Mary Ellen Foster (University of Glasgow), “Face-to-Face Conversation With Socially Intelligent Robots”
2025-01-15 16:00 - 18:00 (Europe/Berlin) | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
When humans talk to each other face-to-face, they use their voices, faces, and bodies together in a rich, multimodal, continuous, interactive process. For a robot to participate fully in this sort of natural, face-to-face conversation in the real world, it must also be able not only to understand the social signals of its human partners, but also to produce appropriate signals in response. In this talk, I will present recent research from my group in this area, and will also discuss the issues involved in moving social robots from the lab to real-world contexts, which involves consultation with a large number of stakeholders.
Dr Mary Ellen Foster is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. Her primary research interests are human-robot interaction, social robotics, and embodied conversational agents. She recently coordinated the MuMMER project, a European Horizon 2020 project in the area of socially aware human-robot interaction, and is currently coordinating a UK/Canada collaborative project investigating the use of socially intelligent robots in paediatric emergency rooms. She obtained her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2007 and has previously worked at the Technical University of Munich and Heriot-Watt University.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Jonas Frenkel’s seminar “Artificial Social Intelligence.” It aims to provide a comprehensive exploration of ASI, which involves the observation, analysis, and synthesis of social phenomena. It integrates synthetic sciences such as machine learning, computer vision, and robotics with cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and the humanities to focus on the perception, cognitive components, and behaviors linked to social intelligence.
This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.

Anita Keshmirian (Forward College, Berlin): "Many Minds, Diverging Morals: Human Groups vs. AI in Moral Decision-Making"
2025-01-16 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Moral judgments are inherently social, shaped by interactions with others in everyday life. Despite this, psychological research has rarely examined the impact of social interactions on these judgments. In our study, we explored the role of group dynamics in moral decision-making by having small groups (4-5 participants) evaluate moral dilemmas first individually, then collectively, and finally individually a second time. Participants judged real-life and sacrificial moral dilemmas involving actions or inactions violating moral principles to benefit the greater good. Experiment 1 found that collective judgments were more utilitarian than individual judgments, supporting the hypothesis that group deliberation temporarily reduces the emotional burden of violating moral norms.
Experiment 2 measured participants’ state anxiety and moral judgments before, during, and after online interactions. Results again showed that collectives were more utilitarian, reducing state anxiety during and after social interaction, suggesting that stress reduction may explain the shift toward utilitarianism in group settings. We replicated this experiment using multi-agent large language models (LLMs) to test how artificial agents make moral decisions. Preliminary findings revealed that, unlike humans, groups of LLM agents were less utilitarian than individual agents. Analysis of the agents’ interactions showed a consistent pattern of virtue-signaling, with LLMs emphasizing deontological reasoning (focusing on moral rules) rather than utilitarian principles.
This divergence from human behavior suggests that collective reasoning in AI systems is shaped by different dynamics, likely due to how LLMs are trained to prioritize socially accepted norms. These results highlight important differences in moral decision-making between human and artificial intelligence, offering new insights into the development of AI systems that more closely mirror human ethical reasoning, particularly in complex, real-world collective decision-making scenarios.
Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott

SCIoI at Oxford Berlin Colloquium on AI Ethics
2025-01-20 10:00 - 16:30 | Beit Room, Rhodes House, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3RG
The 2025 Oxford Berlin colloquium on AI ethics will be held in Oxford and bring together scholars and professionals to discuss a variety of topics, hosted by Dr Caroline Green (Oxford) and Dr Luise Muller (Freie Universitat Berlin).
AI technologies, from large language models to self-driving cars, raise fundamental philosophical questions. The aim of the Oxford Berlin colloquium on AI ethics is to connect early-career researchers doing ground-breaking work on the moral and political philosophy of AI and related fields, and to provide a forum for presenting work in progress, receiving valuable feedback in a constructive environment, and exchanging ideas with leading researchers and professionals from industry and policy.
SCIoI member Verena Hafner will speaking about “Embodied AI and the Artificial Self” at the colloquium..
Find all info about the event here, and the program here.

Rudolf Lioutikov (Karlsruher Institut für Technologie), "Versatile, Language Conditioned Robots"
2025-01-20 14:00 - 15:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
More info will follow soon.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Svetlana Levit’s seminar “Selected Topics in Robot Learning,” which explores how advances in machine learning are helping robots operate in new environments, learn new behaviors, and adapt to changing conditions.

Giovanni Beltrame (Polytechnique Montreal), “Field Collective Robotics: Challenges and Applications”
2025-01-21 16:00 - 18:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Giovanni Beltrame is a Professor in the Department of Computer and Software Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal, where he leads the Making Innovative Space Technology (MIST) Laboratory. At MIST Lab, Giovanni is conducting projects in collaboration with industry and government agencies in areas such as robotics, disaster response, and space exploration. His research interests include the modeling and design of embedded systems, artificial intelligence, and robotics, with a particular emphasis on swarm robotics. He has participated in several field missions with ESA, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), and NASA, including BRAILLE, PANGAEA-X, and IGLUNA. He has made significant contributions to the field of swarm robotics, notably through the development of Buzz, a programming language designed for heterogeneous robot swarms, which facilitates the coordination and control of large groups of robots.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Mohsen Raoufi’s seminar “Introduction to Collective Robotics: Where Complexity Meets Robotics,” which provides an overview on the topic of collective robotics while exploring key areas like complexity science, network science, and engineering.
Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

Stephen M. Fiore (University of Central Florida), “Studying Artificial Social Intelligence: Understanding and Examining Social Cognitive Processes in Human-Machine Collaborations”
2025-01-22 16:00 - 17:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
In this presentation Stephen M. Fiore will provide an overview of a body of research in social cognition and its relation to developing artificial social intelligence. In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), an important research direction is the development of systems that can work alongside and collaborate with humans as actual teammates. Effective teamwork is crucial in fields that have high-stakes and can require complex collaborative problem solving (e.g., disaster response). In these environments, the ability of team members to collaborate requires social-cognitive processes over and above an understanding of the tasks to be accomplished. We address this through the study of socially intelligent AI and how these influence interactions with human counterparts acting as a team. In this talk, Stephen Fiore will first provide an overview of our approach to social cognition and the theoretical concepts being studied. He will describe theory and data from his various research projects studying human-human and human-machine teaming and conclude with recommendations and guidance for future research on artificial social intelligence.
This course This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Jonas Frenkel’s seminar “Artificial Social Intelligence.” It aims to provide a comprehensive exploration of ASI, which involves the observation, analysis, and synthesis of social phenomena. It integrates synthetic sciences such as machine learning, computer vision, and robotics with cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and the humanities to focus on the perception, cognitive components, and behaviors linked to social intelligence.
Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott

Wannes Ooms (KU Leuven Centre for IT & IP Law -Imec): A General Introduction to the EU AI Act
2025-01-23 10:00 - 11:00 | Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
The EU AI Act introduces new obligations for providers and deployers of AI systems. In this presentation, we will discuss the scope of the AI Act, the different qualifications of AI systems under the act and the related obligations or requirements. We also provide a look ahead at key deadlines, the status of standards and conformity assessments, and other responsibilities along the AI value chain.
This event will take place in person and will be streamed via zoom.
Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash

Maarten Sap (Carnegie Mellon University), “Artificial Social Intelligence? On the Challenges of Socially Aware and Ethically Informed LLMs”
2025-01-29 16:15 - 17:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Modern AI systems such as LLMs are pervasive and helpful, but do they really have the social intelligence to seamlessly and safely engage in interactions with humans? In this talk, Maarten Sap will delve into the limits of social intelligence of LLMs and how we can measure and anticipate their risks. He will introduce Sotopia, a new social simulation environment to evaluate the interaction abilities of LLMs as social AI agents. He will show how today’s most powerful models struggle to socially interact due to inability to deal with information asymmetry. He will then shift to how LLMs pose new ethical challenges in their interactions with users. Specifically, through their language modality and possible expressions of uncertainty, his work shows that LLMs tend to express overconfidence in their answers even when incorrect, which users tend to over-rely on. Finally, Maarten Sap will introduce ParticipAI, a new framework to anticipate future AI use cases and dilemmas. Through their framework, his work shows that lay users can help us anticipate the benefits and harms of allowing or not allowing an AI use case, paving the way for more democratic approaches to AI design, development, and governance. He will conclude with some thoughts on future directions towards socially aware and ethically informed AI.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Jonas Frenkel’s seminar “Artificial Social Intelligence.” It aims to provide a comprehensive exploration of ASI, which involves the observation, analysis, and synthesis of social phenomena. It integrates synthetic sciences such as machine learning, computer vision, and robotics with cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and the humanities to focus on the perception, cognitive components, and behaviors linked to social intelligence.
This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.
Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott

Goldie Nejat (University of Toronto), “Paging the Socially Assistive Robots: Intelligent and Persuasive Social Robots for Healthcare and Beyond”
2025-02-05 16:00 - 17:15 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
The world is experiencing a silver tsunami: rapid population aging. As the world’s older population significantly increases, dementia is becoming one of the fastest growing diseases, with no cure in sight. Socially assistive robots are a unique disruptive innovation that are becoming a crucial part of everyday society, especially in a post-pandemic world, aiding people in everyday life to meet urgent and immediate assistive needs. This talk will present some of my group’s recent research efforts in developing intelligent and persuasive socially assistive robots to improve quality of life and promote independence (aging-in-place) of older adults, including those living with dementia and their care providers. In particular, I will discuss some of my team’s many robots including Brian, Casper, Tangy, Blueberry, Salt, Pepper, Chili, Hans Solo, and Luke and Leia that have been deployed in human-centered environments from long-term care homes and hospitals to grocery stores to autonomously provide cognitive and social interventions, help with activities of daily living, and lead individual-based and group-based recreational activities, games and therapies. Our novel multimodal interactive robots are serving as assistants to individuals as well as groups of users, while learning to personalize these interactions to the needs and wants of these users by using perceptual, behavioral and persuasive intelligence. Numerous user studies conducted in care settings will also be discussed to highlight how these robots can effectively be integrated into people’s everyday lives to support person-centered care.
Dr. Goldie Nejat, Ph.D., P.Eng., is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. She is also the Founder and Director of the Autonomous Systems and Biomechatronics Laboratory Professor Nejat is an Adjunct Scientist at both KITE in the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute (University Health Network) and the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Health Sciences, and a Fellow of both ASME and CIFAR. She was the Canada Research Chair in Robots for Society (2014-2024).
Dr. Nejat’s research focuses on developing intelligent service robots and robot cooperative teams for applications in health, eldercare, emergency response, search and rescue, security and surveillance, retail and manufacturing. Her ground-breaking robotics research is leading the development of intelligent socially assistive robots aimed at meeting the challenges posed by a rapidly aging population. She has been invited to speak about her research to scientists, healthcare professionals, policymakers, governments and the general public at many events, conferences and institutions around the world. She has served on the organizing, program and editorial committees of numerous international conferences and journals on robotics, automation, human-robot interaction and medical devices. She is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Social Robotics, a program co-chair for the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) and is also a past Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), and IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE). Her team’s work has been presented in over 100 media stories including in Popular Science, National Geographic Magazine, Time Magazine, Bloomberg, NBC News, the Telegraph, Reader’s Digest, and the Discovery Channel. In 2022, she received the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ) Pioneering Research Award in Robot & Human Interactive Communication along with her students and collaborator. In 2022, she was also internationally recognized as 1 of 50 women in robotics you need to know by Women in Robotics for her inspiring contributions to robotics. In 2020, she received the Engineering Excellence Medal from the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (PEO) and the Professional Engineers Ontario.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Jonas Frenkel’s seminar “Artificial Social Intelligence.” It aims to provide a comprehensive exploration of ASI, which involves the observation, analysis, and synthesis of social phenomena. It integrates synthetic sciences such as machine learning, computer vision, and robotics with cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and the humanities to focus on the perception, cognitive components, and behaviors linked to social intelligence.
Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash.

Tucker Hermans (University of Utah, NVIDIA), “Learning and Planning With Relational Dynamics Models for Robot Manipulation”
2025-02-07 14:00 - 15:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

Agnieszka Wykowska (the Italian Institute of Technology, Genoa), “Using Humanoid Robots To Study Human Cognition”
2025-02-12 17:00 - 18:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Humanoid robots have recently received a lot of attention and enthusiasm in the robotics community and beyond. Indeed, with new technological advancements, they hold the promise to become our assistants in daily lives, as general-purpose machines. In this talk, however, Agnieszka Wykowska will focus on a different, less explored, way of using humanoids – as tools to understand human cognition. Humanoids can play a substantial role in the scientific understanding of human cognition, both through the construction of embodied models of cognitive mechanisms, and in the role of sophisticated apparatus in experimental paradigms. Agnieszka Wykowska will present the work of her lab where they have examined how fundamental mechanisms of human cognition, such as attention, decision making or sense of agency, are modulated by the interaction with a humanoid. She will then demonstrate how results from such studies can be used in robot-assisted cognitive training for children with disabilities, highlighting the role of fundamental science in applied research.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Jonas Frenkel’s seminar “Artificial Social Intelligence.” It aims to provide a comprehensive exploration of ASI, which involves the observation, analysis, and synthesis of social phenomena. It integrates synthetic sciences such as machine learning, computer vision, and robotics with cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and the humanities to focus on the perception, cognitive components, and behaviors linked to social intelligence.
Photo by Zak on Unsplash.

Marina Papadopoulou (University of Tuscia), “Behavioural Rules Underlying Self-Organized Animal Collectives”
2025-02-13 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
From the foraging of ungulates and primates to the bait balls of fish and the murmurations of starlings, the dynamics of animal groups fascinate us with the mystery of their underlying social interactions. Identifying unique and common traits across systems can help us understand the self-organized mechanisms of their emergence, as well as the ecological and evolutionary processes that shape this diversity. In this talk, I will showcase ongoing projects on the collective behaviour of several species of vertebrates, such as schools of Amazon mollies, flocks of European starlings, and troops of chacma baboons, aiming to understand the cognitive rules involved in the dynamics of these collectives. Specifically, I will focus on inter- and intra- specific variation in collective motion and decision-making, the role of individual heterogeneity, and the emergence of complex patterns of collective escape, with methodological details on the analysis of empirical data, the use of robotic predators and conspecifics, and the development of data-inspired agent-based models.
Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

Julten Abdelhalim, “Mastering Confident & Quick-Witted Communication in Academia” Workshop
2025-02-20 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
In this one-hour workshop, a toolbox of best-practise techniques for confident communication skills will be presented. This will equip attendees with a repertoire of rhetorical tools to communicate confidently and quick-wittedly in stressful situations. Participants will learn strategies to handle challenging questions and optimise their performance during academic debates. Another aim is to tackle dealing with harsh criticism, personal attacks and knock-down arguments.

Winter School "Ethics of Neuroscience and AI" 2025
2025-02-24 - 2025-02-28 | Campus Nord of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin at Ostertag-Haus, Philippstr.12, House 4 10115 Berlin
Science of Intelligence, the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience are happy to invite to the Berlin Winter School “Ethics of Neuroscience and AI” 2025.
The Winter School is a five days conference which covers a broad field of topics from philosophical ethics to ethics of research and animal experiments with a focus on ethics and AI in the last two days.
Scientific Organizers: John-Dylan Haynes, Marten Kaas, Thomas Schmidt

Florian Engert (Harvard University), “Attentional Switching in Larval Zebrafish”
2025-02-27 16:00 - 17:30
Decision making strategies in the face of conflicting or uncertain sensory input have been successfully described in many different species. Here we analyze large behavioral datasets of larval zebrafish engaged in a ‘coherent dot’ optomotor assay. We find that animal performance is bimodal and can be separated into two ‘states’, an engaged state where performance is high and fish consistently turn into the direction of the coherent motion, and a second, disengaged state, where performance drops to chance. We find that a simple HMM is sufficient to model these transitions and fits our experimental data well. We find that this addition can be incorporated into an existing DDM framework that has previously been used to model perceptual decision making in larval zebrafish.
Further, we leverage the large behavioral data sets to fit a mixture model of performance distributions and extract two latent variables which we term ‘focus’ and ‘competence’. Whereas ‘competence’ quantifies performance while the fish is in the engaged state, the ‘focus’ variable captures the relative duration for which each animal persists in the engaged state. We show that ‘focus’ may be largely inherited from the parents, while ‘competence’ is more likely to be influenced by environmental context. This quantitative framework for analyzing decision making can be used to screen genetic perturbations for their impact on these two aspects of performance, and potentially help to identify a genetic basis, and a neural mechanism for attention, that extends across organisms.
This talk will take place in person at SCIoI (room 2.057).
Photo by Lance Anderson on Unsplash.

Jonas Kuckling (University of Konstanz), “Living on the Edge – Scalability and Two-Phase Performance in Multi-Robot Systems”
2025-03-13 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Scalability is often lauded as one of the advantages of decentralized multi-robot systems and robot swarms. Theory and many experimental works predict that with increasing swarm density, we will observe a gradual decay of performance. In our work, we have taken a closer look at the scalability of robot swarms in different settings and we have noticed that the predicted decay does not always appear to be gradual. Instead, the performance splits into two phases, potentially causing catastrophic failures at near-optimal swarm densities. In this talk, I will provide an overview of our empirical and theoretical analyses of scalability behavior in robot swarms and the resulting considerations for the design of robot swarms.

Image created in DALL-E by Maria Ott.

Konstantinos Voudouris (Helmholtz AI, University of Cambridge), “ What Are AI Capabilities and How Can We Measure Them?”
2025-03-20 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
What can AI systems do? Answering this question requires us to model their capabilities, but this first demands a clear conception of what capabilities are and which tools we can use to measure them. I advance a dispositional account of capabilities, understanding them as a system’s propensity to behave in certain ways under certain conditions. I then survey the tools we have at our disposal to measure capabilities, and what the nascent field of AI Evaluation can learn from the broader cognitive sciences.

Photo by Stefan Cosma on Unsplash

Vito Trianni (Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, CNR Rome), "Emergence and Heterogeneity in Minimalist Robot Swarms"
2025-03-27 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Far-reaching perspectives in swarm robotics consider robots that are minimalist in their sensing, communication and computation, but are deployed in thousands to collaborate towards the accomplishment of tasks distributed in space and time. Generally speaking, future robot swarms might face harsh operating conditions where little communication is possible and no external infrastructure is available. These robots might not be able to efficiently communicate with a central controller and might not have the perceptual and computational abilities to self-localise or precisely plan their movements. It is therefore necessary to study collaborative strategies that do not rely on complex control and interaction rules. In this talk, I will present studies about minimalist approaches to collective behaviours based on random walks and simple communication systems. I will introduce the concept of Adaptive Random Walks as a tool to design simple emergent behaviours in minimalist robot swarms, and present the case of team formation and aggregation, showing how heterogeneity in the swarm can be beneficial to improve efficiency while maintaining the complexity low. I will then discuss minimal quorum sensing strategies, and discuss which communication protocol provide benefits for group coordination.

Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash

SCIoI at 5th International Conference on Embodied Intelligence
2025-04-02 - 2025-04-04 | On Zoom
This event brings together a wide range of speakers to discuss the challenges and opportunities in Embodied Intelligence research. The conference is structured with a morning session and afternoon session each day to accommodate different time zones. Each session includes plenary talks, panel discussions (including flash talks by leading researchers), and breakout sessions. The conference organizers are open for wider contributions for breakout sessions to facilitate more focused and technical discussions.
SCIoI spokesperson Oliver Brock will be delivering a talk at the conference, sharing insights into cutting-edge advancements in the field.
Click here to participate and present for free. Once contribution is submitted, the organizers will allocate a short time slot in one of the breakout sessions. The selected contributions will be later invited for special issue publications or book chapters.
EI Conferences 2021-2024 Recordings
Recordings and proceedings of this conference in the last two years can be found here.
Official conference website

Girls' Day 2025
2025-04-03 08:00 - 13:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
What is intelligence, and how can research contribute to improving current technologies with insights from this work? At the Girls’ Day with the Excellence Cluster Science of Intelligence, you’ll find out how scientists from various disciplines research the topic of intelligence. Through interactive exchanges, you can learn how researchers work to understand intelligence from different perspectives. After a brief exchange, the participants will visit the researchers’ labs in two groups and experience firsthand how intelligent robots work. They will also participate in a workshop where they can transform their impressions into a puzzle model.
To take part in our program, you should be between 10 and 15 years old.
The program is in German.
More infos here.
Contact Person
Lujain Kretzschmar
Diversity and Equal Opportunities Manager
Phone: 030 31477334
diversity@scioi.de

Excellent Pub Quiz
2025-04-07 19:00 - 21:00 | Fahimi bar, Skalitzer Str. 133, Berlin, 10999, 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 of one of the clusters of excellence with a related live performance, followed by questions from the areas of the rest of the clusters. At the end of the evening you will be certainly smarter than before and perhpas with great prizes in your hands.
Event langage: German
Admission: Free entry
Capacity: Limited spaces, so come early to not miss your spot
Moderator: Jochen Müller
This event is organized by the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities.
The other participating clusters are: MATH+, Science of Intelligence, UniSysCat, SCRIPTS, Matters of Activity, and NeuroCure.

Bojana Grujičić (Science of Intelligence), "Artificial Possibilities"
2025-04-10 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Science often deals with issues pertaining to possibilities, contingencies and necessities, by engaging in thought experiments and modeling. This talk discusses how much deep learning can be helpful for navigating the possibility space for intelligence, adding to our scientific understanding of possibilities. One epistemically useful feature of neural networks is their runnability – they can be trained to perform a cognitive task and can run when given novel stimuli, demonstrating possibilities of cognitive phenomena based on sets of inductive biases. I focus on the problem of justification of neural network-based inferences about possibilities and outline a plausible justificatory strategy. I consider a number of reasons for taking neural network-demonstrated possibilities to be technological, rather than biological possibilities. Despite this, I argue that they add to our scientific understanding of possibilities related to intelligence.

Photo by Joakim Honkasalo on Unsplash.

Tamal Roy & Valentin Lecheval (Science of Intelligence), “Evolution of Collective Cognition Through Individual-Level Selection”
2025-04-17 10:00 - 11:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
More details to follow.
Photo created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

Ralf Kurvers (MPI for Human Development), “Individual, Social and Ecological Drivers of Human Collective Foraging”
2025-04-22 14:00 - 15:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Foraging complexity and competitive social challenges are considered key drivers of human cognition. Yet, we still have a poor understanding of the decision-making mechanisms underlying foraging behavior, especially in social contexts. In this talk, I will combine immersive lab experiments, field work using high-resolution tracking, and computational and agent-based models to uncover the mechanisms guiding human foraging decisions. I hope to convince you that foraging provides a rich test bed to study a broad range of cognitive processes, such as memory, learning, and evidence accumulation, and that the current technological advancements allow us to do this even in the challenging conditions of the natural world.

This talk is part of David Mezey‘s course “Introduction to Modeling Collective Behavior, ” a seminar on collective behavior research, combined with multiple interactive elements.

Adrien Doerig (Freie Universität), “High-Level Visual Representations in the Human Brain Are Aligned With Large Language Models”
2025-04-24 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
The human brain extracts complex information from visual inputs, including objects, their spatial and semantic interrelations, and their interactions with the environment. However, a quantitative approach to capture this information remains elusive. I will present work where we show that LLM embeddings of scene captions successfully characterise brain activity evoked by viewing the natural scenes. This mapping captures selectivities of different brain areas, and is sufficiently robust that accurate scene captions can be reconstructed from brain activity. Further, we show that neural networks trained to transform image inputs into LLM representations are better aligned with brain representations than a large number of state-of-the-art alternative models, despite being trained on orders-of-magnitude less data. Overall, these results suggest that LLM embeddings of scene captions provide a representational format that accounts for complex information extracted by the brain from visual inputs.
Photo created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

Marina Papadopoulou (Tuscia University), “Across the Swarm-Verse: The Self-Organization of Animal Collectives on the Move”
2025-04-29 14:00 - 15:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
From the daily movement of primate troops to the mesmerizing murmurations of starling flocks in the sky, the dynamics of animal groups on the move fascinate us with the mystery of their underlying social interactions. In this talk, I will first showcase how we combine empirical data and computational models based on self-organization to understand the individual rules that underlie collective behaviour, using bird flocks under attack by a robotic predator as a case study. Given that identifying unique and common traits across systems is necessary to understand the ecological and evolutionary processes that shape the diversity of collective behaviour we see in nature, I will further present the Swarm-Verse, a new framework to quantify variation in collective motion across species, using studies on fish, goats, pigeons and baboons.
This talk is part of David Mezey‘s course “Introduction to Modeling Collective Behavior, ” a seminar on collective behavior research, combined with multiple interactive elements.

Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott

Michael Levin (Tufts University), “Communication With Intelligence in Unconventional Embodiments: Bioelectricity as a Case Study”
2025-05-02 14:15 - 15:45 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Embodiment is critical for intelligence; however, the traditional concept of embodiment as movement in 3-dimensional space covers only a small slice of the way biology exploits embodiment. In this talk, I will present a framework for understanding intelligence more broadly, and show how the multiscale competency of bodies navigates many different kinds of spaces. I will use our findings in developmental bioelectricity as a case study for how an unconventional intelligence can be recognized and communicated with, for exciting applications in regenerative medicine and cancer. I will also show novel multicellular life forms, which highlight the remarkable plasticity of the agential material of life by self-constructing new embodied intelligences from un-modified cells. The emerging field of diverse intelligence merges biophysics, computer science, and cognitive science in a way that helps us relate to current and forthcoming beings, with applications in science, engineering, and ethics.

Bio
Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Chair and Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University, where he directs both the Allen Discovery Center and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. Renowned for his pioneering work at the intersection of developmental biology, synthetic biology, and cognitive science, Prof. Levin investigates how cells and tissues process information to control growth, regeneration, and form. His research explores the collective intelligence of cells, bioelectric signaling, and the emergence of cognition in both natural and synthetic organisms, with applications ranging from regenerative medicine to synthetic bioengineering. Prof. Levin is widely recognized for co-discovering xenobots—programmable living machines made from frog cells—and has published over 350 scientific papers. His work has been featured in major scientific and popular media. For more information, visit his lab website.

This event will take place on site with the speaker joining on Zoom: https://tu-berlin.zoom-x.de/j/69207754612?pwd=[REDACTED]
This is part of Aravind Battaje‘s course “Mind, Body, Environment: An Interactive Seminar on Embodied Intelligence,” a seminar introducing to key theories and research highlighting this shift in perspective through invited lectures from experts in the field and interactive sessions.

Pawel Romanczuk (Science of Intelligence)
2025-05-06 14:00 - 15:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
More details to follow.
This talk is part of David Mezey‘s course “Introduction to Modeling Collective Behavior, ” a seminar on collective behavior research, combined with multiple interactive elements.

Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

J. Kevin O’Regan (CNRS Paris), “How To Make a Machine That Is Conscious and Really Feels”
2025-05-09 14:15 - 15:45 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Despite current advances in artificial intelligence, many people remain convinced that machines are still far from being able to really experience, for example, the redness of a sunset, the pain of a pinprick, or what it’s like to be sad. This “phenomenal” or “felt” aspect of consciousness seems outside the realm of science and impossible to implement in machines. Philosophers say phenomenal consciousness is the “hard problem”. I will show that the “hard problem” dissolves if we think about experiences using a “sensorimotor” approach. Like the abandonment of the “ether hypothesis” and the “vital spirit” at the beginning of the 20th century, the sensorimotor approach requires making a metaphysical shift. Instead of thinking of experiences as “happening to us”, we should think of experiences as “things we do”. I will illustrate the idea by taking concrete examples from the study of vision and touch. With this approach it becomes potentially possible to explain everything that can be explained from a scientific point of view about what it’s like to have sensory, bodily, emotional and mental experiences. Phenomenal consciousness loses its mystery. There is no obstacle to making machines that really feel. They are coming very soon.

Bio
Kevin O’Regan is emeritus ex-director of the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS, Université Paris Descartes. After working on eye movements in reading he became interested in visual stability and discovered the phenomenon of change blindness. His current work concerns the sensorimotor approach to phenomenal consciousness and its applications to child development and robotics. See http://whatfeelingislike.net and http://kevin-oregan.net/.

For those who are not in Berlin but would like to join virtually:
https://tu-berlin.zoom-x.de/j/69207754612?pwd=[REDACTED]

This talk is also part of Aravind Battaje‘s course “Mind, Body, Environment: An Interactive Seminar on Embodied Intelligence,” a seminar introducing to key theories and research highlighting this shift in perspective through invited lectures from experts in the field and interactive sessions.

Photo kindly provided by the speaker.

Excellent Pub Quiz
2025-05-12 19:00 - 21:00 | Fahimi bar, Skalitzer Str. 133, Berlin, 10999, 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 of one of the clusters of excellence with a related live performance, followed by questions from the areas of the rest of the clusters. At the end of the evening, you will be certainly smarter than before and perhpas with great prizes in your hands.
Event langage: German
Admission: Free entry
Capacity: Limited spaces, so come early to not miss your spot
Moderator: Jochen Müller
This event is organized by the Cluster of Excellence UniSysCat.
The other participating clusters are: MATH+, Science of Intelligence, Temporal Communities, SCRIPTS, Matters of Activity, and NeuroCure.
