scienceofintelligence.de

Stephen M. Fiore (University of Central Florida), “Studying Artificial Social Intelligence: Understanding and Examining Social Cognitive Processes in Human-Machine Collaborations”
2025-01-22 16:00 - 17:30 (Europe/Berlin) | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
In this presentation Stephen M. Fiore will provide an overview of a body of research in social cognition and its relation to developing artificial social intelligence. In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), an important research direction is the development of systems that can work alongside and collaborate with humans as actual teammates. Effective teamwork is crucial in fields that have high-stakes and can require complex collaborative problem solving (e.g., disaster response). In these environments, the ability of team members to collaborate requires social-cognitive processes over and above an understanding of the tasks to be accomplished. We address this through the study of socially intelligent AI and how these influence interactions with human counterparts acting as a team. In this talk, Stephen Fiore will first provide an overview of our approach to social cognition and the theoretical concepts being studied. He will describe theory and data from his various research projects studying human-human and human-machine teaming and conclude with recommendations and guidance for future research on artificial social intelligence.
This course This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Jonas Frenkel’s seminar “Artificial Social Intelligence.” It aims to provide a comprehensive exploration of ASI, which involves the observation, analysis, and synthesis of social phenomena. It integrates synthetic sciences such as machine learning, computer vision, and robotics with cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and the humanities to focus on the perception, cognitive components, and behaviors linked to social intelligence.
Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott

Giovanni Beltrame (Polytechnique Montreal), “Field Collective Robotics: Challenges and Applications”
2025-01-21 16:00 - 18:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Giovanni Beltrame is a Professor in the Department of Computer and Software Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal, where he leads the Making Innovative Space Technology (MIST) Laboratory. At MIST Lab, Giovanni is conducting projects in collaboration with industry and government agencies in areas such as robotics, disaster response, and space exploration. His research interests include the modeling and design of embedded systems, artificial intelligence, and robotics, with a particular emphasis on swarm robotics. He has participated in several field missions with ESA, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), and NASA, including BRAILLE, PANGAEA-X, and IGLUNA. He has made significant contributions to the field of swarm robotics, notably through the development of Buzz, a programming language designed for heterogeneous robot swarms, which facilitates the coordination and control of large groups of robots.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Mohsen Raoufi’s seminar “Introduction to Collective Robotics: Where Complexity Meets Robotics,” which provides an overview on the topic of collective robotics while exploring key areas like complexity science, network science, and engineering.
Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

Rudolf Lioutikov (Karlsruher Institut für Technologie), "Versatile, Language Conditioned Robots"
2025-01-20 14:00 - 15:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
More info will follow soon.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Svetlana Levit’s seminar “Selected Topics in Robot Learning,” which explores how advances in machine learning are helping robots operate in new environments, learn new behaviors, and adapt to changing conditions.

SCIoI at Oxford Berlin Colloquium on AI Ethics
2025-01-20 10:00 - 16:30 | Beit Room, Rhodes House, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3RG
The 2025 Oxford Berlin colloquium on AI ethics will be held in Oxford and bring together scholars and professionals to discuss a variety of topics, hosted by Dr Caroline Green (Oxford) and Dr Luise Muller (Freie Universitat Berlin).
AI technologies, from large language models to self-driving cars, raise fundamental philosophical questions. The aim of the Oxford Berlin colloquium on AI ethics is to connect early-career researchers doing ground-breaking work on the moral and political philosophy of AI and related fields, and to provide a forum for presenting work in progress, receiving valuable feedback in a constructive environment, and exchanging ideas with leading researchers and professionals from industry and policy.
SCIoI member Verena Hafner will speaking about “Embodied AI and the Artificial Self” at the colloquium..
Find all info about the event here, and the program here.

Anita Keshmirian (Forward College, Berlin): "Many Minds, Diverging Morals: Human Groups vs. AI in Moral Decision-Making"
2025-01-16 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Moral judgments are inherently social, shaped by interactions with others in everyday life. Despite this, psychological research has rarely examined the impact of social interactions on these judgments. In our study, we explored the role of group dynamics in moral decision-making by having small groups (4-5 participants) evaluate moral dilemmas first individually, then collectively, and finally individually a second time. Participants judged real-life and sacrificial moral dilemmas involving actions or inactions violating moral principles to benefit the greater good. Experiment 1 found that collective judgments were more utilitarian than individual judgments, supporting the hypothesis that group deliberation temporarily reduces the emotional burden of violating moral norms.
Experiment 2 measured participants’ state anxiety and moral judgments before, during, and after online interactions. Results again showed that collectives were more utilitarian, reducing state anxiety during and after social interaction, suggesting that stress reduction may explain the shift toward utilitarianism in group settings. We replicated this experiment using multi-agent large language models (LLMs) to test how artificial agents make moral decisions. Preliminary findings revealed that, unlike humans, groups of LLM agents were less utilitarian than individual agents. Analysis of the agents’ interactions showed a consistent pattern of virtue-signaling, with LLMs emphasizing deontological reasoning (focusing on moral rules) rather than utilitarian principles.
This divergence from human behavior suggests that collective reasoning in AI systems is shaped by different dynamics, likely due to how LLMs are trained to prioritize socially accepted norms. These results highlight important differences in moral decision-making between human and artificial intelligence, offering new insights into the development of AI systems that more closely mirror human ethical reasoning, particularly in complex, real-world collective decision-making scenarios.
Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott

Mary Ellen Foster (University of Glasgow), “Face-to-Face Conversation With Socially Intelligent Robots”
2025-01-15 16:00 - 18:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
When humans talk to each other face-to-face, they use their voices, faces, and bodies together in a rich, multimodal, continuous, interactive process. For a robot to participate fully in this sort of natural, face-to-face conversation in the real world, it must also be able not only to understand the social signals of its human partners, but also to produce appropriate signals in response. In this talk, I will present recent research from my group in this area, and will also discuss the issues involved in moving social robots from the lab to real-world contexts, which involves consultation with a large number of stakeholders.
Dr Mary Ellen Foster is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. Her primary research interests are human-robot interaction, social robotics, and embodied conversational agents. She recently coordinated the MuMMER project, a European Horizon 2020 project in the area of socially aware human-robot interaction, and is currently coordinating a UK/Canada collaborative project investigating the use of socially intelligent robots in paediatric emergency rooms. She obtained her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2007 and has previously worked at the Technical University of Munich and Heriot-Watt University.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Jonas Frenkel’s seminar “Artificial Social Intelligence.” It aims to provide a comprehensive exploration of ASI, which involves the observation, analysis, and synthesis of social phenomena. It integrates synthetic sciences such as machine learning, computer vision, and robotics with cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and the humanities to focus on the perception, cognitive components, and behaviors linked to social intelligence.
This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.

Oliver Kroemer (Carnegie Mellon University), “Modularity and Learning To Structure Robot Manipulation Skills”
2025-01-10 14:00 - 15:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Oliver Kroemer’s research focuses on developing algorithms and representations that enable robots to learn versatile manipulation skills over time. By equipping robots with the ability to acquire new skills and adapt manipulations to novel situations, his work opens up a wide range of potential applications—from assisting the elderly and maintaining parks and public spaces to operating in hazardous environments.
Oliver has developed methods that allow robots to learn about objects through physical interactions and autonomously refine their skills using reinforcement learning. Additionally, he has proposed innovative representations for capturing key aspects of manipulations, such as contact states and motor primitives, to enhance generalization across different tasks and scenarios.
The ultimate aim of his research is to create a life-long learning framework that enables robots to continuously acquire and improve manipulation skills, paving the way for more adaptable and capable robotic systems.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Svetlana Levit’s seminar “Selected Topics in Robot Learning,” which explores how advances in machine learning are helping robots operate in new environments, learn new behaviors, and adapt to changing conditions.
Image generated with DALL-E by Maria Ott

Carlo Pinciroli (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), “Simulation Platforms and sim2real Gap”
2025-01-07 16:00 - 18:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Carlo Pinciroli is an Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator of the Robotics Engineering department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), where he leads the NEST (Novel Engineering for Swarm Technologies) Lab. With additional appointments in WPI’s Artificial Intelligence Program, Computer Science, and Fire Protection Engineering, his research centers on swarm robotics.
He is the creator of ARGoS, a widely used, high-performance robot swarm simulator, and the driving force behind Buzz, a programming language designed for real-world robot swarms, recognized by MIT Technology Review and Communications of the ACM. Their work has received funding from NSF, NASA, Amazon Science, Raytheon Technologies, and other major institutions, advancing both simulation accuracy and real-world swarm applications.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Mohsen Raoufi’s seminar “Introduction to Collective Robotics: Where Complexity Meets Robotics,” which provides an overview on the topic of collective robotics while exploring key areas like complexity science, network science, and engineering.
This talk will take place in person at SCIoI and will be available as a live stream.
Image generated with DALL-E by Maria Ott

Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol), “Breaking Swarm Stereotypes: Scalability, Adaptability, and Robustness in Real-World Applications”
2024-12-10 16:00 - 18:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Sabine Hauert is Professor of Swarm Engineering at the University of Bristol in the UK. Her research focuses on making swarms for people, and across scales, from nanorobots for cancer treatment, to larger robots for environmental monitoring, or logistics. Before joining the University of Bristol, Sabine engineered swarms of nanoparticles for cancer treatment at MIT, and deployed swarms of flying robots at EPFL.
The distributed nature of swarm robotics has the potential to enable out-of-the-box solutions in real-world environments that adapt, scale, and are robust to failure. To achieve this potential, we may need to broaden our perception of swarms being composed of large numbers of autonomous, simple, and often homogeneous agents that use local interaction and sensing alone. Instead, we propose a shift towards swarms with emergent properties that are easy to design, monitor, control, and validate by humans. We show how swarms can rely on sophisticated perception of their local environment, and share some information quasi-globally. Finally we envision a world where swarms of specialised robots have a shared awareness of their operations and co-exist in common environments, coordinating tasks in construction, farming, logistics, and environmental preservation.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Mohsen Raoufi’s seminar “Introduction to Collective Robotics: Where Complexity Meets Robotics,” which provides an overview on the topic of collective robotics while exploring key areas like complexity science, network science, and engineering.
This talk will take place in person at SCIoI and will be available as a live stream.
Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), “The Evolution of Brain and Cognition: A Wild Hypothesis”
2024-12-05 16:00 - 17:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Onur Güntürkün is regarded as a pioneer of biologically based psychology. The aim of his work is to find out how perception, thought and action arise in the brain. He is interested in diverse topics, such as motor learning, fear, risk-taking behavior and even kissing. In his research, Güntürkün combines psychological, biological and neuroanatomical aspects with concepts and findings from the comparative behavioral studies and neurosciences. Using magpies as an example, he was able to show that birds recognize themselves in the mirror and are therefore able to develop a kind of self-concept. This finding is astonishing because they lack the cerebral cortex in their brains. This is precisely what controls this ability in primates. Building on this finding, Güntürkün also succeeded in proving that the forebrain structures of birds and primates have converged in an evolutionary process. Despite their different structures, they converge in their neurobiological basis and their behavioral performance.
This talk will take place in person at SCIoI (room 2.057).

Photo created in DALLE by Maria Ott

Mario Di Bernardo (University of Naples Federico II), “Control of Complex Multi-Agent Systems”
2024-12-03 16:00 - 18:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Mario di Bernardo is Professor of Automatic Control at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy and Visiting Professor of Nonlinear Systems and Control at the University of Bristol, U.K. He currently serves as Deputy pro-Vice Chancellor for Internationalization at the University of Naples and coordinates the research area and PhD program on Modeling and Engineering Risk and Complexity of the Scuola Superiore Meridionale, the new School of Advanced Studies located in Naples. On 28th February 2007 he was bestowed the title of Cavaliere of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for scientific merits from the President of Italy. His research interests include the analysis, synchronization and control of complex network systems; piecewise-smooth dynamical systems; nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear control with applications to engineering and computational biology.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Mohsen Raoufi’s seminar “Introduction to Collective Robotics: Where Complexity Meets Robotics,” which provides an overview on the topic of collective robotics while exploring key areas like complexity science, network science, and engineering.
©SCIoI

Majid Khadiv (TU München), “Optimal Control and Learning for Contact-Rich Robotics”
2024-11-29 14:00 - 15:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
The past few years have witnessed significant progress in the field of legged locomotion and manipulation. This is mainly due to the availability of high-performance hardware as well as development of algorithms that scale to high-dimensional, hybrid and under-actuated systems. In this talk, I will present my recent research efforts, mainly on the algorithmic side, on developing efficient predictive controllers that can be complemented with supervised/reinforcement learning for real-time execution in the real world. I will also share my perspective on the open problems that we still need to solve to have functional humanoid robots in the real world.
Majid Khadiv is an assistant professor in the school of Computation, Information and Technology (CIT) at TUM. He leads the chair of AI Planning in Dynamic Environments and is also a member of the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI). Prior to joining TUM, he was a research scientist at the Empirical Inference Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent systems. Before that he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Machines in Motion, a joint laboratory between New York University and Max Planck Institute. Since the start of his PhD in 2012, he has been performing research on motion planning, control and learning for legged robots ranging from quadrupeds, lower-limb exoskeleton up to humanoid robots.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Svetlana Levit’s seminar “Selected Topics in Robot Learning,” which explores how advances in machine learning are helping robots operate in new environments, learn new behaviors, and adapt to changing conditions.
Image generated with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

Hideki Kozima (Tohoku University), “Child-Robot Interactions for Therapeutic and Educational Research and Practices”
2024-11-28 10:00 - 11:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Abstract:
Research in developmental robotics includes modeling human intelligence and the process of its emergence in robotic systems. A novel research paradigm in psychology is emerging in conjunction with such efforts regarding reproducing human-specific communication abilities in robots and observing how children interact with robots with various communication capabilities. I will discuss such research trends from a broader perspective, and the potential to realize robots that afford children the opportunities to build social relationships is examined. We consider human communication abilities not as a set of interactive functionalities in individuals but as a set of social tools in which functionalities have emerged from the social interaction driven by the individual motivation to form relationships with others. We also explore some representative works on using robots to help establish such relationships in autistic and typically developing children. Finally, we discuss the possibility of using robots for further research and practical support for child development centered on building social relationships.

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

Photo by Owen Beard on Unsplash.

Justin Werfel (Harvard University), “Bio-Inspired Intelligence and Robotics”
2024-11-26 16:00 - 18:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Justin Werfel is a senior research scientist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, where he works on topics in complex and emergent systems, including swarm robotics, termite behavior, engineered molecular nanosystems, and evolutionary theory. He leads the Designing Emergence Laboratory, and works closely with a number of other collaborating labs.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Mohsen Raoufi’s seminar “Introduction to Collective Robotics: Where Complexity Meets Robotics,” which provides an overview on the topic of collective robotics while exploring key areas like complexity science, network science, and engineering.
This talk will take place in person at SCIoI and will be available as a live stream.
Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

Mohsen Raoufi (Science of Intelligence), “Crash Course on Network Science”
2024-11-19 16:00 - 18:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Mohsen is a doctoral researcher at SCIoI, working on Project 27, Speed-Accuracy Tradeoffs in Collective Estimation. His research explores the role of networks in shaping collective opinion dynamics.
In this lecture, he will provide an overview of network science with a focus on its applications in collective robotics. He will cover basic topics in graph theory and show how a network science perspective can help our understanding of collective robotics.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Mohsen Raoufi’s seminar “Introduction to Collective Robotics: Where Complexity Meets Robotics,” which provides an overview on the topic of collective robotics while exploring key areas like complexity science, network science, and engineering.

Sylvain Calinon (IDIAP, EPFL), “Frugal Learning of Manipulation Skills in Robotics”
2024-11-15 14:00 - 15:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Many applications in robotics would benefit from robots being able to learn manipulation skills from only few demonstrations or trials. This contrasts with the ongoing trend in machine learning of constantly increasing the amount of data required to learn tasks. The main challenge of acquiring manipulation skills from limited training data is to find inductive biases and representations that can be used in a wide range of tasks, which requires us to advance on several fronts, including data structures and geometric structures. As example of data structures, I will discuss the use of tensor factorization techniques that can be used in global optimization problems to efficiently extract and compress information, while providing diverse human-guided learning capabilities (imitation and environment scaffolding). As examples of geometric structures, I will discuss the use of Riemannian geometry and geometric algebra in robotics, where prior knowledge about the physical world can be embedded within the representations of skills and associated learning algorithms.
Sylvain Calinon is a Senior Research Scientist at the Idiap Research Institute and a Lecturer at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He heads the Robot Learning & Interaction group at Idiap, with expertise in human-robot collaboration, robot learning from demonstration and model-based optimization. The approaches developed in his group can be applied to a wide range of applications requiring manipulation skills, with robots that are either close to us (assistive and industrial robots), parts of us (prosthetics and exoskeletons), or far away from us (shared control and teleoperation).
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Svetlana Levit’s seminar “Selected Topics in Robot Learning,” which explores how advances in machine learning are helping robots operate in new environments, learn new behaviors, and adapt to changing conditions.
The event will take place in person and is available on Zoom.
Image generated with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

POSTPONED - Olaf Hellwich (Science of Intelligence)
2024-11-14 16:00 - 17:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
More details to follow.

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

Pawel Romanczuk (Science of Intelligence), “Introduction to Complexity Science: Part II”
2024-11-12 16:00 - 18:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Pawel Romanczuk holds a professorship on Complexity Research in Adaptive Systems at HU. For SCIoI, he works at the interface of applied mathematics, theoretical physics, and behavioral biology. He focuses on collective behavior of organismic systems. His research bridges analytical and synthetic sciences to study self-organization, evolutionary adaptations, and functional dynamical behavior.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Mohsen Raoufi’s seminar “Introduction to Collective Robotics: Where Complexity Meets Robotics,” which provides an overview on the topic of collective robotics while exploring key areas like complexity science, network science, and engineering.
This talk will take place in person at SCIoI and will be available as a live stream.

Berlin Science Week: Science Slam of the Berlin Clusters of Excellence
2024-11-07 19:30 - 21:30 | Roadrunner’s Paradise Saarbrücker Str. 24 10405 Berlin Germany
Slammin’ like there’s no tomorrow – at our cluster science slam, researchers try everything to entertain their audience, regardless of whether the subject is e.g. mathematics, neuroscience or active material. The sky is the limit when it comes to what’s possible. Costumes, props, movies, power-point presentations or other experimental setups – it is all allowed. Only time sets the limits – every slammer will have six minutes at most. And the audience will decide which presentation is best!
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Social Robots
Anna Lange (SCIoI)
How to Get Rid of your Potential
Gregor Pasemann (MATH+)
Building Blocks of the Fourth Dimension
Chun-Sheng Hsueh (MATH+)
From Awe to Wonder – Designing Nature Inspired Materials
Heidi Jalkh (Matters of Activity)
Exploring Epilepsy in the Human Brain: a Travel to Nowhere
Alice Podestà (NeuroCure)
Medical Progress in Three Acts
Nils von Wardenburg (NeuroCure)
Do you feel comfortable? Reacting, reflecting, and challenging our socio-political world
Roberta Astolfi (SCRIPTS)
Frank’s Casket – Thinking with and through the Box
Andrew James Johnston (Temporal Communities)
Teaming up with ”Ancient Guardians of Earth”
Tamanna Manjur Ahamad (UniSysCat)
Lighting up the Brain
Alina Pushkarev (UniSysCat)
Moderation: Jochen Müller
Visit the event at the Berlin Science Week.

20th Conference of the Gesellschaft Für Ichthyologie (GfI)
2024-11-07 - 2024-11-10 | Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, Philippstraße 13/Haus 6, 10115 Berlin
The 20th conference of the Gesellschaft für Ichthyologie (GfI) e.V. is intended to provide a diverse insight into research with and about fish, but also to give interested hobbyists a chance to speak. It will cover a diverse range of topics, including Evolution, Collective Behavior, Fish Ecology, Fish Communities, Animal Welfare, and poster presentations.
Find the official website here.
Key note Speakers
Dr. Alicia Burns (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin und Excellence Cluster “Science of Intelligence”)
Dr. Félicie Dhellemmes (Technische Universität zu Berlin und Excellence Cluster “Science of Intelligence”)
Dr. Antonia Groneberg (Charité Berlin)
Dr. Ulrike Scherer (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin und Excellence Cluster “Science of Intelligence”)
Dr. Carolin Sommer-Trembo (Universität Basel)

POSTPONED: Karoline Wiesner (University of Potsdam), “Introduction to Complexity Science: Part I”
2024-11-05 16:00 - 18:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Karoline Wiesner has been a Professor of Complexity Science at the Institute for Physics and Astronomy since 2021 and also serves as an external professor at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. She earned her Ph.D. in Physics at Uppsala University and spent her postdoctoral years at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and the University of California in Davis. At the University of Bristol, UK, she held positions as Assistant and later Associate Professor, as well as being a visiting professor at Lund University, the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Mohsen Raoufi’s seminar “Introduction to Collective Robotics: Where Complexity Meets Robotics,” which provides an overview on the topic of collective robotics while exploring key areas like complexity science, network science, and engineering.
This talk will take place in person at SCIoI and will be available as a live stream.

Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott

POSTPONED: Anita Keshmirian (Forward College, Berlin), “Many Minds, Diverging Morals: Human Groups vs. AI in Moral Decision-Making”
2024-10-31 10:00 - 11:00 | Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Abstract
“Moral judgments are inherently social, shaped by interactions with others in everyday life. Despite this, psychological research has rarely examined the impact of social interactions on these judgments. In our study, we explored the role of group dynamics in moral decision making by having small groups (4-5 participants) evaluate moral dilemmas first individually, then collectively, and finally individually a second time. Participants judged real-life and sacrificial moral dilemmas involving actions or inactions violating moral principles to benefit the greater good. Experiment 1 found that collective judgments were more utilitarian than individual judgments, supporting the hypothesis that group deliberation temporarily reduces the emotional burden of violating moral norms. Experiment 2 measured participants’ state anxiety and moral judgments before, during, and after online interactions. Results again showed that collectives were more utilitarian, reducing state anxiety during and after social interaction, suggesting that stress reduction may explain the shift toward utilitarianism in group settings.
We replicated this experiment using multi-agent large language models (LLMs) to test how artificial agents make moral decisions. Preliminary findings revealed that, unlike humans, groups of LLM agents were less utilitarian than individual agents. Analysis of the agents’ interactions showed a consistent pattern of virtue-signaling, with LLMs emphasizing deontological reasoning (focusing on moral rules) rather than utilitarian principles. This divergence from human behavior suggests that collective reasoning in AI systems is shaped by different dynamics, likely due to how LLMs are trained to prioritize socially accepted norms. These results highlight important differences in moral decision-making between human and artificial intelligence, offering new insights into the development of AI systems that more closely mirror human ethical reasoning, particularly in complex, real-world collective decision-making scenarios.”
Image credit: ©SCIoI/ generated with DALL-E

Alan Winfield (UWE Bristol), “Ethics in Collective Robotics”
2024-10-29 16:00 - 18:00 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Alan Winfield is Professor of Electronic Engineering and Director of the Science Communication Unit at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He conducts research in swarm robotics in the Bristol Robotics Laboratory and is especially interested in robots as working models of life, evolution, intelligence, and culture. Alan is passionate about communicating science and technology. He holds an EPSRC Senior Media Fellowship with the theme Intelligent Robots in Science and Society, and blogs about robots, open science and related topics at his blog. Alan is a leading expert in robot ethics and cognitive robotics.
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Mohsen Raoufi’s seminar “Introduction to Collective Robotics: Where Complexity Meets Robotics,” which provides an overview on the topic of collective robotics while exploring key areas like complexity science, network science, and engineering.
This talk will take place in person at SCIoI and will be available as a live stream.

Heiko Hamann (Uni Konstanz, SCIoI), “Introduction to Collective Robotics: A Formal Approach”
2024-10-22 16:00 - 17:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Heiko Hamann is a roboticist with focus on collective systems. With his group he studies distributed robotics, machine learning for robotics, and bio-hybrid systems. In his collaboration with SCIoI member Pawel Romanczuk he investigates collective intelligence and especially the swarm robotics aspects of “Speed-accuracy tradeoffs in distributed collective decision making.”
This talk will take place as part of SCIoI member Mohsen Raoufi’s seminar “Introduction to Collective Robotics: Where Complexity Meets Robotics,” which provides an overview on the topic of collective robotics while exploring key areas like complexity science, network science, and engineering.
This talk will be broadcasted live to the SCIoI premises under the following Link.

Jörg Raisch (Science of Intelligence), "Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Consensus in Multi-Agent Systems"
2024-10-17 16:00 - 17:30 | SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057
Achieving consensus, i.e., agreeing on objectives and on relevant aspects of the environment, is a prerequisite whenever a group of individuals (“agents”) attempt to cooperatively solve a task. This requires information exchange between agents. In technical scenarios, information exchange is via wireless communication channels, which exhibit interference. Standard implementations aim at avoiding interference by resorting to multiplexing. However, the resulting algorithms scale poorly with the number of agents and are inherently non-privacy preserving. We will discuss an alternative approach that, by exploiting the wireless channel’s superposition property, improves efficiency and preserves privacy. Results will be illustrated with examples from traffic automation, such as automatic lane changing and distributed automation of traffic intersections for autonomous vehicles.

The reported results are based on joint work with F. Molinari, S. Stanczak, N. Agrawal, and A. Grapentin (all TU Berlin)

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

Oliver Brock at TED AI Vienna 2024
2024-10-17 - 2024-10-19
SCIoI spokesperson Oliver Brock will give a talk about artificial intelligence (AI) in Vienna (Austria), where, for the first time, a TED series of talks will be hosted, to foster the understanding of AI innovation.
Want to join or get more information? Click here.

Berlin Brains – Restless Gaze, Stable Vision: SCIoI Members Martin Rolfs and Nina Hanning @Zeiss Grand Planetarium Berlin
2024-10-16 19:30 - 21:00 | Zeiss-Großplanetarium, Prenzlauer Allee 80, 10405 Berlin
Live Event at Zeiss-Großplanetarium (Zeiss Grand Planetarium), Berlin with SCIoI memebers Martin Rolfs and Nina Hanning, titled “Restless gaze, stable vision: The camera work of our eyes.”
About:
Our eyes are restless; they constantly orient themselves toward new aspects of the environment. If they were cameras, the recorded film would be dizzying. And yet our perception is continuous and stable. How does this work? And what does the gaze reveal about hidden attention processes in the brain? Martin Rolfs and Nina Hanning demonstrate how they measure these processes in humans and model their contribution to perception and behavior.
This event is organized by the Stiftung Planetarium Berlin. It will take place in German.
Find more information on the event here.
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Berlin University Alliance's Open Space Event on AI and Ethics (in German)
2024-09-25 18:00 - 20:00
Our members Dafna Burema and Jonas Frenkel will take part at “THE OPEN KNOWLEDGE LAB” Berlin as speakers, which thrives on active exchange between science, business, politics, and urban society. The BUA OPEN SPACE salon series provides a platform for dialogue on current social issues and networking: impulses from science and subsequent discussions provide deeper insights into research projects and discourses.
More info

Photo taken from berlin-university-alliance.de.

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

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

Image created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.
