scienceofintelligence.de

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 (Europe/Berlin) | 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.

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.

Mate Nagy (MTA-ELTE Lendület Collective Behaviour Research Group, Budapest)
2025-05-13 14:00 - 15:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

David Bierbach & Yunus Sevinchan (Science of Intelligence), “Self-Organised Criticality in Animal Collectives”
2025-05-15 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
More details to follow.

Photo by lance Anderson on Unsplash.

Anne Jaap, Friedrich Schüßler, and Paul Mieske (Science of Intelligence): "Big mouse data: Characterizing mouse behavior through temporal statistics"
2025-05-22 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
The study of animal behavior is rapidly changing due to recent advances in long-term recording and automated analysis. Here we use these new developments to characterize mouse behavior via their temporal statistics. We analyzed positional data (RFID detections) of groups of mice housed in complex environments over many months. We found that behavior spanning seconds to hours can be separated into three distinct temporal ranges or states: short states of up to 2 min, that correspond mostly to explorative and interactive behaviors; intermediate states between 2-20 min, consisting mostly of feeding and grooming; and long states beyond 20 min corresponding to sleep. Each state has a simple statistical description that allows for a simple model to recapture the broad aspects of the data. We further characterized these states across individuals and age and showed that the amount spent in each state is homeostatically controlled. Taken together, we uncovered a surprisingly simple and consistent description of the temporal statistics of behavior in mice. Our results open up new questions about the underlying mechanisms as well as similar characterizations in other species.

Photo courtesy of SCIoI Project 40.

Jacob Davidson (Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior, Konstanz)
2025-05-27 14:00 - 15:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

Cornelia Fermüller (University of Maryland), “Computational Principles of Embodied Intelligence for Robust Motion Perception and Action”
2025-05-30 14:00 - 16:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Abstract
Understanding the computational principles of embodied intelligence is central to advancing robotic systems that perceive and act in complex environments. This talk explores key principles—low power consumption, robustness, and generalizability—as they emerge in the context of motion perception and action. For visual navigation, evidence is presented that challenges the conventional SLAM paradigm, which relies on correspondence estimation and 3D scene reconstruction. Instead, 3D motion estimation and scene segmentation can be achieved using 1D normal flow measurements derived from image gradients, offering a simpler and more robust alternative. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through implementations on drones equipped with both standard and neuromorphic dynamic vision sensors. Further, it is shown that physical interaction tasks do not necessarily require explicit depth estimation; rather, distance can be inferred in action-dependent units grounded in control dynamics. Finally, the role of visual motion in action understanding is examined, focusing on how motion-derived primitives support robust and generalizable representations of action, opening new avenues for embodied intelligence in robotic systems.
This talk 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.
Bio
Cornelia Fermüller is a Research Scientist at the University of Maryland’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), where she co-founded the Autonomy Cognition and Robotics (ARC) Lab and co-leads the Perception and Robotics Group. Her research lies at the intersection of computer vision, robotics, and human vision, with a focus on biologically inspired solutions for active vision systems. She has made significant contributions to the understanding of visual perception by developing computational models for visual motion analysis, 3D motion and shape estimation, texture analysis, and action recognition, as well as integrating perception, action, and reasoning to enable cognitive robots to learn and interpret human manipulation actions.
Dr. Fermüller holds an M.S. from the University of Technology, Graz, and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the Technical University of Vienna. Her recent work emphasizes the use of event-based, bio-inspired sensors for robust motion perception in challenging environments, with applications ranging from fast motion perception for drones to autonomous driving in diverse lighting conditions. She is the principal investigator of an NSF-sponsored Science of Learning Center Network for Neuromorphic Engineering, co-organizes the Neuromorphic Engineering and Cognition Workshop, and has been recognized for her leadership in interdisciplinary research bridging computational modeling and psychophysical studies of human vision.

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

Photo created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

Excellent Pub Quiz
2025-06-02 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 MATH+.
The other participating clusters are: Temporal Communities, Science of Intelligence, UniSysCat, SCRIPTS, Matters of Activity, and NeuroCure.

Jens Krause (Science of Intelligence), "The Adaptive Value of Collective Behavior"
2025-06-03 14:00 - 15:30
In this talk Jens Krause will discuss the adaptive value of collective behaviour from different perspectives. One perspective is the potential ability of groups or collectives to make better and even faster decisions. In this context Jens will show some of the modelling approaches to explain collective intelligence and the empirical support for them in the laboratory and in the field. Furthermore, he will show some empirical findings regarding collective intelligence which challenge our current understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Another perspective is that of collective behaviour as a defense against predators. It has been found in a number of different species that various forms of collective spirals and waves can fend off predators. This implies that at a global group-wide level, collective patterns are not just beautiful to look at but can provide anti-predator functions which are just beginning to understand.
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.

Palina Bartashevich and David Bierbach (Science of Intelligence), “Collective Air Breathing In the Largest Freshwater Fish on Earth”
2025-06-05 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
More details to follow.
Photo by David Clode on Unsplash.

Martina Poletti (University of Rochester), "Active Foveal Vision" and Michele Rucci (University of Rochester), "Active Space-Time Encoding: The Inseparable Link Between Vision and Action"
2025-06-05 14:00 - 18:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Martina Poletti’s talk will focus on active foveal vision. Vision is an active process even at its finest scale in the 1-deg foveola, the visual system is primarily sensitive to changes in the visual input and it has been shown that fixational eye movements reformat the spatiotemporal flow to the retina in a way that is optimal for fine spatial vision. Using high-precision eye-tracking coupled with a system for gaze-contingent display capable of localizing the line of sight with arcminute precision, and an Adaptive Optics Scanning Light Ophthalmoscope (AOSLO) for high-resolution retinal imaging enabling retinal-contingent manipulations of the visual input, their results show that the need for active foveolar vision also stems from the non-uniformity of fine spatial vision across this region. Further, they show that the visual system is highly sensitive even to a small sub-foveolar loss of vision and fixation behavior is readjusted to compensate for this loss. Overall, the emerging picture is that of a highly non-homogenous foveolar vision characterized by a refined level of control of attention and fixational eye movements at this scale.
Michele Rucci’s talk explores how the human visual system constructs spatial representations. Unlike other sensory modalities, where spatial information must be inferred from incoming signals, vision begins with a sophisticated imaging system—the eye—that explicitly preserves spatial structure on the retina. This might suggest that human vision is primarily a passive spatial process, in which the eye simply transmits the retinal image to the cortex—much like uploading a digital photograph—to form a map of the scene. However, this analogy is misleading, as it overlooks the strong temporal sensitivity of visual neurons and contradicts theoretical models and experimental findings that examine vision in the context of natural motor behavior. Here, Michele Rucci will review recent evidence supporting active space-time encoding—the idea that, as with other senses, vision relies on motor strategies to encode spatial information in the temporal domain. This concept has important implications for understanding the normal functioning of the visual system, the effects of abnormal oculomotor behavior, and the development of visual prostheses.
This talk is part of course Olga Shurygina‘s course “Active Sensing,” a seminar on cutting-edge research on active sensory perception in humans and other mammals and realted advances in artificial agents’ abilities such as seeing, grasping, and navigating in space.

Photo created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

Tony Prescott (University of Sheffield), "The Psychology of Artificial Intelligence"
2025-06-06 14:00 - 16:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Artificial intelligence and robotics have been making great progress in recent years but how close are we to emulating human intelligence? This talk will explore the similarities and differences between humans and AIs and discuss the development of biomimetic cognitive systems that more directly think and behave like us. A key focus will be on layered control architectures for robots inspired by the mammalian brain. The talk will be illustrated with work from my lab on active sensing, memory, and sense of self for animal-like and humanoid robots.
This talk 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.
For those who are not in Berlin but would like to join virtually:
https://tu-berlin.zoom-x.de/j/69207754612?pwd=[REDACTED]
Photo generated with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

Andrew J. King (Swansea University),"Understanding Animal Collective Behaviour Across Systems"
2025-06-10 14:00 - 15:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Andrew King is a scientist driven by curiosity, exploring questions across species, contexts, and methods. His research group investigates how and why individuals engage in collective behaviour, using a wide range of systems, perspectives, and tools. In this seminar, he will present their fundamental work in behavioural biology, as well as its applied themes, including animal management and bio-inspired engineering.
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.

Jennifer Groh (Duke University) and Kristen Grauman (University of Texas), "What Eye Movements Have to Do with Hearing"
2025-06-12 14:00 - 18:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Jennifer Groh (Duke University)
Hearing works in concert with vision, such as when we watch someone’s lips move to help us understand what they are saying. But bridging between these two senses poses computational challenges for the brain. One such challenge involves movements of the eyes – every time the eyes move with respect to the head, the relationship between visual spatial input (the retina) and auditory spatial input (sound localization cues anchored to the head) changes. I will describe this problem from early computational and experimental work showing how and where signals regarding eye movements are incorporated into auditory processing, closing with a recent discovery from our group that a signal regarding eye movements is sent by the brain to the ears themselves. This signal casues the eardrum to oscillate in conjunction with eye movements (Gruters et al PNAS 2018) and carries detailed spatial information about the direction and amplitude of the eye movement (Lovich et al PNAS 2023). I will also present new findings concerning the underlying mechanism of this effect, involving the contributions of the middle ear muscles and outer hair cells, and the potential impact on sound transduction.

Kristen Grauman (University of Texas), “Audio-visual learning in 3D environments”
Perception systems that can both see and hear have great potential to unlock problems in video understanding, augmented reality, and embodied AI. I will present our recent work in egocentric audio-visual (AV) perception. First, we explore how audio’s spatial signals can augment visual understanding of 3D environments. This includes ideas for self-supervised feature learning from echoes, AV floorplan reconstruction, and active source separation, where an agent intelligently moves to hear things better in a busy environment. Throughout this line of work, we leverage our open-source SoundSpaces platform, which allows state-of-the-art rendering of highly realistic audio in real-world scanned environments. Next, building on these spatial AV and scene acoustics ideas, we introduce new ways to enhance the audio stream – making it possible to transport a sound to a new physical environment observed in a photo, or to dereverberate speech so it is intelligible for machine and human ears alike.

This talk is part of course Olga Shurygina‘s course “Active Sensing,” a seminar on cutting-edge research on active sensory perception in humans and other mammals and realted advances in artificial agents’ abilities such as seeing, grasping, and navigating in space.

Photo created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

Fumiya lida (University of Cambridge) "Info-Bodiment: Informatization of Robot Embodiment for the Next Generation AI Robots"
2025-06-13 14:00 - 16:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
There is growing interest in applying AI technologies to the control of intelligent robotic systems. While this research has led to promising developments, it still faces major challenges due to its heavy reliance on learning from limited datasets—often dominated by visual information. In this talk, I will introduce “Info-Embodiment” as a new research framework for realizing Embodied Intelligence, along with its underlying technological foundations. As advances in soft robotics and functional materials enable deeper integration between the informational and physical realms, we are beginning to see the emergence of novel forms of embodied intelligence. Within this evolving landscape, I will explore how rapidly advancing fields such as machine learning can help accelerate progress. Going beyond conventional models of body control and AI as abstract computational systems, this approach positions the body itself as an active site of information processing and generation, opening new possibilities for intelligent behavior.
Bio
Fumiya Iida is Professor of Robotics at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. Previously he was an assistant professor for bio-inspired robotics at ETH Zurich (2009-2014) and a lecturer at Cambridge (2014-2018). He received his bachelor and master degrees in mechanical engineering at Tokyo University of Science (Japan, 1999), and Dr. sc. nat. in Informatics at University of Zurich (2006). In 2004 and 2005 he was also engaged in biomechanics research of human locomotion at Locomotion Laboratory, University of Jena (Germany). From 2006 to 2009 he worked as a postdoctoral associate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in USA. In 2006 he was awarded the Fellowship for Prospective Researchers from the Swiss National Science Foundation and, in 2009, the Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship. He was a recipient of the IROS2016 Fukuda Young Professional Award, Royal Society Translation Award in 2017, Tokyo University of Science Award in 2021. His research interests include biologically inspired robotics, embodied artificial intelligence, and biomechanics of human locomotion and manipulation, where he was involved in a number of research projects related to dynamic legged locomotion, navigation of autonomous robots, and human-machine interactions. For more information, visit the Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory website.

This talk 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.

Heiko Hamann (Science of Intelligence), "From Models to Machines: A Roboticist’s View on Collective Behavior"
2025-06-17 14:00 - 15:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Swarm robotics investigates how large numbers of relatively simple, autonomous robots can coordinate to complete complex collective tasks. In this lecture, we explore how models of collective behavior can guide the design of such systems. We highlight how modeling collective behavior is not only a tool for understanding natural systems, but a powerful method to synthesize coordinated behaviors in robot swarms. We contrast bio-mimicry to more abstract bio-inspired paradigms. Through examples like task allocation and flocking, we demonstrate how biological insights can shape engineering choices. An impressive insight from biology is that ‘less is more,’ that is, less communication or less knowledge can sometimes increase the swarm’s performance. We conclude by briefly discussing swarm robotics applications that diverge from biological analogies and reflect on future directions.
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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.

Symposium – Plants As Model Systems for Distributed Intelligence?
2025-06-19 10:00 - 13:00 | MAR 2.057
The SCIoI Symposium – Plants as Model Systems for Distributed Intelligence investigates plant systems as potential model organisms for distributed intelligence.
Plants respond adaptively and context-sensitively to environmental stimuli without a central nervous system—an exemplary case of non-neuronal, decentralized intelligence.
Rainer Hedrich (University of Würzburg) will present current insights into molecular information processing in plants. Pawel Romanczuk (SCIoI) will connect this biological perspective to SCIoI’s principle-based approach to understanding intelligence across systems. The concluding panel discussion will bring together experts from plant biology and behavioral science to explore future research directions.
10:00 – Opening
10:05 – Invited Talk: Rainer Hedrich (University of Würzburg)
“Plant Sensory Biology: Molecular Mechanisms of Information Management”
10:50 – SCIoI Talk: Pawel Romanczuk (HU Berlin, SCIoI)
“An Inclusive Principle-Based Approach to Intelligence”
11:35 – Break
12:00–13:00 – Panel Discussion with Audience Participation:
Rainer Hedrich, Kerstin Kaufmann, Pawel Romanczuk, Jens Krause
