© 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.  

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’.

[Weiterlesen]

Future artificial intelligence (AI) systems, and AI-based robots in particular, must be able to understand and gauge not only their own actions, but also those of others. From now on, researchers from the universities of Bielefeld, Bremen, and Paderborn are permanently consolidating their research in this area at a cross-location centre. At the Joint Research Center on Cooperative and Cognition-enabled AI (CoAI JRC), the expertise of the three strong research partners will make new ways of interaction and learning possible between humans and machines. Unprecedented in Germany, the centre for co-constructive AI is also intended to contribute to the training of the next generation of research and technology leaders who will represent a new perspective on AI in science and society. With this in mind, the CoAI JRC is planning a joint curriculum to inspire and empower young researchers in this field.[Weiterlesen]

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). 

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.[Weiterlesen]

Professor Joanna Bryson from the Hertie School in Berlin talks at CITEC about how transparent AI systems are and how the companies that produce them are controlled.[Weiterlesen]

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.[Weiterlesen]

Last week in March, our RoboCup@Home team ToBI (Team of Bielefeld) visited the University of Bremen for a preparation event for the RoboCup WorldCup 2023 in Bordeaux.[Weiterlesen]

Professor Dr Enrico Motta of the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) at the Open University in the UK talks at CITEC about visual intelligence of robots.[Weiterlesen]

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)

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.[Weiterlesen]

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.[Weiterlesen]

When humans and robots work together on cooperative tasks, each partner needs appropriate space to act. The new DFG project SEMIAC explores perceptual and behavioral strategies of a mobile robot which considers implicit non-verbal signals of a human collaborator for its own navigation and acting. SEMIAC stands for Semantic Environmental Models for Implicit Action Coordination with humans. The joint DFG project with University of Magdeburg started in December 2022 and is funded for three years. While Madgeburg focusses on the perception and interpretation of interaction-relevant features (head and body poses, facial expressions, scene context), in Bielefeld this is combined with adaptive robot behaviors considering human intentions. The overall goal of the project is to reduce interruptions and interaction breakdowns in the close collaboration between humans and robots.  

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/

CITEC's RoboCup@Home team ToBI (Team of Bielefeld) - consisting of 12 Bachelor and Master students of the Faculty of Technology - prepares for the RoboCup 2023 in Bordeaux, France.[Weiterlesen]