CITEC

CITEC lab demo at the GENIALE 2025

2025-08-18T11:42:09+02:00

CITEC will open its doors for the GENIALE 2025 event under the title "KI und wir" (AI and us). The programme is now online available, and registration is open under: registration link.

CITEC releases an internal newsletter, the CITEC UPDATE.

2024-04-18T22:50:20+02:00

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.

CITEC Lecture Series was startet

2024-04-08T00:00:00+02:00

In the CITEC Lecture Series, local and invited speakers highlight different topics of Cognitive Interaction Technology from an interdisciplinary perspective.

CITEC renews its profile and organizational structure

2023-07-19T11:02:14+02:00

Making the interaction with A.I. and future intelligent systems truly human-compatible – this is and always has been the mission of the Center for Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC).

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’.

Philipp Cimiano puts this mission in a nutshell: „The future cognitive and AI systems that we envision will be trustworthy and reliable partners. Beyond being limited to perform narrow tasks in pre-defined environments, they will be able to adapt to changing environments, user contexts and humans needs. For this we need to equip them with the ability to understand and recognize human needs, requirements of a situation and translate this understanding into corresponding actions. Developing the foundations for this vision is our mission.”

This strategical reorientation is also made visible in the renewed website at cit-ec.de. CITEC has transformed the application-oriented part of its research agenda into Innovation Labs that represent different application fields. Therefore, CoR-Lab – which has been an own 16-year-old success story in the cooperation between industry and academics – joins forces with CITEC in a first Innovation Lab on human-centered automation for sustainable workplaces. As a second Innovation Lab, the COSY@Home-Lab was founded, incorporating long-standing activities in home assistance systems and home robotics. Philipp Cimiano already sees further application fields for cognitive interaction technology: “Our innovation labs will enable us to translate our fundamental research results into areas where they can unfold impact at industrial and societal level. A key application field for CITEC will be the development of assistive systems in the medical field, supporting both patients as well as medical and care personnel.” Thus, CITEC proceeds to new horizons and new frontiers in research as well as application fields.

CITEC was established in 2007 as part of the Excellence Initiative funded by the Federal and State Governments and, since 2020, it has been continued as a central academic institute of Bielefeld University. For more than a decade, CITEC has been an international hallmark of research, exploring the underlying technical and biological foundations of how agents cognitively interact with their environment and with other agents. From the very beginning, this has been an interdisciplinary endeavor, yielding many-faceted findings, such as understanding the control of eye movements even in blind performances in tasks like speed stacking, or developing physical training methods that consider the memory structure of individual trainees. Further research topics include the investigation of the adaptive control mechanisms of walking stick insects, the impacts of gender on human attribution to humanoid robot heads or understanding tactile grasping strategies of human and robotic hands, to name a few.

It is only through the close cooperation of computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, biology, and mathematics that such a variety of results in such different application fields has been possible. Helge Ritter as the former speaker and coordinator of the Cluster of Excellence, together with Britta Wrede as a former co-speaker, have been warrantors of this successful interdisciplinary approach for many years. Now, there are new interdisciplinary challenges ahead.

Joint Research Centre Explores Key Issue for the Future Co-constructive Artificial Intelligence

2023-07-10T00:00:00+02:00

At the CoAI JRC, one of the things cutting-edge researchers from the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer interaction, medical assistance, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy are working on is developing the foundations for robots with completely new capabilities. The AI systems developed here have the cognitive ability to understand how and why they do things. They recognise their own gaps in knowledge themselves. However, the AI systems also have an interactive capability to subsequently acquire new skills when interacting with humans. To this end, the researchers are exploring a new conceptual framework for intelligent action: the concept of what is known as co-construction refers to cognitive and interactive mechanisms that help humans and machines to master tasks together. This unites the expertise on co-constructive AI from no less than three research locations in one hub.

An integral part of the research at the CoAI JRC is what is known as the Virtual Research & Training Building (ViB)—a digital laboratory that will be accessible to the international scientific community in the spirit of open, transparent, and participatory research. Robots, environments, and software can be used here as if the researchers were actually present in the laboratory. This makes research data and results available to a broad public, for university teaching, and for further research.

For the universities of Bielefeld, Bremen, and Paderborn, the cross-location centre means increased visibility for their respective and joint research and education activities on artificial intelligence. The university executive boards welcome and support this consolidation of competences. This cooperation is a strategic and sustainable contribution to building the profile of the three cooperation partners. They thank the participating researchers for their commitment.

Professor Dr Michael Beetz, head of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IAI) at the University of Bremen, describes the special nature of the AI research conducted at the CoAI JRC: ‘The most flexible, powerful, and reliable learning systems are not ChatGPT or any of the other machine learning systems that are currently attracting so much attention. In fact, it is us humans: through interaction with others, we learn from birth how the world around us works and how we can operate successfully in it. Co-constructive AI takes these skills as inspiration to explore AI systems that are not only able to perform tasks but also help others. In order to do this, these co-constructive AI systems need to understand what their human partners want and are capable of in order to specifically augment their skills.’ At the Bremen location, the diverse and internationally excellent exploratory research on intelligence and cognition in autonomous agents and agent teams in the high-profile area Minds, Media, Machines forms an excellent starting point for achieving the specified research goals of the CoAI JRC in cooperation with the universities of Bielefeld and Paderborn.

Professor Dr Philipp Cimiano, head of the Semantic Computing Group and coordinator of the Center for Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) at Bielefeld University, sees enormous potential here: ‘With the new CoAI JRC centre, we are creating an excellent and unique framework for breaking ground in AI research, which is only possible through interdisciplinary collaboration. CoAI will build on previous research at the Cognitive Interaction Technology Center (CITEC) and explore a new AI paradigm. Unlike current language models such as ChatGPT, this paradigm will allow systems to understand the consequences of their suggestions and give an idea of what it means to act in concert with a human. Without this capability, we can’t create AI systems in the long term that can work with us reliably and that we can trust.’

Professor Dr Katharina Rohlfing, head of the Psycholinguistics research group and the ‘SprachSpielLabor’ at Paderborn University explains: ‘The joint centre allows us to create synergies between the partner universities and to address the underlying mechanisms of co-construction. This way, we achieve the best possible concentration and networking of our existing and future research activities.’ In Paderborn, the focus is on research into intelligent socio-technical systems and the role of co-construction in explanatory processes. Researchers at the universities of Paderborn and Bielefeld have also been investigating this concept since 2021 as part of the German Research Foundation’s Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio 318 ‘Constructing Explainability’, which is dedicated to the topic of ‘Explainability of Artificial Intelligence (AI)’ and whose spokesperson is Rohlfing.

Further information is available online at: https://coai-jrc.de/

Kick-off for AI research project SAIL

2023-05-10T18:00:00+02:00

Artificial intelligence (AI) is omnipresent in our society. A kick-off event at the University of Paderborn's Future Mile 2 in March marked the official start of the SAIL research network, in which scientists are developing the foundations for the sustainable design of AI components. "We are proud to be part of such a large and promising project. SAIL is a good example of the successful cooperation at Campus OWL. It confirms the outstanding research we are doing in the field of artificial intelligence," said Prof. Dr. Johannes Blömer, Vice-President for Research and Academic Promotion at the University of Paderborn.

Around 90 scientists are involved in the four-year collaborative project, which is being funded by the North Rhine-Westphalian government with up to 14.8 million euros. They are investigating how AI systems can work in a sustainable, transparent, safe and resource-saving manner over a long product life cycle. The interdisciplinary network includes the Paderborn University, the Bielefeld University, the Bielefeld University of Applied Science and Arts (HSBI) and the Ostwestfalen-Lippe University of Applied Sciences (TH OWL). SAIL stands for "SustAInable Life-cycle of Intelligent Socio-Technical Systems".

New AI Fellowship goes to computer scientist Barbara Hammer

2023-04-06T00:00:00+02:00

Computer scientist Professor Dr Barbara Hammer from Bielefeld University has been awarded the first fellowship of the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, which is endowed with up to 600,000 EUR. Together with the federal government, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia has been permanently funding the institute as an international research centre since July 2022. Barbara Hammer heads the North Rhine-Westphalian Graduate School Data-NInJA. As part of the fellowship, she will focus on research into trustworthy artificial intelligence for spatial data (TrustAI) to meet the challenges of climate change and drinking water supply. Another fellowship goes to Professor Dr Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo from the Paderborn University.

Read more on https://bit.ly/3MueSW6 (in German)

Bielefeld neuroinformatics researchers take second place in Minecraft-based AI agent competition

2023-03-16T00:00:00+01:00

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.

When Alexa joins the family

2023-02-15T00:00:00+01:00

Siri, Alexa and Co. are popular. Families in particular are using AI-based voice assistants to help organise their busy lives. Children easily learn to use them. As part of the IMPACT project, a research consortium from the universities Bielefeld, Kassel, Duisburg-Essen (UDE) and the Evangelical University of Nuremberg, led by social psychologist Professor Dr Nicole Krämer, investigated the impact of these systems on our communication behaviour and relationships. The project was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation with 1.5 million EUR over four years. On March 6 and 7, the researchers will present their findings at a final conference in Berlin.

Read more on https://bit.ly/3Z8uOkd (in German)

How robotics and AI are transforming healthcare

2023-02-14T00:00:00+01:00

Assistant systems in nursing, artificial intelligence (AI) to support doctors and home diagnostic apps: The use of robotics and AI in healthcare is diverse. Three project leaders from the Transregional Research Centre "Constructing Explanability" (TRR 318) present what is behind such systems, how they are used and what users think about them. In this Collaborative Research Centre at the Universities Paderborn and Bielefeld, an interdisciplinary team is working on the principles, mechanisms and social practices of explanation. The findings will be taken into account in the design of AI systems and will help to make AI more understandable. Interested parties can attend the three lectures online as listeners: Prof. Dr. Kisten Thommes about assistance systems in care on Feb. 22, Prof. Dr.- Philipp Cimiano about intelligent systems that support doctors in their diagnoses on Apr. 26, Prof. Dr. Britta Wrede about an AI-based App on self-diagnosis on June 14.

New subproject launched in TTR 318 "Constructing Explanability" on social signals of understanding

2023-01-25T00:00:00+01:00

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/