For the Public

Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften 2025, Excellent Pub Quiz

TU Berlin, Wangari Mathaai Foyer, Straße des 17. Juni 135, in the main building

Join the “Excellent Pub Quiz” at the Long Night of the Sciences 2025! Back by popular demand: team up with your friends (2–4 people), come up with a fun team name, and put your knowledge to the test at the Excellent Pub Quiz hosted by Berlin’s seven Clusters of Excellence at TU Berlin. Exciting prizes

Hot Topics in Intelligence Research

POSTPONED: Alan Winfield (UWE Bristol) & Dafna Burema (Science of Intelligence)

SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

This event has been postponed to 29 July 2025. How should we think about Ethics when Machines become part of our social worlds? Alan Winfield and Dafna Burema will explore the ethical and societal dimensions of robotics and AI in an interactive fishbowl and in conversation with Master`s students of the course “Introduction to Modeling

Thursday Morning Talk

Raina Zakir (Université Libre De Bruxelles), “Robust Decision-Making in Minimalistic Robot Swarms Under Social Noise”

SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

Abstract Minimalistic robot swarms hold great promise for applications in healthcare, disaster response, and environmental monitoring. A key challenge lies in enabling these robots to rapidly and reliably reach consensus using limited communication, computation, and memory. In this talk, we explore how robot swarms can collectively identify the best among multiple discrete options in their

Hot Topics in Intelligence Research

William Warren (Brown University), “The Dynamics of Perception and Action: From Pedestrian Interactions to Collective Behavior”

SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

It’s a perplexing time in the study of visual perception. On the one hand, there is a resurgence of models that freely posit a priori structure in the visual system, including priors, generative world models, and physics engines. On the other hand, there is the astonishing a posteriori success of deep neural networks trained only

Thursday Morning Talk

Matthias Nau (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), “Revealing General Principles Underlying Active Vision and Memory”

SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

Abstract: Cognitive neuroscience seeks theories that jointly explain behavioral, neural, and mental states. The dominant approach is to use specialized tasks designed to optimally probe a concept of interest (e.g., episodic memory), and to disentangle behavioral, sensory, and mnemonic factors through design (e.g., by constraining gaze during image recognition). I will present an alternative framework

Hot Topics in Intelligence Research

Jacob Yates (UC Berkeley), “The Role of Motor Signals in Visual Cortex”

SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

Embodiment is fundamental to biological intelligence. Brains do not passively receive the world, they actively shape what they sense through self-motion. For nearly a century, we have known that perception and action are deeply entangled, and that organisms must constantly infer whether a sensory change comes from the environment or from themselves. A longstanding idea

Thursday Morning Talk

POSTPONED: Alican Mertan (University of Vermont), “Morphological Cognition: Evolving Robots Exhibiting Cognitive Behavior without Abstract Controllers”

SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

With the rise of modern deep learning, neural networks have become an essential part of virtually every artificial intelligence system, making it difficult to imagine different models for intelligent behavior. In contrast, nature provides us with many different mechanisms for intelligent behavior, most of which we have yet to utilize. One such underinvestigated aspect of

Hot Topics in Intelligence Research

Alan Winfield (UWE Bristol) & Dafna Burema (Science of Intelligence)

Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

How should we think about Ethics when Machines become part of our social worlds? Alan Winfield and Dafna Burema will explore the ethical and societal dimensions of robotics and AI in an interactive fishbowl and in conversation with Master`s students of the course “Introduction to Modeling Collective Behavior”. Alan Winfield, a pioneer in the field

External Event

Summer School “Sensory Neuroscience” (Pisa, Italy)

For the first time this year, SCIoI will be one of the organizers of the Circle U. Summer School in Pisa, which already involves the HU Berlin and UCLouvain. Together with renowned researchers, Master's students will explore the complexities of the human mind and brain through the study of perception. This summer school is connected

For the Public

Excellent Pub Quiz

Fahimi bar Skalitzer Str. 133, Berlin, Germany

Dive into the wonderful world of research of the seven Berlin Clusters of Excellence: from literature to chemistry, from politics to AI, you and your team can find answers for exciting and surprising questions from the clusters’ research areas. So seek fellows and think of your team name! Every quiz evening focuses on the research

2025 Berlin Summer School on Artificial Intelligence and Society

Elena Simperl (King’s College London), “Open Data Infrastructure in the Age of Generative AI”

TU-Campus EUREF, EUREF-Campus 9, 10829 Berlin-Schöneberg. EUREF-Campus 10829 Germany

This event is for registered attendees. Open data infrastructure refers to the systems, frameworks, and processes put in place to collect, store, manage, and share data generated or held by government, science, and other public institutions. It is meant to ensure that public data is accessible, high-quality, secure, and usable by a wide range of