Latest Past Events

Pawel Romanczuk (Science of Intelligence), “Is Intelligence Critical? Can Magnets Teach Us Anything About Brains and Swarms?”

Abstract: More than three decades ago, it was proposed that certain natural systems can be viewed as self-organized critical systems, which self-tune themselves to special regions in parameter space close to so-called critical points, where the behavior of a system exhibits a qualitative change at the macroscopic scale, i.e. it undergoes a phase transition. Over

Antje Nuthmann (University of Kiel), “Real-World Scene Perception and Search From Foveal to Peripheral Vision”

It is a commonly held assumption that the fovea is where the interesting action occurs. To scrutinize this assumption, we conducted a series of experiments that addressed the following question: How important are the different regions of the visual field for gaze guidance in everyday visual-cognitive tasks? Following on from classic findings for sentence reading, I will present key results from various

Marc Toussaint (Science of Intelligence), “Do We Need Reasoning?”

On Zoom

Reasoning (or planning, rational decision making) seems a core aspect of intelligence -- but what exactly does that mean? If we observe clever behavior in an animal, can we claim it is based on reasoning? And doesn't the success of deep RL show us that we (as engineers) do not need reasoning? I'll discuss reasoning