Thursday Morning Talk

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

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

The EU AI Act introduces new obligations for providers and deployers of AI systems. In this presentation, we will discuss the scope of the AI Act, the different qualifications of AI systems under the act and the related obligations or requirements. We also provide a look ahead at key deadlines, the status of standards and

From the foraging of ungulates and primates to the bait balls of fish and the murmurations of starlings, the dynamics of animal groups fascinate us with the mystery of their underlying social interactions. Identifying unique and common traits across systems can help us understand the self-organized mechanisms of their emergence, as well as the ecological

In this one-hour workshop, a toolbox of best-practise techniques for confident communication skills will be presented. This will equip attendees with a repertoire of rhetorical tools to communicate confidently and quick-wittedly in stressful situations. Participants will learn strategies to handle challenging questions and optimise their performance during academic debates. Another aim is to tackle dealing

Scalability is often lauded as one of the advantages of decentralized multi-robot systems and robot swarms. Theory and many experimental works predict that with increasing swarm density, we will observe a gradual decay of performance. In our work, we have taken a closer look at the scalability of robot swarms in different settings and we

What can AI systems do? Answering this question requires us to model their capabilities, but this first demands a clear conception of what capabilities are and which tools we can use to measure them. I advance a dispositional account of capabilities, understanding them as a system’s propensity to behave in certain ways under certain conditions.

Far-reaching perspectives in swarm robotics consider robots that are minimalist in their sensing, communication and computation, but are deployed in thousands to collaborate towards the accomplishment of tasks distributed in space and time. Generally speaking, future robot swarms might face harsh operating conditions where little communication is possible and no external infrastructure is available. These

Science often deals with issues pertaining to possibilities, contingencies and necessities, by engaging in thought experiments and modeling. This talk discusses how much deep learning can be helpful for navigating the possibility space for intelligence, adding to our scientific understanding of possibilities. One epistemically useful feature of neural networks is their runnability - they can

More details to follow. Photo created with DALL-E by Maria Ott.

The human brain extracts complex information from visual inputs, including objects, their spatial and semantic interrelations, and their interactions with the environment. However, a quantitative approach to capture this information remains elusive. I will present work where we show that LLM embeddings of scene captions successfully characterise brain activity evoked by viewing the natural scenes.

More details to follow.   Photo by lance Anderson on Unsplash.