Events & Talks

Physical Intelligence Talk Ye Zhao 19-12-2019 Robust Planning and Decision -- Towards Safe Robot Tasks and Motions in Complex Environments The demand for safe, robust, and intelligent robotic systems is growing rapidly, given their potential to make our societies more productive and increase our welfare. To achieve this, robots are increasingly expected to operate in human-populated environments, maneuver in remote and cluttered environments, maintain and repair facilities, take care of our health, and streamline manufacturing and assembly lines. However, computational issues limit the ability of robots to plan complex motions in constrained and contact-rich environments, interact with humans safely, and exploit dynamics to gr... Metin Sitti

Dynamic Locomotion Talk Fernanda Bribiesca 18-12-2019 Fernanda Bribiesca: Biomechanics and functional morphology of the avian wing Fernanda Bribiesca-Contreras' doctoral research investigates the form and function relationship of the wing muscles and its implication with aerial and underwater flight. Alexander Badri-Spröwitz

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Dr. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker 13-12-2019 Haptic Intelligence (colloquium organized by the MPI for Biological Cybernetics) Our scientific understanding of haptic interaction is still evolving, both because what you feel greatly depends on how you move, and because engineered sensors, actuators, and algorithms typically struggle to match human capabilities. Consequently, few computer and machine interfaces provide the human operator with high-fidelity touch feedback or carefully analyze the physical signals generated during haptic interactions, limiting their usability. The crucial role of the sense of touch is also deeply appreciated by researchers working to create autonomous robots that can competently manipu...

Talk Peter Dayan 11-12-2019 Replay and Preplay in Human Planning Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience (BCCN )

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Seungmoon Choi, Ph.D. 06-12-2019 Automatic Authoring of Haptic Content Providing rich and immersive physical experiences to users has become an essential component in many computer-interactive applications, where haptics plays a central role. However, as with other sensory modalities, modeling and rendering good haptic experiences with plausible physicality is a very demanding task in terms of the cost associated with modeling and authoring, not to mention the cost for development. No general and widely-used solutions exist yet for that; most designers and developers rely on their in-house programs, or even worse, manual coding. This talk will introduce the re... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Perceiving Systems Talk Sebastian Starke 28-11-2019 Neural State Machine for Character-Scene Interactions In this talk, I will present about the most recent advances in data-driven character animation and control using neural networks. Creating key-framed animations by hand is typically very time-consuming and requires a lot of artistic expertise and training. Recent work applying deep learning for character animation was firstly able to compete or even outperform the quality that could be achieved by professional animators for biped locomotion, and thus caused a lot excitement in both academia and industry. Shortly after, following research also demonstrated its applicability to quadruped l... Joachim Tesch Ahmed Osman

Talk Prof. Maloney, Laurence T 28-11-2019 Probability distortion serves to maximize mutual information between objective probabilities and their internal representation

Perceiving Systems Talk Simone Behrens 21-11-2019 Body models for research on eating behavior, physical activity and body representation The body is one of the most relevant aspects of our self, and we shape it through our eating behavior and physical acitivity. As a psychologist and neuroscientist, I seek to disentangle mutual interactions between how we represent our own body, what we eat and how much we exercise. In the talk, I will give a scoping overview of this approach and present the studies I am conducting as a guest scientist at PS. Ahmed Osman

Physical Intelligence Talk Majid Taghavi 08-11-2019 Electromechanical transducers for energy harvesting, sensing, and actuation In this talk, Majid Taghavi will briefly discuss the demand for high-performance electromechanical transducers, the current challenges, and approaches he has been pursuing to tackle them. He will discuss multiple electromechanical concepts and devices that he has delivered for low-power energy harvesting, self-powered sensors, and artificial muscle technologies. Majid Taghavi will look into piezoelectric, triboelectric, electrostatic, dielectrophoretic, and androphilic phenomena, and will show his observations and innovations in coupling physical phenomena and developing smart materials and... Metin Sitti

Physical Intelligence Talk Eric R. Dufresne 04-11-2019 Liquid-elastomer composites: from basic physics to functional materials Prof. Eric Dufresne will describe some experiments on some simple composites of elastomers and droplets. First, we will consider their composite mechanical properties. He will show how simple liquid droplets can counterintuitively stiffen the material, and how magnetorheological fluid droplets can provide elastomers with magnetically switchable shape memory. Second, we consider the nucleation, growth, and ripening of droplets within an elastomer. Here, a variety of interesting phenomena emerge: size-tunable monodisperse droplets, shape-tunable droplets, and ripening of droplets along st... Metin Sitti

Talk Dr. Rao , Rajnish 28-10-2019 Neuronal Responses to Conspecifics in the Ventral Hippocampus

Talk Prof. Klaus Scheffler 28-10-2019 Potential of low field MRI

Perceiving Systems Talk Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf 23-10-2019 Computational Ecology and AI for Conservation Computation has fundamentally changed the way we study nature. New data collection technology, such as GPS, high definition cameras, UAVs, genotyping, and crowdsourcing, are generating data about wild populations that are orders of magnitude richer than any previously collected. Unfortunately, in this domain as in many others, our ability to analyze data lags substantially behind our ability to collect it. In this talk I will show how computational approaches can be part of every stage of the scientific process of understanding animal sociality, from intelligent data collection (crowdsourci... Aamir Ahmad

Talk Peter Dayan 20-10-2019 Theoretical Neuroscience: Decision Making and its Discontents Society for Neuroscience (SFN) 2019

Talk Peter Dayan 19-10-2019 Anticipation, imagination and information seeking via mid-brain, hippocampal, and prefrontal interactions Society for Neuroscience (SFN) 2019

Talk Prof. Zhaoping Li 19-10-2019 - 23-10-2019 The central-peripheral dichotomy in the top-down Feedback in visual recognition. 49th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience

Event 14-10-2019 - 15-10-2019 WASP Intelligent Systems Colloquium (WISC) This two-day event is designed to bring together members of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) with a large group of faculty and PhD students from Sweden's Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP). Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Sara Sorce

Physical Intelligence Talk Prof. Pietro Valdastri and Prof. Russel Harris 09-10-2019 Lifesaving Capsule Robots and New Opportunites: Manufacturing for Robotics <strong>Prof. Pietro Valdastri's </strong>talk will focus on Medical Capsule Robots. Capsule robots are cm-size devices that leverage extreme miniaturization to access and operate in environments that are out of reach for larger robots. In medicine, capsule robots can be designed to be swallowed like a pill and to diagnose and treat mortal diseases, such as cancer. The talk will move from capsule robots for the inspection of the digestive tract toward a new generation of surgical robots and devices, having a relevant reduction in size, invasiveness, and cost as the main drivers for innovati...

Talk Prof. Thier, Peter 30-09-2019 Cerebellum-based learning and its role in coping with fatigue

Perceiving Systems Talk Fabio Ferreira 27-09-2019 Learning Visual Dynamics Models of Rigid Objects Using Relational Inductive Biases Endowing robots with human-like physical reasoning abilities remains challenging. We argue that existing methods often disregard spatio-temporal relations and by using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that incorporate a relational inductive bias, we can shift the learning process towards exploiting relations. In this work, we learn action-conditional forward dynamics models of a simulated manipulation task from visual observations involving cluttered and irregularly shaped objects. We investigate two GNN approaches and empirically assess their capability to generalize to scenarios with novel an... Siyu Tang

Perceiving Systems Talk Eldar Insafutdinov 26-09-2019 Inferring the models of rigid and articulated objects from images: from 2D keypoints to 3D shape and appearance In the first part of the talk, I am going to present our work on human pose estimation in the Wild, capturing unconstrained images and videos containing an a priori unknown number of people, often occluded and exhibiting a wide range of articulations and appearances. Unlike conventional top-down approaches that first detect humans with the off-the-shelf object detector and then estimate poses independently per bounding box, our formulation performs joint detection and pose estimation. In the first stage we indiscriminately localise body parts of every person in the image with the state-of-t... David Hoffmann Siyu Tang

Physical Intelligence Talk Mirko Kovac 26-09-2019 Soft Aerial Robotics for Infrastructure Manufacturing Future cities and infrastructure systems will evolve into complex conglomerates where autonomous aerial, aquatic and ground-based robots will coexist with people and cooperate in symbiosis. To create this human-robot ecosystem, robots will need to respond more flexibly, robustly and efficiently than they do today. They will need to be designed with the ability to move across terrain boundaries and physically interact with infrastructure elements to perform sensing and intervention tasks. Taking inspiration from nature, aerial robotic systems can integrate multi-functional morphology, new ma... Metin Sitti

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Jean-Louis Thonnard 25-09-2019 From Fingertip Skin Mechanics to Dexterous Object Manipulation Fingertip skin friction plays a critical role during object manipulation. We will describe a simple and reliable method to estimate the fingertip static coefficient of friction (CF) continuously and quickly during object manipulation, and we will describe a global expression of the CF as a function of the normal force and fingertip moisture. Then we will show how skin hydration modifies the skin deformation dynamics during grip-like contacts. Certain motor behaviours observed during object manipulation could be explained by the effects of skin hydration. Then the biomechanics of the partial... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker David Gueorguiev

Physical Intelligence Talk Peter Blümler 25-09-2019 Mag-Guider: permanent magnet systems to steer and image superparamagnetic A new concept of using permanent magnet systems for guiding superparamagnetic nano-particles (SPP) on arbitrary trajectories over a large volume is presented. The same instrument can also be used for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using the inherent contrast of the SPP [1]. The basic idea is to use one magnet system, which provides a strong, homogeneous, dipolar magnetic field to magnetize and orient the particles, and a second constantly graded, quadrupolar field, superimposed on the first, to generate a force on the oriented particles. As a result, particles are guided with constant f... Metin Sitti

Talk Prof. Zrenner, Eberhard 23-09-2019 Restitution of Vision in Blinding Retinal Diseases: Gene Replacement Therapy and Retinal Prosthesis

Intelligent Control Systems Talk Dr. Michael Muehlebach 19-09-2019 A Dynamical Systems Perspective on Optimization with Momentum My talk will be divided into two parts. In the first part, I will analyze Nesterov's accelerated gradient method from a dynamical systems point of view. More precisely, I will derive the accelerated gradient method by discretizing an ordinary differential equation with a semi-implicit Euler integration scheme. I will analyze both the ordinary differential equation and the discretization for obtaining insights into the phenomenon of acceleration. In particular, geometric properties of the dynamics, such as asymptotic stability, time-reversibility, and phase-space volume contraction are shown... Sebastian Trimpe

Perceiving Systems Talk Taras Kucherenko 19-09-2019 How to make your agent gesture in a natural way? Conversational agents in the form of virtual agents or social robots are rapidly becoming wide-spread. Humans use non-verbal behaviors to signal their intent, emotions and attitudes in human-human interactions. Conversational agents therefore need this ability as well in order to make an interaction pleasant and efficient. An important part of non-verbal communication is gesticulation: gestures communicate a large share of non-verbal content. Previous systems for gesture production were typically rule-based and could not represent the range of human gestures. Recently the gesture generation... Mohamed Hassan Soubhik Sanyal

Dynamic Locomotion Event 17-09-2019 - 18-09-2019 Workshop organized at Bernstein conference 2019, Berlin On September 17-18, Charlotte and Alexander are organising the workshop: 'Integrating neuroscience and biomechanics: the neuromechanics of motor coordination in humans and other animals'. This is a satellite workshop prior to the Bernstein conference 2019 in Berlin. Join us these two days, for an exciting line of speakers (see link 'more information'). Charlotte Le Mouel Alexander Badri-Spröwitz

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Ernest (Ted) Gomez, MD, MTR 11-09-2019 Haptic Intelligence in Surgical Learning - Lessons from Laparoscopy and Robotics Surgery is a demanding activity that places a human life in the hands of others. However, innovations in minimally invasive surgery have physically separated surgeons' hands from their patients, creating the need for surgeons and their tools to develop both natural and artificial haptic intelligence. This lecture examines the essential role of haptic intelligence in skill development for laparoscopic and robotic surgery. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Intelligent Control Systems Talk Prof. Martina Maggio 10-09-2019 Feedback-Control for Self-Adaptive Predictable Computing Cloud computing gives the illusion of infinite computational capacity and allows for on-demand resource provisioning. As a result, over the last few years, the cloud computing model has experienced widespread industrial adoption and companies like Netflix offloaded their entire infrastructure to the cloud. However, with even the largest datacenter being of a finite size, cloud infrastructures have experienced overload due to overbooking or transient failures. In essence, this is an excellent opportunity for the design of control solutions, that tackle the problem of mitigating overload peak... Sebastian Trimpe

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Zhaoping Li 03-09-2019 A New Framework to Understanding Biological Vision Visual attention selects a tiny amount of information that can be deeply processed by the brain, and gaze shifts bring the selected visual object to fovea, the center of the visual field, for better visual decoding or recognition of the selected objects. Therefore, central and peripheral vision should differ qualitatively in visual decoding, rather than just quantitatively in visual acuity. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Perceiving Systems Talk Björn Browatzki 22-08-2019 Robust Discrimination and Generation of Faces using Compact, Disentangled Embeddings Current solutions to discriminative and generative tasks in computer vision exist separately and often lack interpretability and explainability. Using faces as our application domain, here we present an architecture that is based around two core ideas that address these issues: first, our framework learns an unsupervised, low-dimensional embedding of faces using an adversarial autoencoder that is able to synthesize high-quality face images. Second, a supervised disentanglement splits the low-dimensional embedding vector into four sub-vectors, each of which contains separated information abo... Timo Bolkart

Talk Dr. Tang, Siyu 21-08-2019 Learning to See People in Complex Scenes: Algorithms, Results and Open Challenges

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Gunhyuk Park 09-08-2019 Illusive and Realistic Vibrotactile Feedback: 2D Phantom Sensation and Vibrotactile Dimensional Reduction Many hapticians have designed and implemented haptic effects to various user interactions. For several decades, hapticians have proved that the haptic feedback can improve multiple facets of user experience including task performance, analyzing and utilizing user perception, and substituting other sensory modalities. Among them, this talk introduces two representative rendering methods to provide vibrotactile effects to users: 2D phantom sensation that makes a user perceive illusive tactile perception by using multiple real vibrotactile actuators and vibrotactile dimensional reduction that ... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Talk Dr. Kelber, Almut 31-07-2019 Bird colour vision in context

Perceiving Systems Talk Yoshihiro Kanamori 30-07-2019 Relighting Humans: Occlusion-Aware Inverse Rendering for Full-Body Human Images Relighting of human images has various applications in image synthesis. For relighting, we must infer albedo, shape, and illumination from a human portrait. Previous techniques rely on human faces for this inference, based on spherical harmonics (SH) lighting. However, because they often ignore light occlusion, inferred shapes are biased and relit images are unnaturally bright particularly at hollowed regions such as armpits, crotches, or garment wrinkles. This paper introduces the first attempt to infer light occlusion in the SH formulation directly. Based on supervised learning using conv... Senya Polikovsky Jinlong Yang

Perceiving Systems Talk Chengde Wan 23-07-2019 Self-supervised 3D hand pose estimation Deep learning has significantly advanced state-of-the-art for 3D hand pose estimation, of which accuracy can be improved with increased amounts of labelled data. However, acquiring 3D hand pose labels can be extremely difficult. In this talk, I will present our recent two works on leveraging self-supervised learning techniques for hand pose estimation from depth map. In both works, we incorporate differentiable renderer to the network and formulate training loss as model fitting error to update network parameters. In first part of the talk, I will present our earlier work which approximates... Dimitris Tzionas

Physical Intelligence Talk Richard T Bryan 22-07-2019 - 22-04-2019 An introduction to bladder cancer & challenges for translational research

IS Colloquium Christoph Keplinger 17-07-2019 Robotic materials for the intelligent systems of the future: From soft robotics to energy capture Robots today rely on rigid components and electric motors based on metal and magnets, making them heavy, unsafe near humans, expensive and ill-suited for unpredictable environments. Nature, in contrast, makes extensive use of soft materials and has produced organisms that drastically outperform robots in terms of agility, dexterity, and adaptability. The Keplinger Lab aims to fundamentally challenge current limitations of robotic hardware, using an interdisciplinary approach that synergizes concepts from soft matter physics and chemistry with advanced engineering technologies to introduce r...

Physical Intelligence Talk Joseph B. Tracy 16-07-2019 Magnetically and Optically Active Nanoparticles and Polymer Composites Magnetic fields and light can be used to assemble, manipulate, and heat nanoparticles (NPs) and to remotely actuate polymer composites. Simple soft robots will be presented, where incorporation of magnetic and plasmonic NPs makes them responsive to magnetic fields and light. Application of magnetic fields to dispersions of magnetic NPs drives their assembly into chains. Dipolar coupling within the chains is a source of magnetic anisotropy, and chains of magnetic NPs embedded in a polymer matrix can be used to program the response of soft robots, while still using simple architectures. Wavel... Metin Sitti

Perceiving Systems Talk Shunsuke Saito 10-07-2019 Robust and High-Fidelity Human Digitization from Minimal Inputs Realistic digital avatars are increasingly important in digital media with potential to revolutionize 3D face-to-face communication and social interactions through compelling digital embodiment of ourselves. My goal is to efficiently create high-fidelity 3D avatars from a single image input, captured in an unconstrained environment. These avatars must be close in quality to those created by professional capture systems, yet require minimal computation and no special expertise from the user. These requirements pose several significant technical challenges. A single photograph provides only p... Timo Bolkart

Intelligent Control Systems Talk Prof. Dr.-Ing. Marco Huber 09-07-2019 Cognitive Production Systems – AI in Production Fraunhofer IPA in Stuttgart is one of the largest institutes within the Fraunhofer Society with a strong focus on production technologies and automation. Research and technology transfer efforts on machine learning and artificial intelligence are concentrated at IPA’s Center for Cyber Cognitive Intelligence (CCI). This talk gives an introduction to CCI‘s mission and typical industrial applications being addressed. Furthermore, an overview of the research areas and a deep dive into selected topics are provided. Examples are 6D pose estimation for robotic bin-picking, explainable machine lear... Sebastian Trimpe

IS Colloquium Uri Shalit 08-07-2019 Uri Shalit - Causal Inference and Machine Learning: a Two-Way Street Where does causal thinking meet machine learning? We will discuss several such cases. We first show how we use learning theory to guide us in building algorithms for inferring individual-level causal effects, and how we apply these ideas to create deep-learning causal-effect inference methods. We then show how ideas from causal inference can help us in two important machine learning tasks: learning robust classifiers and interpreting deep image recognition system. If time permits, we’ll discuss a recent application of machine learning for learning individualized treatments for patients in a... Krikamol Muandet

Event 05-07-2019 2019 Intelligent Systems Summer Colloquium MPI-IS cordially invites you to attend for the 2019 Summer Colloquium Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Matthias Tröndle Ildikó Papp-Wiedmann Barbara Kettemann

Intelligent Control Systems Talk Florent Di Meglio 01-07-2019 Thermoacoustic instabilities: various approaches to estimation and control Reducing the size and emissions of gas turbine engines used in the aeronautics industry forces manufacturers to explore new operating conditions. An undesirable phenomenon called thermo-acoustic instabilities may occur, caused by the coupling between combustion dynamics and the acoustics of the combustion chamber. To help predict, detect and suppress it, we explore various approaches. We will discuss the design of observers for infinite-dimensional systems, Fourier-based reduced-order modeling as well as a Machine-Learning approach based on high-fidelity simulation data. Sebastian Trimpe Mona Buisson-Fenet

Autonomous Vision Event 30-06-2019 - 07-07-2019 3rd Computational Vision Summer School The 3rd Computational Vision Summer School offers a broad perspective on biological vision and computer vision with a thorough understanding of the theoretical and computational challenges involved. The school is unique in bringing together people from diverse disciplines who all share a computational view of vision. The faculty consists of renowned senior researchers in the field, teaching lectures and providing hands-on tutorials on topics ranging from early vision to image understanding. Michael Black Andreas Geiger Siyu Tang

Physical Intelligence Talk Prof. Shu Yang 28-06-2019 Programming Intelligence through Geometry, Topology, and Anisotropy Geometry is concerned with the properties of configurations of points, lines, and circles, while topology is concerned with space, dimension, and transformation. Geometry is also materials independent and scale invariant. By introducing holes and cuts in 2D sheets, we demonstrate dramatic shape change and super-conformability via expanding or collapsing of the hole arrays without deforming individual lattice units. When choosing the cuts and geometry correctly, we show folding into the third dimension, known as kirigami. The kirigami structures can be rendered pluripotent, that is changing ...

Software Workshop Talk Adriane Boyd 25-06-2019 Using Wikipedia Edits in Low Resource Grammatical Error Correction We develop a grammatical error correction system for German using a small gold corpus augmented with edits extracted from Wikipedia revision history. We extend the automatic error annotation tool ERRANT (Bryant et al., 2017) for German and use it to analyze both gold corrections and Wikipedia edits (Grundkiewicz and Junczys-Dowmunt, 2014) in order to select as additional training data Wikipedia edits containing grammatical corrections similar to those in the gold corpus. Using a neural machine translation approach (Chollampatt and Ng, 2018), we evaluate the contribution of Wikipedia edits a... Jean-Claude Passy

Talk Dr. Mallot, Hans-Peter 18-06-2019 The structure of cognitive space: from geometry to behavior

Talk Dr. Visscher, Kristina 17-06-2019 How do the connections of central and peripheral V1 relate to the functions of central and peripheral vision?

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