Marina Papadopoulou (Tuscia University), “Across the Swarm-Verse: The Self-Organization of Animal Collectives on the Move”
2025-04-29 14:00 - 15:30 (Europe/Berlin) | 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

John Tsotsos (York University), "Attentional Mechanisms Bridge Seeing to Looking"
2025-06-20 14:15 - 15:45 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
David Marr wrote ‘What does it mean, to see? The plain man’s answer (and Aristotle’s, too) would be, to know what is where by looking‘. Modern vision science has moved beyond Aristotle’s view as well as Marr’s, although it certainly would not have advanced without the influence of both. Seeing and Looking are different and although related in a plain manner, at a deeper mechanistic level it is not plain at all: they are spatially, temporally and causally connected.
We examine Looking and Seeing and the roles they play in a rational visual agent that functions purposefully in a real three-dimensional world, as a plain person, Marr, or Aristotle would behave during their lifetimes. The vast bulk of theoretical, experimental and empirical research has focussed on how an agent views and perceives an image, singly or in video sequence. We add to the small but growing literature that addresses how an agent chooses how to view a three-dimensional world in the context of a real world task. Looking is the result of a change of gaze while Seeing is what occurs during the analysis of what is being looked at and causes a particular next Looking act. Gaze change ranges over a full 6 degrees-of-freedom for head pose and 3 degrees-of-freedom for each of two eyes within that head.
Although our past research has shown that sensor viewpoint planning has provably exponential complexity properties, we propose that an array of attentional mechanisms, as found in our Selective Tuning model, tame the complexity of such behaviour and provides the bridge between Seeing and Looking. Through extensive human experiment (one of these is the pictured Same-Different Task) and foraging through the history of computational vision, we are gradually constructing a picture of a complex blend of orchestrated attentional, visual, reasoning, planning and motor behaviours required for real-world 3D visual tasks.
Bio
John Tsotsos (he/him) is Distinguished Research Professor of Vision Science at York University and also holds an Adjunct Professorship in Ophthalmology and Vision Sciences at the University of Toronto. Internationally recognized for his pioneering work on visual attention and active vision, Prof. Tsotsos developed the influential Selective Tuning theory, which has shaped understanding of both human and computational vision. His research spans computer vision, computational neuroscience, robotics, and artificial intelligence, with over 300 refereed publications and major contributions to areas such as motion interpretation, visual search, and medical image analysis.
Prof. Tsotsos has received numerous honors, including Fellowships in the Royal Society of Canada, IEEE, and the Canadian Academy of Engineering, as well as the Sir John William Dawson Medal for sustained excellence in interdisciplinary research—the first computer scientist to receive this distinction. He has held the NSERC Tier I Canada Research Chair in Computational Vision since 2003 and was the founding Director of York’s Centre for Vision Research, which he led to international prominence.

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 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 provided by the speaker.

Max Ploner (Science of Intelligence), “Evaluating Sample Efficiency: How Language Models Learn to Recall Facts from Data"
2025-06-26 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
More details to follow.
Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

Michael Brecht, "Active touch and Large-Brain Neuroscience in Elephants" and Yasemin Vardar, "Active Synthetic Touch: Generating Naturalistic Multisensory Tactile Stimuli for Active Exploration"
2025-06-26 14:00 - 18:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Michael Brecht (BCCN Berlin) will present data on a systemic investigation of brains and of grasping behavior in elephants. The analysis of sensory nerves suggests that elephants are extremely tactile animals. In elephants, trunk whisker length is lateralized as a result of heavily lateralized trunk behaviors. The elephant trunk tip appears to be represented by a large cortical three-dimensional trunk-tip model; this observation is reminiscent of the somatosensory cortical snout representation in pigs. The trunk musculature of elephants is breath-takingly complex and filigree. Trunk morphology, motor neuron organization and grasping differs between African elephants (which pinch objects with their two trunk fingers) and Asian elephants (which have only one finger and wrap objects with their trunk).
He will discuss the potential of novel X-ray technologies for large brain analysis. Both behavioral analysis and elephant neuroanatomy reveal striking individual differences between individual elephants. Thus, it appears that elephants are less equal than other animals.
Imagine you could feel your pet’s fur on a Zoom call, the fabric of the clothes you are considering purchasing online, or tissues in medical images. We are all familiar with the impact of digitization of audio and visual information in our daily lives – every time we take videos or pictures on our phones. Yet, there is no such equivalent for our sense of touch. This talk will encompass Yasemin Vardars (Delft University of Technology) scientific efforts in digitizing naturalistic tactile information for the last decade. She will explain the methodologies and interfaces we have been developing with my team and collaborators for capturing, encoding, and recreating the perceptually salient features of tactile textures for active bare-finger interactions. She will also discuss current challenges, future research paths, and potential applications in tactile digitization.
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.

Dario Floreano (EPFL), "Avian-Inspired Drones"
2025-06-27 14:00 - 16:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
In less than 20 years drones transitioned from research labs to the real world and had a major impact on inspection, security, rescue, logistics, and entertainment. However, today’s drones do not match the agility, endurance, adaptability, and intelligence of birds. Birds are not only the masters of the sky but are also at ease on the ground and in water. Stringent aerodynamical constraints shaped their bodies and brains to leverage morphological change to adapt to diverse locomotion conditions that are still poorly understood. I will show examples of abstracting principles of avian morphological design and flight control to design agile aerial robots that can also be used to test biological hypotheses and improve our understanding of embodied intelligence in avian vertebrates.
Bio
Prof. Dario Floreano is director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Between 2010 and 2022, he was the founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics, a research program that graduated almost 200 PhD students and more than 100 postdocs, funded two professorships at EPFL and University of Zurich, created the EPFL Master’s program in Robotics and the annual Swiss Robotics Day, helped launch Cybathlon, and generated more than 15 robotics spinoffs that created several hundred jobs.
Prof. Floreano holds an M.A. in Vision, an M.S. in Neural Computation, and a PhD in Robotics. He has held research positions at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, at Caltech/JPL, and at Harvard University. His research interests are Robotics and A.I. at the convergence of biology and engineering. Prof. Floreano made pioneering contributions to the fields of evolutionary robotics, aerial robotics, and soft robotics. He served in numerous advisory boards and committees, including the Future and Emerging Technologies division of the European Commission, the World Economic Forum Agenda Council, the International Society of Artificial Life, the International Neural Network Society, and in the editorial committee of several scientific journals. In addition, he helped spinning off three drone companies (senseFly.com, Flyability.com, Elythor.com) and a non-for-profit portal on robotics and A.I. (RoboHub.org). For more information, visit his EPFL profile or Google Scholar page.

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 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 created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

LNDW 2025/Open Labs at RBO: Hands-On with the Future: Control a Soft Robotic Hand!
2025-06-28 17:00 - 22:30 | SCIoI, MAR Building, Marchstr. 23, Berlin
Where: RBO Lab (5th floor)
Time: At regular intervals between 5:30 and 10pm
Event Type: Experiment
By Alexander Koenig
Language: English and German
Suitable for kids: Yes, from 5
Website: www.tu.berlin/en/robotics
Did you ever wonder what it feels like to control a robotic hand? At the Robotics and Biology Lab you can see, touch and control a human-like robotic hand that’s soft, adaptive, and ready to interact! Unlike stiff, traditional robots, this hand has silicone fingers powered by air, allowing it to bend, flex, and gently grasp objects just like your own hand. Watch live demonstrations of grasping and manipulation, then take control yourself and experience the future of robotics firsthand. Safe, smart, and intuitive—come and see soft robotics in action!

LNDW 2025/SCIoI Open Labs: Become a Swordfish and Chase Virtual Fish in a Mixed Reality Game
2025-06-28 17:30 - 22:00 | SCIoI, MAR Building, Marchstr. 23, Berlin
Where: Showroom, SCIoI, TU MAR building Room 2.034
Time: At regular intervals from 5:30 to 10pm
By David Mezey and Palina Bartashevich
Language: English
Suitable for kids: Yes (only with parental supervision 5+)
Description: Visitors can dive into the world of collective intelligence by becoming a marlin (a large swordfish) and chasing a swarm of virtual fish in an interactive projected playground. Through this experience, they will discover how fish use group strategies to evade predators—both in the virtual world and in nature. In particular, they will learn about the so-called “fountain effect,” a defense tactic used by sardines in the Gulf of Mexico. This strategy is not only visually stunning but also highly effective against large predators like marlins. Additionally, visitors will get to see real drone footage from field experiments, showing how these large swordfish, in response to the prey’s collective strategies, also coordinate and hunt together in groups.
More Information: https://www.scienceofintelligence.de/arena-for-hunters-and-the-hunted-finding-principles-of-intelligence-with-sciois-loop-method/
Exclusion Criteria: People with known history of epilepsy, severe sea-sickness or disorientation. Visitors willing to try the interactive setup must be in a generally good or normal physical condition.
Additional Information: Visitors will move in a 4m by 4m interactive playground. They will interact with a virtual fish school projected on the floor. To do so, they will hold a special cane that is tracked by the system while they walk within the installation.
Check out all of our LNDW events here: www.scienceofintelligence.de/lndw-2025

LNDW 2025/SCIoI Open Labs: How Group Structure Shapes the Spread of Behavior
2025-06-28 17:30 - 22:00 | SCIoI, MAR Building, Marchstr. 23, Berlin
Where: Showroom, SCIoI, TU MAR building Room 2.034
Time: At regular intervals from 5:30 to 10pm
By Maryam Karimian
Language: English
Suitable for kids: No
This demo showcases simulation results that illustrate how group size and density influence the spread of behavior by systematically manipulating these factors and evaluating their impact on contagion dynamics.
Check out all of our LNDW events here: www.scienceofintelligence.de/lndw-2025

LNDW 2025/SCIoI Open Labs: Explore Vision Science & Create Art with Your Eyes!
2025-06-28 17:30 - 22:00 | SCIoI, MAR Building, Marchstr. 23, Berlin
Where: Dark Lab (Room 2.008)
Time: regular intervals between 5:30 and 10pm
Event Type: Experiment
By Ole Hall, Julie Ouerfelli-Ethier, and Qu Runfeng
Language: English, German, French
Suitable for kids: Yes, from 5
The SCIoI Vision Lab is opening its doors to the public! Join us for a unique experience.
Discover Eye Tracking – Live demonstrations will show how eye movements provide a window into the brain.
Draw with Your Eyes – Try our eye-tracking system and draw just by moving your eyes on the screen
Take your artwork home or save it on your phone.
Fun for All Ages – Suitable for children (ages 5+) and adults alike.
Multilingual Event – All activities available in German, English, and French. Come and see how your eyes reveal more than you think!
Check out all of our LNDW events here: www.scienceofintelligence.de/lndw-2025

LNDW 2025/Open Labs at RBO: Feeling Without Seeing
2025-06-28 17:30 - 22:00 | SCIoI, MAR Building, Marchstr. 23, Berlin
Where: RBO Lab (5th floor)
Time: regular intervals between 5:30 and 10pm
Event Type: Experiment
By Furkan Davulcu
Language: English
Suitable for kids: Yes, from 5
Website: www.tu.berlin/en/robotics
How do you recognize objects just by touch? Our amazing soft robotic hand can do it too! Fitted with special sensors in its squishy fingers, it feels tiny changes in shape (deformations) to understand what it’s holding – without even looking! Come learn how it works, and even try controlling the hand yourself! Experience the future of robotics – where machines can truly feel!
Check out all of our LNDW events here: www.scienceofintelligence.de/lndw-2025

LNDW 2025/Open Labs at RBO: Robot Plays Escape Room
2025-06-28 17:30 - 22:00 | SCIoI, MAR Building, Marchstr. 23, Berlin
Where: RBO Lab (5th floor)
Time: at regular intervals between 5:30 and 10pm
Event Type: Demonstration
By Paul Xu Pu
Language: English
Suitable for kids: Yes, from 5
Website: www.tu.berlin/en/robotics
Do you know our robot can play the escape room game? Join us to explore how we build intelligent systems by combining various abilities. Watch our robot in action as it manipulates objects, solves puzzles, operates furniture, and attempts to open the door — just like in an escape room!
