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