From now on, the CITEC management releases an internal newsletter, the CITEC UPDATE. The first issue is online, now. The page will always provide the most recent issue, as well as an archive of previous issues.

 
© Bielefeld University

On Sept. 28, our RoboCup@Home team ToBI celebrated its homecoming event. The team demonstrated to the CITEC audience what the robot achieved at the world cup in Bordeaux, back in July. In the demonstration the robot served as a party host welcoming guests, serving crackers, and cleaning up. After a 5th place in the @Home Open Platform League in 2023, we are looking forward to the next year, 2024 in Eindhoven.  

© Deutsche Telekom IT GmbH

Open sesame. On Sep 25, the best three student teams of the software engineering project at Bielefeld University in the summer term 2023 were honored by the project partners Deutsche Telekom IT & T-Labs. In an exciting cooperation semester between the DT IT/Chapter Fullstack & T-Labs and the Faculty of Technology & CITEC, the students developed a web app using SSI technology for opening doors.

Now CITEC has taken on a new research profile and organizational structure. The responsibility of coordinating CITEC has been handed over to Philipp Cimiano, as speaker, and Stefan Kopp, as co-speaker. Holding on to CITEC’s established interdisciplinary infrastructure and research values, they aim to adapt to the advances of the rapidly growing field of Artificial Intelligence and the resulting societal impacts. CITEC’s overarching research topic ‘Human-Aware Cognitive Systems in Open Worlds’ is approached through interdisciplinary collaboration and projects in five core research areas, namely, ‘Learning in Interaction’, ‘Multimodal Cognition and Communication’, ‘Socially Intelligent Agents’, ‘Trustworthy and Sustainable AI’ and ‘Embodied Cooperative Systems’.

A kick-off workshop at the end of June brought together all the project partners from research and industry at the CITEC research center, who will spend the next three years investigating how a robot can help in the kitchen. As part of the technology network it's OWL, the project is being funded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia with 1.04 million euros. Of this amount, 276,000 euros each will go to three subprojects at Bielefeld University in the areas of intelligent systems, neuroinformatics and digital linguistics.

Read more (in German). 

Dr. Andrew Melnik and Florian Leopold, neuroinformatics researchers at the Faculty of Technology, participated in the Minecraft-based competition for AI agents (MineRL BASALT). The competition took place at the NeurIPS 2022 international conference in New Orleans in December. The winners were announced in March. Together with their colleagues from the University of Eastern Finland, Melnik and Leopold, as part of the "UniTeam", were delighted to receive a prize of USD 4,000 for second place in the competition. They were also awarded a research prize of USD 2,000.

Read more on https://blogs.uni-bielefeld.de/blog/techfak/entry/bielefelder_neuroinformatiker_gewinnen_zweiten_preis (in German)