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.

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’.

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)

When people explain something to each other, they often observe the other person's signals of incomprehension in order to adapt their explanation accordingly. In a new subproject of the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre "Constructing Explanability" (TRR 318), scientists want to make this process possible for machines as well. But the approach has its pitfalls when it comes to the interaction between man and machine.

Read more in an interview of Kristina Nienhaus with the project leader, junior professor Dr Hanna Drimalla at CITEC and Faculty of Technology at Bielefeld University:  https://aktuell.uni-bielefeld.de/2023/01/25/erklaeren-ist-immer-eine-zweiseitige-sache/