Faculty of Technology: News

Public Presentations for the W3 Professorship in Interactive Robotics

2026-06-26T10:21:27+02:00

The Faculty of Technology warmly invites all interested members of the university community to attend the public presentations as part of the appointment process for the W3 Professorship in Interactive Robotics. The public presentations will take place at the beginning of each candidate interview and offer an opportunity to learn about the candidates’ teaching approaches and current research. Each public session consists of:

Teaching presentation (in German): 15 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of discussion
Research presentation (in English): 30 minutes, followed by 15 minutes of discussion

Following the public presentations, the appointment committee will continue with a non-public interview session. We encourage faculty members, researchers, students, and anyone interested in interactive robotics to attend the public presentations and engage in the discussions.

The interviews are scheduled as follows:

Karinne Ramirez-Amaro: 29 June, 09:00–12:00, CITEC 1.204
Rudolf Lioutikov: 30 June, 09:00–12:00, CITEC 1.204
Rania Rayyes: 30 June, 13:00–16:00, CITEC 1.204
Julia Starke-Bohse: 30 June, 16:00–19:00, CITEC 1.204
Tanja Katharina Kaiser: 1 July, 16:00–19:00, CITEC 1.204
Markus Vorrath: 2 July, 09:00–12:00, CITEC 1.204
Nicolás Navarro-Guerrero: 6 July, 13:00–16:00, CITEC 1.204
Niels Dehio: 17 July, 09:00–12:00, CITEC 1.204

To provide further insight into the presentation topics, the following three abstracts are available:

Karinne Ramirez-Amaro

Transparent Robot Decision-Making through Interpretable and Explainable AI

Transparent decision-making enables humans to understand, interpret, and predict what robots do. Interpretable and explainable methods enhance transparency: interpretable methods clarify how a learned model reaches decisions, while explainable methods articulate why specific decisions were made. In this talk, I will first introduce our interpretable AI methods that generate compact, generalizable semantic models to infer human activities, enabling robots to gain a high-level understanding of human movement. Next, I will present our causal approach, which enables robots to anticipate and prevent both imminent and future failures, helping them understand why failures occur, learn from mistakes, and improve future performance. Finally, I will discuss how we combine these methods into a single framework that integrates symbolic planning with hierarchical reinforcement learning. This integration allows us to learn flexible, reusable robot policies for manipulation tasks, yielding coherent action sequences that are individually executable. Together, interpretable and explainable AI form the foundation for general-purpose robots capable of making complex decisions in dynamic and unpredictable environments, and for fostering the mutual understanding that effective human-robot collaboration requires.

Rudolf Lioutikov

Towards Interactive Behavior Foundation Models

The remarkable advances in generative AI have sparked a new wave of robotics research leveraging Diffusion Models and Vision-Language Models, with the ultimate goal of developing Behavior Foundation Models for robotic systems. However, current state-of-the-art approaches face significant limitations that hinder their use in interactive, real-world settings: these models are exceptionally large, resource-intensive, and slow to react, while requiring vast amounts of diverse, well-grounded data to learn spatial and robotic reasoning. Internationally, the push towards Behavior Foundation Models is dominated by ever larger models trained on ever larger datasets, a strategy that leaves the efficiency, reactivity, and grounding required for safe, close human-robot interaction comparatively unexplored. These gaps make it difficult to deploy foundation models that can ground their decisions in cluttered, dynamic scenes, react fluidly to people in real time, and remain transparent in how they behave. This talk presents our recent contributions reducing model size, data requirements, and training/inference costs of Score-Based Diffusion, Vision-Language-Action Models and Movement Primitive based Action Tokenizers, spanning asynchronous architectures for reactive, high-frequency control, scalable pipelines for reliable spatial grounding, and structured, explainable scene representations. Closing these gaps is not merely beneficial but essential for the next generation of robots that must work safely and responsively alongside people, and it gives Germany and Europe a timely opportunity to lead a crucial research direction still neglected by other international players racing to scale Behavior Foundation Models, presenting a path towards Interactive Behavior Foundation Models.

Tanja Katharina Kaiser

Intelligent Multi-Robot Collaboration

Artificial intelligence is enabling robots to become increasingly adaptive, autonomous, and capable of working effectively in teams. In multi-robot systems, AI-based approaches offer new opportunities to improve collaboration across a wide range of settings, from loosely coupled cooperation in shared environments to tightly integrated coordination among heterogeneous robot teams. In this talk, I will cover AI-based approaches to a spectrum of multi-robot collaboration settings, including centralized and decentralized control, homogeneous and heterogeneous teams, and systems with different levels of information sharing. I will discuss cases where robots communicate or share global state information, as well as more challenging scenarios in which each robot must act based only on local observations. The methods I will present are based on different learning methods or combine foundation models with algorithmic approaches, and are exemplified in scenarios relevant for various real-world applications, to enable flexible, scalable, and robust collaboration.

From Seminar Project to Scientific Publication

2026-06-17T12:06:32+02:00

What began as a pilot study as part of the compulsory seminar ‘Scientific Research Methods’ on the Master’s programme in Intelligent Interactive Systems has now led to a successful academic publication.

During the seminar, Master’s students developed an initial pilot study, carried it out and prepared the results for academic publication. The findings were initially submitted as a conference paper and published as a preprint. However, the students were not discouraged by an initial rejection. Instead, they used the feedback constructively, expanded the study to include a larger number of participants and comprehensively revised the article. The improved paper was subsequently submitted to the journal Frontiers in Psychology. After several rounds of peer review, the study was finally published – a remarkable achievement that impressively demonstrates scientific perseverance, teamwork and commitment (link to the publication).

We warmly congratulate Hakki Egemen Gülpinar and Anastasiia Skryzhadlovska on this publication and are delighted to see this outstanding example of how high-quality research papers can emerge from teaching modules. We wish them every success in their future research and careers, and look forward to many more exciting scientific achievements. The research was supervised through a collaboration between the Social Cognitive Systems and Cognitive Neuroscience research groups, supported by the Faculty of Technology.

Study Abroad Opportunity for TechFak Students!

2026-04-15T11:05:37+02:00

A semester abroad is a valuable academic and personal experience – and with the right financial support, it becomes much easier to realize. Through the Cross-Border Studies Programme of the Phoenix Contact Foundation, international study stays for students of the Faculty of Technology are specifically funded – both within and outside Europe. The Faculty and the International Office warmly welcome this funding opportunity and explicitly encourages students to consider spending a semester at one of our numerous partner universities. What does the programme offer? Funding for a semester abroad in the upcoming academic year (winter or summer semester)

Two scholarships awarded per calendar year
Can be combined with other funding programmes
Application period 📅 13 April – 15 May 2026

The call for applications is published once a year in March. Applications are only possible within this period. An international study experience enhances not only your academic profile, but also the intercultural skills, language proficiency, and global perspective – qualifications highly valued in both academia and industry.

Further information on the programme, eligibility requirements, and the application process can be found here: https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/international/go-out/stipendien/phoenix-contact/

IISY Symposium 2026: Highlights

2026-03-26T15:28:25+01:00

We look back on a truly successful and inspiring IISY Symposium that took place on March 25, 2026. Across two presentation sessions and one poster session, Master IISY students showcased the results of their research projects. A special highlight of the day was the final presentation of the Best Project Work award. After careful deliberation, the jury (Sven Wachsmuth, Benjamin Paaßen, and Thomas Herrmann)—selected Dana Meyer and Colin Watson as this year’s winners. Their project stood out for its quality, innovation, and excellent presentation, earning them a prize of €100. We warmly congratulate them on this well-deserved achievement. At the same time, we would like to emphasize that the symposium featured many outstanding projects. The high overall quality made the jury’s decision particularly challenging, reflecting the dedication and talent of all participants.

We would also like to extend our sincere thanks to Team TOBI for their impressive demo and for sharing their exciting experiences and insights from RoboCup. Their contribution added an extra layer of inspiration to the event. We hope that everyone who attended enjoyed the symposium as much as we did. Beyond showcasing excellent work, the event provided valuable insights and inspiration for future projects, research, and studies. Thank you once again to everyone who made this day possible—we look forward to the next IISY Symposium in 2027!

IISY Symposium 2026 takes place at CITEC on March 25th

2026-03-24T09:40:26+01:00

We are happy to invite you to our annual IISY Symposium, which will take place on March 25 at CITEC. During the symposium, 19 student project groups will present their work across two presentation sessions and one poster session. We are also pleased to announce that Team TOBI from RoboCup Homecoming 2026 will present a live demo as part of the IISY Symposium.

Faculty of Technology with two sessions at BI.teach

2019-01-10T14:23:20+01:00

Faculty of Technology with two sessions at BI.teach

On the 26th of November BI.teach, the day of teaching took place at Bielefeld university. The Faculty of Technology contributed an internal session and took part in a workshop within the public part of BI.teach.

Prof. Dr. Anette Frank from Heidelberg University spoke about „Evaluation of teaching within systematic accreditation of study programs”. Especially the question of institutional consequences out of the evaluation results to improve teaching was discussed.

Dennis Hoffmann, Dorian Lehmenkühler und Barbara Fassnacht from the Student Representative Committee had a talk within the workshop “Evaluation Practice at Bielefeld University” about the evaluation of lectures by questionnaires and the online-evaluation of tutors in the Faculty of Technology.

2018-03-19 | 12th CeBiTec Symposium: Big Data in Medicine and Biotechnology

2018-02-26T16:02:55+01:00

The Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec) of Bielefeld University, the Bielefeld Center for Data Science (BiCDaS) as well as the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI) cordially invite you to attend the 12^th CeBiTec Symposium entitled Big Data in Medicine and Biotechnology. More...