POSTPONED: Alan Winfield (UWE Bristol) & Dafna Burema (Science of Intelligence)
2025-07-01 14:00 - 15:30 (Europe/Berlin) | 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
More details to follow.
Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

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.

Sören Auer (TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library), "Neuro-symbolic AI for Open Science"
2025-09-17 13:30 - 14:30 | TU-Campus EUREF, EUREF-Campus 9, 10829 Berlin-Schöneberg. EUREF-Campus 10829 Germany
Abstract: We explore how neuro-symbolic AI, i.e., combining neural networks with symbolic knowledge representation, can drive the next generation of open, transparent, and responsible scientific research. By combining the adaptability of machine learning with the interpretability of structured knowledge, neuro-symbolic approaches offer powerful tools for enhancing reproducibility, semantic interoperability, and trust in AI-driven science. With examples such as the Open Research Knowledge Graph and TIB’s AI research assistant, we highlight how these methods support machine-readable research outputs, facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration, and align with the core values of open science, ultimately shaping a more inclusive and accountable research ecosystem.
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.

Simon Vock (Charité Universitätsmedizin), "Critical dynamics governs deep learning"
2025-09-25 10:00 - 23:00 | Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Artificial intelligence has advanced rapidly through larger and deeper neural networks, yet fundamental questions remain about how to optimize network dynamics for performance and adaptability. This study shows that deep neural networks (DNNs), like biological brains, perform optimally when operating near a critical phase transition – poised between active and inactive dynamics. Drawing from physics and neuroscience, we demonstrate that criticality provides a unifying principle linking structure, dynamics, and function in DNNs. Analyzing more than 80 state-of-the-art models, we first report that improvements in accuracy over the past decade coincided with an implicit evolution toward more critical dynamics. Architectural and training innovations unknowingly guided networks toward this optimal regime. Second, building on these insights, we develop a training method that explicitly drives networks to criticality, improving robustness and performance. Third, we show that fundamental problems in AI, including loss of performance in deep continual learning, are caused by loss of criticality and that maintaining criticality rescues performance. This work introduces criticality as a fundamental framework for AI development by emphasizing dynamic optimization alongside scale. It bridges artificial intelligence with physics and biological cortical network function inspiring novel self-tuning strategies in DNNs. The findings offer a theoretically grounded path forward in designing efficient, adaptable, and high-performing artificial intelligence systems drawing inspiration from principles observed in biological neural systems.
Image generated with DALLE by Maria Ott.

Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin (MPI-AB & the University of Konstanz), "Communication and coordination in animal societies"
2025-09-25 16:00 - 17:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Abstract:
Many social species use signals such as vocalizations to coordinate a range of group behaviors, from coming to consensus on where to move to banding together against threats. Despite their widespread importance, these behaviors remain challenging to study in the wild because doing so requires monitoring many individuals simultaneously. In this talk, I will give an overview of our work tracking the movements and vocalizations of entire social groups in the wild to tackle questions at the interface of communication and collective behavior. What roles does vocal signaling play in the coordination of collective movement? What drives groups to split up? And how do vocalizations mediate collective action against external threats? I will explore how we and our collaborators are addressing these questions in three species of social carnivore that coordinate across varying spatial scales – highly cohesive meerkat groups, moderately cohesive coati groups, and fission-fusion hyena clans.
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 by Gertrūda Valasevičiūtė on Unsplash.

Excellent Pub Quiz
2025-10-13 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

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

This event is organized by the Cluster of Excellence SCRIPTS.
The other participating clusters are: MATH+, Science of Intelligence, Temporal Communities, UniSysCat, Matters of Activity, and NeuroCure.

Anna Lange and Helene Ackermann (Science of Intelligence), “Adaptivity in Learner-Teacher Interaction”
2025-10-16 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
More details to follow.

Félicie Dhellemmes and Valerii Chirkov (Science of Intelligence), "Navigating the Explore-Exploit Trade Off in Collective Search"
2025-10-23 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
More details to follow.

Photo by Prince Patel on Unsplash.

Dimitri Coelho Mollo (Umeå University), "Functional Ontologies for AI systems: Tasks, Mechanisms, and Capacities"
2025-10-30 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Abstract
The size and complexity of current Deep Artificial Neural Networks pose remarkable challenges to our attempts of explaining and understanding their workings. In this talk, I put forward a proposal for complementing existing efforts to that aim, inspired by research on cognitive ontology in philosophy of cognitive science. In particular, I suggest that, as much as we need theoretically and empirically grounded categories for cognitive tasks, cognitive capacities, and cognitive mechanisms in cognitive science, we need theoretically and empirically grounded categories for functional tasks, capacities and mechanisms when studying AI systems. The resulting functional ontologies, I argue, can play crucial roles in informing further research in explainable and interpretable AI, and in refining our understanding of such systems. I illustrate this proposal by examining recent research on the computational mechanisms underlying specific capacities in Large Language Models, showing how appeal to functional ontologies can further enrich such research.

Oliver Brock (Science of Intelligence), "Robotics and AI Will Never Feel the Same Again"
2025-10-30 14:15 - 15:45 | Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
The Robotics Institute Germany (RIG) offers weekly insights into current research work on robotics. In RIG’s weekly online lectures, leading robotics researchers present the latest developments, challenges, and visions and answer questions from the audience.
SCIoI spokesperson Oliver Brock will kick off the series with a talk about the future of robotics and AI. He will be available for questions after the lecture.
The event will take place in person and online: https://tu-berlin.zoom-x.de/j/63606623807?pwd=[REDACTED]
The series is part of a seminar for MSc and PhD students, while it is also open to anyone interested. Students who are interested in enrolling in the course can visit the TU-website.

Palina Bartashevich, Marten Kaas, Valerii Chirkov, Yunus Sevinchan, and Yating Zheng (Science of Intelligence), "What is Collective Intelligence?"
2025-11-06 10:30 - 12:00 | MAR Asimov Lab, Marchstrasse 23, Berlin, 10587, Germany
Abstract:
From ice fishers and marlins to robots, natural and artificial collectives show remarkable ways of making decisions together. Join us as we explore the collective mind! How do sardines escape the attacks of marlins – and how do marlins adapt their hunting strategies in return? What guides groups of hobby ice fishers in Finland as they decide where to drill the best fishing holes? And what can these real-world strategies teach us about building smarter artificial agents, like swarm robots?
In this exciting event, SCIoI computer scientist Palina Bartashevich will introduce the topic of collective intelligence, sharing drone footage and stories from her team’s expedition to the Mexican Atlantic, where they observed hunting marlins in action. Following her introduction, ethicist Marten Kaas will lead a lively discussion with scientists Valerii Chirkov, Yunus Sevinchan, and Yating Zheng on the most fascinating aspects of swarm intelligence in humans, animals and robots. It turns out that when groups share information and make decisions together, they can act much like a distributed brain, and that tells us a lot about collective minds in nature and technology — who would have thought?
Register by 5 November by emailing solveig.steinhardt@scioi.de.
Click here for more info.

The Science Slam
2025-11-06 19:00 - 22:00 | Roadrunner’s Paradise Saarbrücker Str. 24 10405 Berlin Germany
Amidst the excitement, one event stands out for its humor, heart, and energy: the Battle of the Brains: The Ultimate Science Slam Edition. This much-loved tradition, hosted by Berlin’s seven Clusters of Excellence (SCIoI, MATH+, UniSysCat, SCRIPTS, Neurocure, Temporal Communities, Matters of Activity) transforms complex research into lively and entertaining performances. Researchers bring their work to life with everything from costumes and props to experimental setups, vying for the audience’s applause and the coveted title of best science slammer. For Science of Intelligence (SCIoI), our member Anna Lange and Vito Mengers will join the stage and present their research.

Excellent Pub Quiz
2025-11-10 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 Science of Intelligence.
The other participating clusters are: MATH+, UniSysCat, Temporal Communities, SCRIPTS, Matters of Activity, and NeuroCure.

Elena Merdjanovska (Science of Intelligence), “Efficient Model Learning From Data With Partially Incorrect Labels: Learning From Noisy Labels”
2025-11-20 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

Sole Traverso (Science of Intelligence), "Symmetry-aware Lifelong Bayesian Reinforcement Learning: Finding the Loo Faster"
2025-11-27 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

Benjamin Alt (Universität Bremen), "Hybrid AI for Safe Embodied Intelligence"
2025-11-28 10:00 - 23:00 | Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Enabling robots to perform complex manipulation tasks in open-world environments requires approaches to intelligence that bridge the traditional divide between symbolic and subsymbolic systems. Hybrid systems that combine reasoning over symbolic knowledge with probabilistically approximately correct inference over probability distributions promise to make robot manipulation actions generalizable, interpretable, and scalable to address real-world challenges. This talk explores how hybrid AI systems can enable robots to become not just capable agents, but also safe colleagues and companions for humans.
Benjamin Alt is Technical Director at the AICOR Lab at University of Bremen. He is collaborating with RBO in the Robotics Institute Germany (RIG) Technical Committee (TC) called Manipulate Anything, Anywhere, Anytime (MA3).
This talk is a collaboration between the Robotics and Biology Laboratory (RBO), the Robotics Institute Germany (RIG) and Science of Intelligence.

POSTPONED: Arianna Novati (Science of Intelligence), "Mouse Lock Box 2.0"
2025-12-04 10:00 - 10:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
More details to follow.
©SCIoI/Katharina Hohlbaum, Arianna Novati

Hublet at SCIoI: Winter Conference of the Association For the Study of Animal Behavior (ASAB)
2025-12-15 10:15 - 2025-12-16 18:00 | Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
How does sensory information shape animal behaviour?
This year’s Winter Conference of the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour (ASAB) takes on one of the most intriguing questions in behavioural biology: how animals perceive, interpret, and act on information from their environment. From camouflage to communication, from primate foraging to the “linguistics” of animals, the meeting brings together cutting-edge research on sensory worlds across species.
For everyone in Berlin who cannot attend the conference in person but would still like to follow the talks and discuss them with others, the IGB and SCIoI is hosting a Hublet.
A Hublet is a local satellite gathering where the conference is streamed live, creating a shared space for learning, exchange, and spontaneous discussion. It’s an informal, community-driven way to experience the conference together, and a chance to connect with others interested in animal behavior, sensory systems, cognition, and beyond.
Attendance is free and open to all.
(Participation follows the ASAB Code of Conduct.)
Program @SCIoI
(Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057 )
Monday and Tuesday
10:15am – 6pm
For the whole program, please visit the conference website (streamed at the Hublet). Please be aware that the conference program is U.K. time (CET -1).
Program Highlights
Monday
10:30 – Public Lecture: Innes Cuthill
Animal camouflage: evolutionary biology meets neuroscience, art and war
15:30 – Plenary 1: Amanda Melin
Multimodal foraging in wild sympatric primates
Tuesday
10:30 – Tinbergen Lecture: Toshitaka Suzuki
Animal linguistics
12:15 – Plenary 2: Barbara Caspers
Family affairs – the impact of chemical cues on bird social communication
About This Year’s Theme
“How sensory information affects behaviour”
The 2025 meeting explores how animals perceive their world, a topic famously challenged by philosopher Thomas Nagel’s question: What is it like to be a bat?
While we may never fully inhabit another species’ sensory perspective, understanding these sensory modalities is essential for interpreting behaviour. In an increasingly human-altered world, sensory systems face new challenges from noise, light pollution, artificial scents, and shifting magnetic environments. The conference investigates how these pressures shape decision-making, adaptation, and sometimes maladaptive outcomes.
Join the Berlin Hublet
Come watch the conference with fellow researchers, students, and anyone curious about animal behaviour. Whether you work in biology, robotics, psychology, philosophy, or simply enjoy learning about the natural world, you are warmly invited.

Vladislav Golyanik (MPI for Informatics), "Egocentric 4D Vision with Conventional and Event Cameras"
2026-01-20 10:00 - 11:00 | Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
4D computer vision using egocentric visual sensors on head-mounted devices (such as Aria glasses) is gaining momentum. While substantial progress has been made in recent years, various open challenges remain in the field, including robust 3D human and hand pose estimation from egocentric cameras, optimal egocentric camera placement, real-time processing, and fulfilling ergonomic and power consumption constraints of mobile devices. This talk will focus on several projects on egocentric 4D vision conducted by and with contributions from the 4D and Quantum Vision (4DQV) research group (MPI for Informatics). We will investigate how modern computer graphics rendering tools can be leveraged for synthetic training data generation, and discuss, among other points, the increasing role of event cameras in egocentric vision. The talk will also provide an overview of other ongoing research directions at 4DQV.
Bio:
Vladislav Golyanik is a senior researcher leading the “4D and Quantum Vision” research group at the Visual Computing and Artificial Intelligence (VCAI) Department of MPI for Informatics. He is also a lecturer at Saarland University. Vladislav’s primary research interests include 3D reconstruction and neural rendering of deformable scenes, 4D generative models and quantum-enhanced computer vision (QeCV). He received a doctoral degree in Computer Science from the University of Kaiserslautern in 2019.
