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Berlin University Alliance's Open Space Event on AI and Ethics (in German)
2024-09-25 18:00 - 20:00 (Europe/Berlin)
Our members Dafna Burema and Jonas Frenkel will take part at “THE OPEN KNOWLEDGE LAB” Berlin as speakers, which thrives on active exchange between science, business, politics, and urban society. The BUA OPEN SPACE salon series provides a platform for dialogue on current social issues and networking: impulses from science and subsequent discussions provide deeper insights into research projects and discourses.
More info

Photo taken from berlin-university-alliance.de.

Berlin Summer School of Artificial Intelligence and Society
2024-09-09 - 2024-09-13 | Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Berlin is currently facing numerous challenges, ranging from the modernization of public administration to the adaptation to climate change, from traffic planning to the regulation of the housing market, the implementation of an efficient health care system and creating incentives for a more sustainable lifestyle with the involvement of citizens.
In this context, the effective application of artificial intelligence approaches promises a better understanding of processes, e.g. spatial, temporal or environmental developments through the integration of sensor data. On this basis, they may offer a wide range of new design options. However, with their high demand for resources like energy and water for cooling and technical infrastructure, the development and implementation of these solutions demands careful consideration and planning.
Given the highly complex and human-centred nature of urban systems, the practical implementation of artificial intelligence technologies in cities requires a uniquely multidisciplinary lens underpinned by ethical considerations. For this reason, this Summer School offers a space to explore initial approaches to critically reflect on the prerequisites and effects of new technologies in the course of various aspects of the “urban”. Using a transdisciplinary approach, participants will develop an in-depth understanding of how aspects of sustainability can be applied in smart cities and to what extent technologies such as AI must be understood as opportunities and/or threats for sustainable urban development.
The summer school is organized by BIFOLD, Science of Intelligence and the Weizenbaum Institute and designed for doctoral students who are passionate about machine learning, data management and the impact of cutting-edge AI on society.
Find further information here.
Image credit: BIFOLD

Ralf M. Haefner (University of Rochester, NY), “How We Move Our Eyes To Collect Information”
2024-07-25 10:00 - 11:00 | MAR 2.057
Abstract
Collecting new information about the outside world is a key aspect of brain function. In the context of vision, we move our eyes multiple times per second to accumulate evidence about a scene. Prior studies have suggested that this process is goal-directed and close to optimal. Here, we show that this process of seeking new information suffers from a confirmation bias similar to what has been observed in a wide range of other contexts. We present data from a new gaze-contingent task that allows us to both estimate a participant’s current belief, and compare that to their subsequent eye-movements. We find that these eye-movements are biased in a confirmatory way. Finally, we show that these empirical results can be parsimoniously explained under the assumption that the brain performs approximate, not exact, inference, with computations being more approximate in decision-making compared to sensory areas.
This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.

Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

Jens Krause (Science of Intelligence), “Hunting in Groups”
2024-07-18 16:00 - 17:30 | MAR 2.057
More details to follow.

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI (room 2.057).

Adrian Sieler (Science of Intelligence): “Building Anthropomorphic Soft Robotic Hands With Human-Like Manipulation Abilities”
2024-07-18 10:00 - 11:30
More info to follow.

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.

Marta Halina (University of Cambridge), "Intuitive Physics in Nonhuman Animals"
2024-07-04 16:00 - 17:00
Abstract:
Comparative psychologists have spent the last few decades examining whether nonhuman animals understand the physical world in a way that is similar to humans. Broadly, human intuitive physics is thought to include a collection of abilities, such as knowing that solid objects continue to exist even when no longer perceived and that objects tend to fall unless prevented from doing so. In this talk, Marta introduces the empirical research program dedicated to investigating intuitive physics in nonhuman animals. She then shows how current research in this area encounters problems of underdetermination. Finally, she proposes a route forward: computational modelling combined with signature testing.

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.

Photo by Adrien Converse on Unsplash.

Caleb Weinreb (Harvard Medical School), “A Seconds-Long Timescale in Naturalistic Behavior Structures Neural Dynamics”
2024-07-04 10:00 - 11:30
A core task of animal cognition is to carve the world up into relevant contextual states – based on sensory input, internal drives, and awareness of one’s own recent behavior – and then hold these state assignments in working memory as guides for action and anchors for learning. By training animals to perform asks with well-defined contextual states, researchers have homed in on prefrontal cortex (PFC) as a critical node for such contextual state inference. But these tasks are a poor approximation of real life; rather than engaging in a single well-defined task, free animals define their own tasks and engage in them dynamically over time recognizing contexts that emerge naturally from their own interactions with task affordances. A core question in neuroethology is which specific “task states” emerge in a given experimental setting and how they structure neural dynamics, including in PFC. We took advantage of motion sequencing (MoSeq) — which uses 3D pose tracking and machine learning to segment behavior into sub-second motifs or “syllables” – to understand how mPFC activity coevolves with behavior across multiple timescales during unconstrained social interaction and solitary exploration. We find mPFC activity correlates strongly with ongoing behavior, and that these correlations are most parsimoniously explained through an underlying manifold of behavior states that evolve on a timescale of seconds. The behavior states influence not only which PFC neurons are active, but also which variables are most strongly encoded. We also find that the composition of states is labile and propose that it emerges predictably from the number and salience of affordances in the animal’s environment.

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.
Photo by Pietro Jeng on Unsplash.

Katja Liebal (Universität Leipzig), "Comparative Approach to Human Cognition: Possibilities and Challenges"
2024-06-27 16:00 - 17:30 | MAR 2.057
Aiming to understand human psychology and what makes humans “unique” benefits from a frame of reference against which to assess it. Comparing human psychology with that of other animals, particularly our closest relatives, nonhuman primates, can provide such a frame of reference and thereby contribute to identifying the defining characteristics of the human species. Studying cognitive skills in nonhuman species, however, presents a variety of methodological and ethical challenges, which I will address in my talk. After introducing the rationale of a comparative approach and highlighting some “hot topics” in current research with primates, I will discuss some of the challenges of comparative research, such as the impact of anthropomorphism and speciesism, the difficulty of developing appropriate methods to study cognitive skills in non-linguistic species, and the ethical boundaries of conducting such research with highly endangered species.
This talk will take place in person at SCIoI and on Zoom.
Photo by taopaodao on Unsplash.

Ralph Hertwig (Science of Intelligence), “How intelligent is deliberate ignorance?”
2024-06-27 10:00 - 23:30
More details to follow.

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.

Excellent Pub Quiz - LNDW 2024
2024-06-22 18:00 - 23:00
Once again, the motto for the Long Night of the Sciences 2024 is: Invite friends for a team (2-4 people), find a creative team name and take part in the “Excellent Pub Quiz” of the seven Berlin Clusters of Excellence at TU Berlin and win great prizes! Find answers for exciting and surprising questions from the clusters’ research areas.
There will be two rounds of quizzes (in German), each lasting an hour and each with different questions from the clusters’ research projects. You can choose to leave after the first round or come for the second round. All hardcore science enthusiasts and quiz lovers are of course welcome to take part in both quiz rounds and try their luck twice:
6pm-7pm: Registration opens
7pm-8pm: 1st quiz round
8pm-8:30pm: Poster session with information on the research areas of all seven Berlin Clusters of Excellence
8:30pm-9:30pm: 2nd quiz round

Tickets for the Long Night of Science are available here.

Brian Scholl (Yale University), "Visual Intelligence: On the Unexpected Sophistication of Perception "
2024-06-20 16:00 - 17:30 | MAR 2.057
It is natural to think of vision as relatively primitive, compared to the richness of higher-level cognition. But recent work has revealed how perception is unexpectedly sophisticated along several related dimensions. First, recent work suggests that visual processing spontaneously extracts not only simple features such as color, shape, and motion, but also properties more associated with higher-level thought — such as agency, causal history, and intuitive physics. (Appreciating that a tower is about to fall, for example — or that an object looks the way it does because it was crushed, or that another agent is attending to us — seems more like perceiving a shape than proving a theorem.) Second, vision turns out to be selective in various sophisticated ways, automatically discounting some information while highlighting properties of special import — such as information that categorically distinguishes different dynamic “event types” (e.g. bouncing, rolling, scooping, and pouring). Third, the acuity of perception is specially tuned to provide high-resolution representations about high-importance information — such as the degree of pupil dilation in other people. Here I’ll review recent work from our lab supporting each of these three related dimensions of “visual intelligence”. This presentation will involve some results and some statistics, but the key claims will also be illustrated with phenomenologically vivid demonstrations in which you’ll be able to directly experience the effects. Collectively, this work presents a new way to think about how perception delivers a rich interpretation of the world to the mind at large.
This talk will take place in person at SCIoI and on Zoom.
Photo by v2osk on Unsplash.

Oren Forkosh (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), " Behavior, Personality, Social Structure, and Emotions in Freely Behaving Groups of Mice and Other Animals"
2024-06-14 14:15 - 15:15 | MAR 2.057
Abstract:
In recent years, the study of animal behavior in neuroscience has seen a significant shift towards more naturalistic and less intrusive methods. It is under these conditions that the true spectrum of animal behavior can be exhibited, free from the artificial constraints and stressful conditions often imposed by traditional laboratory settings. In this talk, I will focus on the interplay between behavior, personality, hierarchy, and affective states as measured in our “social boxes”. These systems allow for the continuous and unattended tracking of groups of mice over extended periods and can automatically recognize and catalog over 100 distinct behaviors. A four-day experiment, for example, can potentially replace a myriad of classical tests typically used in neuroscience. Our system can also discern and record a ‘behavioral fingerprint’ for each mouse. These fingerprints reveal consistent traits—personalities—that are not only distinct between individuals but also persist over time. These behavioral fingerprints are also reflected in each animal’s gene expression. In addition, by examining the interplay between behavior and personality across multiple timescales – from seconds to days – we can gain insights into the affective states of these animals. Finally, expanding our research to other species, including bats, cows, flies, as well as humans, allows us to develop a general understanding of behavior and personality. This comparative strategy holds promise for developing a ‘universal translator’ of behavioral and personality patterns, paving the way for new comparative studies. These insights into the personalities and emotions of both humans and animals have the potential to significantly enhance our knowledge of the neurobiological underpinnings of behavior.

Christof Koch (Allen Institute for Brain Sciences), "Integrated Information Theory – Or Why Consciousness is Fundamentally Distinct from Intelligence"
2024-06-13 16:00 - 17:30 | MAR 2.057
Humans not only can act intelligently in the world but consciously experience it, such as the delectable taste of Nutella, the sharp sting of an infected tooth, or the terror and ecstasy of a near-death experience. I will discuss progress achieved in tracking the footprints of conscious experiences to the posterior regions of the cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of the brain. I shall introduce the Integrated Information Theory (IIT). It explains in a principled manner which systems, based on their structure, are conscious and has been used to build devices to detect consciousness in patients with disorders of consciousness. The theory asserts the existence of free will and predicts that consciousness is much more widespread than commonly assumed. On the other hand, present digital computers using a von Neumann-like architectures, though they may approach, or even exceed, human-level general intelligence, will never be conscious. Consciousness is ultimately about being, not about doing.
Christof Koch is best known for his work exploring the physical basis of consciousness in humans, animals, and machines. A physicist and neurobiologist, he was for more than a quarter of a century a professor of biology and engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. He remains at the Allen Institute as a Meritorious Investigator. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica, seeking to understand consciousness, its place in nature, and how this knowledge can benefit all of humanity. He latest book, Then I am Myself the World, was just published. A vegetarian, cyclist and dog lover, Christof lives on a small island in the Pacific Northwest. For more information, see www.christofkoch.com

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.

Aravind Battaje (Science of Intelligence), “A Study on Human and Robot Perception and the Architecture of Perceptual Information Processing”
2024-06-13 10:00 - 11:30 | MAR 2.057
More details to follow.

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

Iain Couzin (Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior & University of Konstanz), “Collective Intelligence in Animals and Robots”
2024-06-11 16:00 - 17:30
Abstract
In 1905 the biologist Edmund Selous wrote of his wonderment when observing a flock of starlings flying overhead “they circle; now dense like a polished roof, now disseminated like the meshes of some vast all-heaven-sweeping net…wheeling, rending, darting…a madness in the sky”. He went on to speculate “They must think collectively, all at the same time, or at least in streaks or patches — a square yard or so of an idea, a flash out of so many brains”. Today, we still know relatively little about how social interactions connect brains together—and thus how sensing and information processing arises in such organismal collectives. Employing automated tracking, computational reconstruction of sensory information, biomimetic robotics, and immersive ‘holographic’ virtual reality (VR) experiments, I will explore geometric principles of collective decision-making that occur across scales of biological organization, from neural dynamics to animal collectives. In doing so I will explain why classical models from non-linear statistical physics fail to account for collective animal behavior. I will will present several new theoretical frameworks, including active inference and neural ring attractor networks, that do account for key experimental findings and challenge long-held beliefs about how order can emerge from disorder within animal collectives.
This talk will take place in person at SCIoI and on Zoom.
Photo taken by https://www.uni-konstanz.de.

Asifa Majid (University of Oxford), "Establishing Human Universals"
2024-05-30 16:00 - 17:00
Abstract:
Psychology, the “science of mental life”, aims to provide models and theories that apply universally. However, there is a growing concern that what we gather from studying humans in a particular place and time might not accurately reflect how humans behave in other contexts. This talk will consider how we can establish whether something is a psychological universal and provide examples of best practice, taking examples from the cross-cultural research of percepts and concepts.

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.
Photo by Stefano Bucciarelli on Unsplash.

Verena Wagner (University of Konstanz), “On Pause: Suspending Judgment and Abstaining in Machine Learning”
2024-05-30 10:00 - 11:00
Abstract:

Machine Learning (ML) systems typically yield definitive outputs, even when the underlying probabilities do not justify a decision. This poses a significant challenge in medical applications, where patients rely on individualized diagnoses, treatments, and prognoses. A recent advancement in ML research addresses this issue by introducing so-called “abstention models,” which enable ML systems to provide neutral outputs. From the perspective of a philosopher who works on cognitive neutrality and the suspension of judgment in human agents, this is an interesting field to explore. In this talk, I will introduce my philosophical theory of cognitive neutrality, which promotes various ways of suspending judgment. Against this backdrop, I will explore different abstention models and look for similarities and differences between suspension of judgment in humans and abstention in ML systems. In particular, I will examine whether the distinctions outlined in my cognitive neutrality framework also manifest in different models of abstention.

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

Asieh Daneshi, “The Effect of Group Size and Group Density on Behavioral Contagion in Humans”
2024-05-23 10:00 - 11:00

Alicia Burns, “Predator-Prey Interactions in the Open Ocean”
2024-05-16 10:00 - 11:00
More details to follow.
This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.
Photo by: Rodrigo Friscione Wyssmann.

Alan Akbik (Science of Intelligence), "Evaluating the Factual Knowledge of Language Models and their Robustness to Noise: A Tale of Two SCIoI Projects"
2024-05-16 04:00 - 17:30

Guillermo Gallego (Science of Intelligence), " Beyond the Blink - New Applications and Methods for Event Cameras"
2024-05-02 16:00 - 17:30 | MAR 2.057

Joshua B. Evans, “Creating Multi-Level Skill Hierarchies in Reinforcement Learning”
2024-05-02 10:00 - 11:00
Abstract:

What is a useful skill hierarchy for an autonomous agent? In this talk, we will consider a possible answer based on a graphical representation of how the interaction between an agent and its environment may unfold. The proposed approach uses modularity maximisation as a central organising principle to expose the structure of the interaction graph at multiple levels of abstraction. The result is a collection of skills that operate at varying time scales, organised into a hierarchy, where skills that operate over longer time scales are composed of skills that operate over shorter time scales. The entire skill hierarchy is generated automatically, with no human intervention, including the skills themselves (their behaviour, when they can be called, and when they terminate) as well as the hierarchical dependency structure between them. In a wide range of environments, this approach generates skill hierarchies that are intuitively appealing and that considerably improve the learning performance agents given access to them.

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.
Photo by Bofu Shaw on Unsplash

Girls' Day 2024
2024-04-25 13:00 - 16:00
This year, SCIoI is once again delighted to be part of Girls’ Day, an event dedicated to offering school-aged girls the opportunity to explore new experiences and gain insights into the realm of STEM related research. This time around, our researchers Palina Bartashevich, Asieh Daneshi, Soledad Traverso, Anna Lange, and David Mezey, with the help of our lab managers Matthis Kaiser, Michael Brück, and Rolf Struikmans and Diversity Manager Lujain Kretzschmar will be showing the girls around SCIoI, offering hands-on demonstrations on topics such as Virtual Reality, interacting with robots, fish swarms, and mouse lockboxes. The girls will also visit the laser cutter and get to build their own 3D puzzle robot.

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.
Ph. by Adrien Converse on Unsplash.

Serge Belongie (University of Copenhagen), "Searching for Structure in Unfalsifiable Claims"
2024-04-18 16:00 - 17:00
Abstract:
While advances in automated fact-checking are critical in the fight against the spread of misinformation in social media, we argue that more attention is needed in the domain of unfalsifiable claims. In this talk, we outline some promising directions for identifying the prevailing narratives in shared content (image & text) and explore how the associated learned representations can be used to identify misinformation campaigns and sources of polarization.

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.
Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash.

Pavel Němec (Charles University), “Two Independent Origins of Complex Brains and Intelligent Behavior in Birds and Mammals”
2024-04-18 10:00 - 11:30
Abstract:

Over the last 20 years, it has been shown that birds and mammals are startlingly similar in their cognitive repertoire. Even the most intelligent taxa from each group – great apes and large corvids and parrots – match each other in most domains of cognition. This functional similarity is remarkable considering that birds and mammals shared a last common ancestor about 325 million years ago. Moreover, avian brains are small and lack a cerebral cortex arranged in layers. My talk will focus on recent discoveries showing that birds and mammals independently evolved brains with dramatically increased neuron numbers in the telencephalon and cerebellum, brain parts associated with higher cognition. This brain information processing capacity surge in birds and mammals is associated with the elaboration of at least partly non-homologous neural circuitry. Moreover, similar functions are processed in different, non-homological forebrain regions. Extreme neuron packing densities in birds partly explain why they have similar cognitive levels as mammals, but volumetrically much smaller brains. Astoundingly, phylogenetic analysis suggests that as few as four major changes in neuron-brain scaling in over 300 million years of evolution pave the way to intelligence in endothermic land vertebrates.

Ph. kindly provided by Pavel Němec.

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.

Hector Garcia De Marina (University of Granada), “Practical Challenges in Formation Control and Mobile Robot Swarms”
2024-04-11 10:00 - 11:00 | MAR 2.057
Abstract:
Robot swarms have the potential to assist us with simpler logistics in persistent missions involving vast scenarios. Robot swarms also promise added resilience to complete their objectives despite unforeseen difficulties. However, current demonstrations of swarm technology in unstructured environments only count on single-digit individuals. That is farther from what one would expect from the huge scaling potential of a swarm. What are the bottlenecks then?
In this talk, I will present some practical challenges that mobile robot swarms face in fundamental tasks, e.g., the control of specific geometry parameters during a swarm deployment, also known as formation control. As an application of higher-level tasks leveraging formation control, we will see the coordination of robots while tracking paths and the source-seeking of scalar fields.
I will also focus on onboard imperfections and how they are responsible for non-designed emergent behavior. Nevertheless, I will show some hidden opportunities within the imperfections that could assist us with practical deployments.

Related articles (free links to Arxiv):
Maneuvering and robustness issues in undirected displacement-consensus-based formation control: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.03544
Guiding vector fields for the distributed motion coordination of mobile robots: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.09478v4
Resilient source seeking with robot swarms: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.02937
Behavioral-based circular formation control for robot swarms: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09101

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.
Photo by Louis Reed on Unsplash.

Jacek Wiland, "Assessing the Factual Knowledge Contained in Language Models During Lifelong Learning"
2024-04-04 10:00 - 23:30

Heiner Spieß (Science of Intelligence), “Tools to Study the Generality of Deep Neural Network Representations”
2024-03-28 10:00 - 11:30

Fariba Karimi (Graz University of Technology), "Complexity Science for Societal Good"
2024-03-21 10:00 - 11:00 | MAR 2.057
Abstract:
Social inequalities — structured and recurrent patterns of unequal distribution of wealth, opportunities, and rewards — are on the rise, and quick-fix, top-down approaches are failing. Structural inequality is one of the important manifestations of social inequalities in which institutions, policies, and societies create systems of privilege that are structural barriers to equality and inclusiveness. Structural inequalities emerge and evolve in complex multi-dimensional social networks. With the rise of artificial intelligence and algorithms in decision-making processes, such inequalities are being reinforced and exacerbated in a non-linear, complex manner that is difficult to comprehend and tackle. To address and mitigate such timely issues, we need a complexity science approach and interdisciplinary teams more than ever.

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.
Photo by Vincentiu Solomon on Unsplash.

Michael Beetz (Universität Bremen), "Empowering Robots with Digital Mental Models: Filling the Cognitive Gap for Everyday Tasks"
2024-03-21 08:00 - 17:00
In this talk I introduce Digital Mental Models (DMMs) as a novel cognitive capability of AI-powered and cognition-enabled robots. By combining digital twin technology with symbolic knowledge representation and embodying this combination into robots, we tackle the challenge of converting vague task requests into specific robot actions, that is robot motions that cause desired physical effects and avoid unwanted side effects. This breakthrough enables robots to perform everyday manipulation tasks with an unprecedented level of context-sensitivity, foresight, generality, and transferability. DMMs narrow the cognitive divide currently existing in robotics by equipping robots with a profound understanding of the physical world and how it works.

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.
