Andrew J. King (Swansea University),"Understanding Animal Collective Behaviour Across Systems"
2025-06-10 14:00 - 15:30 (Europe/Berlin) | 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.
--
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!

LNDW 2025/SCIoI Open Labs: Smart Swarms – How Mathematics Helps To Understand Swarm Behavior and Collective Intelligence
2025-06-28 17:45 - 18:45 | SCIoI, MAR Building, Marchstr. 23, Berlin
Where: SCIoI, TU MAR building Room 2.013
Time: at 5:45 and 6:45pm (duration: 30 mins)
Event Type: Talk
By Prof. Pawel Romanczuk
Language: English and German
Suitable for kids: No
This exciting lecture is meant to give a short intro to collective intelligence, and can also serve as an introduction to the CoBe experiments you will be seeing in the SCIoI showroom. Coordinated swarm behavior is a fascinating biological phenomenon that can offer many advantages to swarm members – from protection against predators to better decision-making in the group. But how can so many individuals coordinate their behavior so perfectly? And under what circumstances are swarms truly smarter than individuals? This lecture provides insight into how mathematical models help us find answers to these and similar questions and gain a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms of collective intelligence.
Check out all of our LNDW events here: www.scienceofintelligence.de/lndw-2025

GERMAN VERSION:
“Schlaue Schwärme – Wie Mathematik und hilft Schwarmverhalten und kollektive Intelligenz zu verstehen”
Koordiniertes Schwarmverhalten ist ein faszinierendes biologisches Phänomen, das den Mitgliedern des Schwarms viele Vorteile bieten kann – vom Schutz vor Räubern bis hin zu besseren Entscheidungen in der Gruppe. Aber wie können so viele Individuen ihr Verhalten überhaupt so perfekt koordinieren? Und unter welchen Umständen sind Schwärme wirklich klüger als Einzelne? Dieser Vortrag bietet einen Einblick, wie mathematische Modelle uns helfen, Antworten auf diese und ähnliche Fragen zu finden und ein tieferes Verständnis für die zugrunde liegenden Mechanismen kollektiver Intelligenz zu erlangen.
Check out all of our LNDW events here: www.scienceofintelligence.de/lndw-2025
Photo by Teryll KerrDouglas on Unsplash

Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften 2025, Excellent Pub Quiz
2025-06-28 19:00 - 21:00 | TU Berlin, Wangari Mathaai Foyer, Straße des 17. Juni 135, in the main building
Join the “Excellent Pub Quiz” at the Long Night of the Sciences 2025!
Back by popular demand: team up with your friends (2–4 people), come up with a fun team name, and put your knowledge to the test at the Excellent Pub Quiz hosted by Berlin’s seven Clusters of Excellence at TU Berlin. Exciting prizes await!
Get ready for a quiz night like no other — with brain-tickling questions from across the Clusters’ diverse research areas: applied mathematics (MATH+), intelligent systems (Science of Intelligence), sustainable chemistry (UniSysCat), political theory (SCRIPTS), material innovation (Matters of Activity), brain science (NeuroCure), and global literature (Temporal Communities). There’s something for every kind of science fan!
The quiz will be held in two rounds (in German), each lasting an hour and featuring different questions inspired by current research. Join one or both — the choice is yours!
Schedule
6:00–7:00 PM: On-site registration
7:00–8:00 PM: Round 1
8:00–8:30 PM: Break
8:30–9:30 PM: Round 2
When: Saturday, 28 June 2025 – Registration starts at 6:00 PM
Where: TU Berlin, Straße des 17. Juni 135 – Main Building (Ground Floor, Wangari Maathai Foyer, back left next to the Audimax)
No need to register in advance – just arrive early to secure your spot. Last year, over 120 participants across 28 teams battled it out for the top spots. This year, too, the top three teams will take home fantastic prizes courtesy of the Clusters of Excellence.
Check out all of our LNDW events here: www.scienceofintelligence.de/lndw-2025
Tickets for the Long Night of the Sciences can be purchased here.

POSTPONED: Alan Winfield (UWE Bristol) & Dafna Burema (Science of Intelligence)
2025-07-01 14:00 - 15:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
This event has been postponed to 29 July 2025.
How should we think about Ethics when Machines become part of our social worlds? Alan Winfield and Dafna Burema will explore the ethical and societal dimensions of robotics and AI in an interactive fishbowl and in conversation with Master`s students of the course “Introduction to Modeling Collective Behavior”. Alan Winfield, a pioneer in the field of robot ethics, will share insights from his work on cognitive robotics, science communication, and the development of ethical standards for intelligent systems.
Dafna Burema brings a sociological lens, focusing on how AI and robots shape—and are shaped by—social values, particularly in sensitive areas like eldercare. Together, they’ll reflect on how society can critically engage with intelligent technologies and what ethical frameworks might guide their integration into collective life.
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.

Photo created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

Raina Zakir (Université Libre De Bruxelles), “Robust Decision-Making in Minimalistic Robot Swarms Under Social Noise”
2025-07-03 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Abstract
Minimalistic robot swarms hold great promise for applications in healthcare, disaster response, and environmental monitoring. A key challenge lies in enabling these robots to rapidly and reliably reach consensus using limited communication, computation, and memory. In this talk, we explore how robot swarms can collectively identify the best among multiple discrete options in their environment. We analyze and compare several prominent decision-making algorithms through both simulations and theoretical modeling. Particular attention is given to how asocial behaviors—introducing social noise—affect convergence and robustness. Our results offer insights into designing simple yet effective voting rules for robust consensus in decentralized swarm systems.
Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

William Warren (Brown University), "The Dynamics of Perception and Action: From Pedestrian Interactions to Collective Behavior"
2025-07-11 14:00 - 16:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
It’s a perplexing time in the study of visual perception. On the one hand, there is a resurgence of models that freely posit a priori structure in the visual system, including priors, generative world models, and physics engines. On the other hand, there is the astonishing a posteriori success of deep neural networks trained only on natural images and image sequences. Although their performance offers an existence proof of the sufficiency of image information for certain visual tasks, the black box of deep learning does not easily offer up that information or how it’s extracted by the visual system.
A science of perception depends on understanding the visual information that is available in natural environments and is used to guide natural behavior. I propose that we take seriously James Gibson’s information hypothesis: For every perceivable property of the environment, however subtle, there must be a variable of information, however complex, that uniquely specifies it. The project is to identify the information that the visual system uses to perceive and act within the constraints of a species’ ecological niche.
Two decades ago I decided to work out a test case to see whether an information-based account of a natural behavior could be sustained. In this talk I will offer a status report on our effort to build a model of visually controlled human locomotion – a pedestrian model – that scales up from individual behaviors like steering and obstacle avoidance, to pedestrian interactions like following and collision avoidance, to the collective behavior of human crowds. Surprisingly, linear combinations of these nonlinear components can account for the emergence of more complex behavior, such as self-organized ‘flocking’, crowd bifurcations, and stripe formation in crossing flows.
Bio
Bill (he/him) earned his undergraduate degree at Hampshire College (1976), his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Connecticut (1982), did post-doctoral work at the University of Edinburgh, and has been a professor at Brown ever since. He served as Chair of the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences from 2002-10. Warren is the recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship, an NIH Research Career Development Award, and Brown’s Elizabeth Leduc Teaching Award for Excellence in the Life Sciences. Warren’s research focuses on the visual control of action – in particular, human locomotion and navigation. He seeks to explain how this behavior is adaptively regulated by multi-sensory information, within a dynamical systems framework. Using virtual reality techniques, his research team investigates problems such as the visual control of steering, obstacle avoidance, wayfinding, pedestrian interactions, and the collective behavior of crowds. Experiments in the Virtual Environment Navigation Lab (VENLab) enable his group to manipulate what participants see as they walk through a virtual landscape, and to measure and model their behavior. The aim of this research is to understand how adaptive behavior emerges from the dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment. He believes the answers will not be found only in the brain, but will strongly depend on the physical and informational regularities that the brain exploits. This work contributes to basic knowledge that is needed to understand visual-motor disorders in humans, and to develop mobile robots that can operate in novel environments. For more information, visit his faculty profile or the VENLab website.

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.

Matthias Nau (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), "Revealing General Principles Underlying Active Vision and Memory"
2025-07-17 10:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Abstract:
Cognitive neuroscience seeks theories that jointly explain behavioral, neural, and mental states. The dominant approach is to use specialized tasks designed to optimally probe a concept of interest (e.g., episodic memory), and to disentangle behavioral, sensory, and mnemonic factors through design (e.g., by constraining gaze during image recognition). I will present an alternative framework that instead recognizes that concepts such as perception, memory, and action are often inextricable, both theoretically and empirically, which I demonstrate for example by showing that brain activity during movie viewing and recall is linked through eye movements. I will argue that new generalizable concepts are needed to explain phenomena across domains, and outline how such concepts may be empirically derived through multi-task studies: by testing generalization of results across tasks and data modalities, we reveal the mutual constraints task demands impose on behavioral, neural, and mental states. In this context, I will also highlight the importance of ‘naturalistic’ tasks and behavioral tracking for cognitive neuroscience, and briefly introduce open-source tools for camera-free MR-based eye tracking.
Image created by Maria Ott with DALL-E.

Jacob Yates (UC Berkeley), "The Role of Motor Signals in Visual Cortex"
2025-07-18 14:00 - 15:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Embodiment is fundamental to biological intelligence. Brains do not passively receive the world, they actively shape what they sense through self-motion. For nearly a century, we have known that perception and action are deeply entangled, and that organisms must constantly infer whether a sensory change comes from the environment or from themselves. A longstanding idea holds that sensory signals are either suppressed during movement or that movement effects are subtracted out. However, recent discoveries in neuroscience, especially in rodents, suggest that spontaneous movements strongly influence sensory cortex. In this talk, I will share our work re-examining this question in primates. We found that movements do not broadly modulate visual cortex unless they move the retina, creating an inherent ambiguity between motor effects and changes in sensory input. I will describe our new approach to disentangling sensorimotor interactions during natural behavior, combining high-resolution eye tracking with high-density neural recordings and modern machine learning. By precisely measuring the retinal input during natural vision, we find that much of what appears to be a motor signal is actually visual reafference, the lawful, structured sensory consequences of an animal’s own actions. I will discuss how measuring and modeling this loop can deepen our understanding of active inference in the brain and what it means for designing truly embodied agents that adapt to the world as brains do.
Bio
Jacob Yates (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Optometry & Vision Science at UC Berkeley and leads the Active Vision and Neural Computation Lab. His research explores how populations of neurons in the cortex and early visual pathways encode the visual world, with a particular focus on how eye movements generate and utilize information for perception. By combining statistical and machine learning approaches, his lab builds computational models to better understand neural activity and human perception, ultimately aiming to bridge the gap between neural coding and real-world visual behavior.
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 by Soliman Cifuentes on Unsplash.

POSTPONED: Alican Mertan (University of Vermont), "Morphological Cognition: Evolving Robots Exhibiting Cognitive Behavior without Abstract Controllers"
2025-07-24 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
With the rise of modern deep learning, neural networks have become an essential part of virtually every artificial intelligence system, making it difficult to imagine different models for intelligent behavior. In contrast, nature provides us with many different mechanisms for intelligent behavior, most of which we have yet to utilize. One such underinvestigated aspect of intelligence is embodiment and the role it plays in intelligent behavior. We suspect that “the unreasonable effectiveness of deep learning” overshadowed the investigation into what bodies mean for intelligence, especially how they can be a source of intelligent behavior, as opposed to passively participating in its display.
To investigate how bodies alone give rise to intelligent behavior, we suggest treating bodies not just as an aid to the brain, but also studying them as doing full cognitive behavior end-to-end. We term such robots that demonstrate cognitive behaviors without an abstract control layer as possessing “morphological cognition”. I will present our initial work on morphological cognition, where we use simple shape-changing processes to create robots that can perform a range of tasks from locomotion to image classification without any abstract controller (i.e., no neural network).

Image created by Maria Ott with DALL-E

Alan Winfield (UWE Bristol) & Dafna Burema (Science of Intelligence)
2025-07-29 14:00 - 16:00 | Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
How should we think about Ethics when Machines become part of our social worlds? Alan Winfield and Dafna Burema will explore the ethical and societal dimensions of robotics and AI in an interactive fishbowl and in conversation with Master`s students of the course “Introduction to Modeling Collective Behavior”. Alan Winfield, a pioneer in the field of robot ethics, will share insights from his work on cognitive robotics, science communication, and the development of ethical standards for intelligent systems.
Dafna Burema brings a sociological lens, focusing on how AI and robots shape—and are shaped by—social values, particularly in sensitive areas like eldercare. Together, they’ll reflect on how society can critically engage with intelligent technologies and what ethical frameworks might guide their integration into collective life.
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.
Photo created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

Summer School "Sensory Neuroscience" (Pisa, Italy)
2025-09-06 - 2025-09-09
For the first time this year, SCIoI will be one of the organizers of the Circle U. Summer School in Pisa, which already involves the HU Berlin and UCLouvain. Together with renowned researchers, Master’s students will explore the complexities of the human mind and brain through the study of perception. This summer school is connected with the TNE initiative NEUROBRIDGE, which promotes exchanges with international institutions.
Read the article here.
Click here for more info.
Photo by Andrea Cevenini on Unsplash.

Excellent Pub Quiz
2025-09-08 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 Matters of Activity.
The other participating clusters are: MATH+, Science of Intelligence, Temporal Communities, SCRIPTS, UniSysCat, and NeuroCure.

Asieh Daneshi (Science of Intelligence), “Is risky behavior contagious?”
2025-09-11 10:00 - 11:00

Summer School of Artificial Intelligence and Society 2025 (BIFOLD, Weizenbaum Institute, SCIoI)
2025-09-15 - 2025-09-18 | TU-Campus EUREF, EUREF-Campus 9, 10829 Berlin-Schöneberg., EUREF-Campus, 10829, Germany
As artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes the landscape of scientific discovery, the need for openness, transparency, and reproducibility in research has never been more urgent. The 2025 Berlin Summer School on Artificial Intelligence and Society, jointly organized by the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD), the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, and Science of Intelligence (SCIoI), will focus on a timely and critical topic: “Open Science and AI – Shaping the Future of Responsible Research.”
Taking place from 15 to 18 September 2025, this year’s Summer School invites early-career researchers and advanced Master’s students to explore how open data, open collaboration, and responsible practices can help build more transparent, fair, and trustworthy AI systems.
Check the summer school website (left) for more information.

Elena Simperl (King's College London), "Open Data Infrastructure in the Age of Generative AI"
2025-09-15 10:30 - 11:30 | TU-Campus EUREF, EUREF-Campus 9, 10829 Berlin-Schöneberg. EUREF-Campus 10829 Germany
This event is for registered attendees.
Open data infrastructure refers to the systems, frameworks, and processes put in place to collect, store, manage, and share data generated or held by government, science, and other public institutions. It is meant to ensure that public data is accessible, high-quality, secure, and usable by a wide range of stakeholders, including the public.
For more than a decade, we have witnessed millions of datasets made available via such infrastructure, advancing research, policymaking, and innovation. However, open data infrastructure is still far from realising its potential; non-technical users face significant barriers in navigating complex datasets and extracting meaningful information to support their decisions.
Furthermore, the global AI race has put substantial strains on this infrastructure, with data holders forced to re-examine their ability to sustain critical public services.
In this talk I will walk through some of my recent research into addressing these challenges. I will start with a series of user studies, which explore how professionals in various data-related roles engage with chatbots to find, make sense, and use open data.
Diving deeper to the accuracy issues suggested by these studies, I will then describe two experiments, which use machine unlearning and information leakage methods to understand if existing public authoritative sources of data are used by widely accessible generative AI tools.
Informed by the findings, my team developed PortalGPT, a series of AI prototypes leveraging knowledge graphs, large language models, and retrieval-augmented generation to make open data more accessible and actionable for people with varying levels of data literacy.
PortalGPT enhances dataset discovery by bridging the gap between user information needs and structured data queries and enables dataset exploration through interactive analysis tools. Through conversational natural language interactions, users can seamlessly search, analyse, and explore knowledge from open data portals, redefining the traditional methods of navigating and utilizing open datasets.
The talk is part of the 2025 Berlin Summer School on Artificial Intelligence and Society, jointly organized by the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD), the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, and Science of Intelligence (SCIoI), will focus on a timely and critical topic: “Open Science and AI – Shaping the Future of Responsible Research.”
Taking place from 15 to 18 September 2025, this year’s Summer School invites early-career researchers and advanced Master’s students to explore how open data, open collaboration, and responsible practices can help build more transparent, fair, and trustworthy AI systems.
Image generated with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

Katrin Frisch (Ombuds Committee for Research Integrity in Germany), "Maintaining Integrity when Using AI in Your Research"
2025-09-17 10:00 - 11:00 | TU-Campus EUREF, EUREF-Campus 9, 10829 Berlin-Schöneberg. EUREF-Campus 10829 Germany
Abstract: Since the release of ChatGPT and other generative AI applications, research institutions as well as various stakeholders such as research funders and publishers have been discussing how the use of AI in research should be dealt with from the perspective of research integrity. While a consensus on some matters was quickly reached, other issues are still being debated. This has led to a rather heterogeneous policy landscape, which will likely remain in flux due to the fast-paced nature of AI. Additionally, a recent survey by Wiley found that nearly two-thirds of respondents indicated that the lack of clear guidelines prevents them from using generative AI to the extent that they would like.
In this presentation, participants will get an overview of the status quo of the current debate on AI and research integrity. The presentation has a practical bend covering how to disclose different use cases of AI in publications and what to keep in mind when it comes to working with AI in research, for example regarding peer review, writing grants or using AI-generated images. The presentation will also raise awareness about further issues that are still under debate such as recommendations on which tools to use, questions of access and ethical aspects.
The talk is part of the 2025 Berlin Summer School on Artificial Intelligence and Society, jointly organized by the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD), the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, and Science of Intelligence (SCIoI), will focus on a timely and critical topic: “Open Science and AI – Shaping the Future of Responsible Research.”
Taking place from 15 to 18 September 2025, this year’s Summer School invites early-career researchers and advanced Master’s students to explore how open data, open collaboration, and responsible practices can help build more transparent, fair, and trustworthy AI systems.
Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.
