Thursday Morning Talk

Abstract: Research in robotics and A.I. aims at optimizing very specific task rewards. Intelligent animals have a high degree of curiosity, and recent results have shown that instrumental reward optimization is a poor explanation for their behavior. We can show that to explain empirical results from animals, we need to have the drive to optimize

Abstract: Animals are equipped with a rich innate repertoire of sensory, behavioral and motor skills, which allows them to interact with the world immediately after birth. At the same time, many behaviors are highly adaptive and can be tailored to specific environments by means of learning and exploration. In this work, we use mathematical analysis

Minimize Surprise in Robots: An Innate Motivation for Collective Behavior After a quick overview of other related research projects in my lab (bio-hybrid systems, swarm performance, collective decision-making), I will present our work on minimize surprise for multi-robot systems. Each robot has two artificial neural networks, a world model (“prediction machine”) and a behavioral module

BIO: Michael Pauen is a philosopher with a focus on the philosophy of mind. As the academic director of an interdisciplinary graduate school, he has extensive experience in interdisciplinary research and training. Having a specific interest in philosophical and psychological aspects of human sociality, he will focus on social intelligence both in humans and in

All animal ethical positions are largely in agreement that animals – as beings capable of suffering – must be morally considered for their own sake and that certain consequences for one's own actions must be derived from this. This insight has been incorporated into animal protection legislation based on the EU Directive 2010/63. German legislation

Finding flexible tool use and manufacture in non-specialized animals, may contribute to our understanding of the origins of tool-related cognition. Goffin's cockatoos are Indonesian parrots that originate from a small archipelago in the Moluccas. They are highly opportunist generalists that forage on a large number of different and often patchily distributed or seasonal resources. Accordingly,

Abstract: Understanding and recreating intelligence is possibly the biggest scientific challenge of our time. Evolution has produced organisms that are highly specialised for some cognitive tasks, whereas others present what has been called general intelligence, with humans identified as the paragon. Artificial intelligence (AI), despite decades of efforts to achieve generality, is still specialised. It

Abstract: Rasmus Rothe is Co-Founder at Merantix, the Artificial Intelligent Venture Studio. In this talk he will give insight into how a deep tech startup is built via ideation, incubation and scaling, and the specifics and challenges of working with technology AI in the process. BIO: Rasmus Rothe is the co-founder and CTO of Berlin-based Merantix,

Abstract:  I argue that artificial intelligence research has been both fuelled and hindered by the use of ‘model tasks’, that is, tasks the solution of which are taken to be sufficient for, or at least indicative of intelligence. Before AI proper, cybernetics explored model tasks involving basic real-time and world-involving action control aimed at the

Through a talk followed by a discussion and Q&A, AI Director at Science & Startups Tina Klüwer will explore the joint programmes and resources offered by Berlin's universities to those wishing to successfully start and develop a company, also explaining what support is available. BIO: Dr. Tina Klüwer is a recognized expert, manager and technical

Abstract: Models of vision have come far in the past 10 years. Deep neural networks can recognise objects with near-human accuracy, and predict brain activity in high-level visual regions. However, most networks require supervised training using ground-truth labels for millions of images, whereas brains must somehow learn from sensory experience alone. We have been using

Abstract: Choice architecture suggests that much of what we decide is influenced by that options are presented. This means that the choice environment can encode intelligence that will help (or can hurt) the decision maker. The talk will start by reviewing some results from choice architecture and describe how the environment can affect choice through