The SCIoI Executive Board

Oliver Brock represents the synthetic discipline robotics. He has extensive experience in building real-world robotic systems, contributing also to related disciplines, including perception and machine learning. Within the fields of robotics, he is a leader in leveraging collaborations with analytical disciplines, in particular psychology and behavioral biology, to work towards an understanding of embodied intelligence.

Jörg Raisch represents the discipline control. His research interests include both methodological and applied aspects of control. In the context of SCIoI, his work on abstraction-based synthesis of discrete event and hybrid control systems, on consistent control hierarchies, and on consensus-based control of multiagent systems will be particularly relevant.

Christa Thöne-Reineke represents the analytical discipline of behavioral biology. She has extensive experience in laboratory animal science and animal models, especially in animal behavior as read out for severity assessment and animal welfare. She will study the costs and benefits of cognition and the influence of emotion and well-being on animal behavior.

Marcel Brass is a cognitive and social neuroscientist who is interested in motor and cognitive control. He investigates the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying social cognition, cognitive flexibility and human volition. He is best known for his behavioral and brain imaging research on imitation, task switching and intentional control of action. Within SCIoI, he will primarily investigate social intelligence.

Jens Krause’s research will be part of the behavioral biology component of SCIoI. He and his group have developed an interactive robotic fish which is recognised by live fish as a conspecific. This robot is used to investigate basic principles of collective behavior and collective cognition. In particular they are interested in the way in which group-living organisms process information to deal with environmental challenges and how they come to collective decisions that are adaptive. Their interactive robot can embody the algorithms that they identified in biological agents and thereby allows them to test their validity. In order to give their robots realistic behaviour (as fish) they address the issues of dimensionality reduction and cursive interaction which are central to SCIoI.

David Bierbach is a biologist working on topics that range from individual differences to large-scale collective behaviors. He integrates field-based studies with analytical and experimental approaches in the laboratory. Through his highly interdisciplinary work, he has developed several experimental techniques to study animal behavior in the most standardized ways, from video playbacks and computer animations to the use of bio-mimetic robots. His main research objectives are tropical freshwater fish like clonal mollies (Poecilia formosa), guppies (P. reticulata) or sulfur mollies (P. sulphuraria). At SCIoI, he is investigating how fish use anticipation in their social interactions. The overall aim is to implement this knowledge to build better bio-mimetic robots and social interaction algorithms.

Furkan Davulcu is a doctoral researcher working with SCIoI as a member of Professor Oliver Brock’s Robotics and Biology Laboratory. He earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in computer engineering from Middle East Technical University in Turkey, where he conducted research on selecting footholds for legged robots. In his work on Project 43 at SCIoI, Furkan is focusing on exploring and leveraging regularities at multiple levels of abstraction to generate robust and general real-world behavior. His research is grounded in the hypothesis that intelligent behavior involves the consideration of information at different levels of abstraction about the world to select the most appropriate action for a given task.