Events & Talks

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?

Talk Günther, Mathias 12-06-2019 The mesoscale effect of engagement onto the cortical activity during a 2-AFC tactile detection Task

Perceiving Systems Talk Dr Antonia Tzemanaki 05-06-2019 Anthropomorphism in Surgical Robotics and Wearable Technologies Over the past century, abdominal surgery has seen a rapid transition from open procedures to less invasive methods such as laparoscopy and robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (R-A MIS), as they involve reduced blood loss, postoperative morbidity and length of hospital stay. Furthermore, R-A MIS has offered refined accuracy and more ergonomic instruments for surgeons, further minimising trauma to the patient. However, training surgeons in MIS procedures is becoming increasingly long and arduous, while commercially available robotic systems adopt a design similar to conventional laparos... Dimitris Tzionas

Haptic Intelligence Talk Yasemin Vardar 04-06-2019 Career-Building Strategies for Postdocs and Ph.D. Students Sign-Up! is a career-building program for female post-docs in the Max Planck Society. This program aims to prepare post-doctoral researchers for their future scientific careers by several interactive training sessions and networking activities. As a selected member of this program, I will summarize the workshops that I participated in this year. My talk will cover topics about success factors in scientific careers, career planning, professional communication and leadership, self-presentation, and research funding. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Dr Antonia Tzemanaki 03-06-2019 Anthropomorphism in Surgical Robotics and Wearable Technologies Over the past century, abdominal surgery has seen a rapid transition from open procedures to less invasive methods such as laparoscopy and robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (R-A MIS), as they involve reduced blood loss, postoperative morbidity and length of hospital stay. Furthermore, R-A MIS has offered refined accuracy and more ergonomic instruments for surgeons, further minimising trauma to the patient. However, training surgeons in MIS procedures is becoming increasingly long and arduous, while commercially available robotic systems adopt a design similar to conventional laparos... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Talk Prof. Bach, Michael 27-05-2019 Imaging in our brain – Optical illusions neither “trick the eye” nor “fool the brain

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Caroline G. L. Cao, Ph.D. 23-05-2019 Human Factors Research in Minimally Invasive Surgery Health care is probably the last remaining unsafe critical system. A large proportion of reported medical errors occur in the hospital operating room (OR), a highly complex sociotechnical environment. As technology is being introduced into the OR faster than surgeons can learn to use them, surgical errors result from the unfamiliar instrumentation, increased motoric, perceptual and cognitive demands on the surgeons, as well as the lack of adequate training. Effective technology design for minimally invasive surgery requires an understanding of the system constraints of remote surgery, and t... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Talk Dr. Stednitz, Sarah 06-05-2019 The social brain of zebrafish

Perceiving Systems Talk Jinlong Yang 03-05-2019 Modeling shape space of clothed human using a learning approach In the past few years, significant progress has been made on shape modeling of human body, face, and hands. Yet clothing shape is currently not well presented. Modeling clothing using physics-based simulation can sometimes involve tedious manual work and heavy computation. Therefore, a data-driven learning approach has emerged in the community. In this talk, I will present a stream of work that targeted to learn the shape of clothed human from captured data. It involves 3D body estimation, clothing surface registration and clothing deformation modeling. I will conclude this talk by outlini... Timo Bolkart

Talk Dr. Urartu Şeker 02-05-2019 Biological Devices: Self-Actuated Protein Delivery Systems Programming cellular devices to deliver proteins or small molecules using synthetic genetic regulation can be employed in many areas such as biomedicine, living therapeutics, living materials and many others. A biological device composed of a cellular sensor coupled with a programmed protein delivery system can lead the formation of a synthetic system that can sense the environmental inputs, carry out calculations and create an output. Using this approach, we have built cellular devices those can sense environmental signals and creates an output in the form of protein secretion. In this tal...

Perceiving Systems Talk Marilyn Keller 26-04-2019 Using RGB-D cameras for scene streaming and navigation in virtual reality Since the release of the Kinect, RGB-D cameras have been used in several consumer devices, including smartphones. In this talk, I will present two challenging uses of this technology. With multiple RGB-D cameras, it is possible to reconstruct a 3D scene and visualize it from any point of view. In the first part of the talk, I will show how such a scene can be streamed and rendered as a point cloud in a compelling way and its appearance improved by the use of external cinema cameras. In the second part of the talk, I will present my work on how an RGB-D camera can be used for enabling real-w... Sergi Pujades

Modern Magnetic Systems Max Planck Lecture Victorino Franco 23-04-2019 Magnetocaloric Effect: From Energy Efficient Refrigeration to Fundamental Studies of Phase Transitions Joachim Gräfe Michael Hirscher

Empirical Inference Talk Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber 11-04-2019 Unsupervised Learning: Passiv and Active I’ll start with a concept of 1990 that has become popular: unsupervised learning without a teacher through two adversarial neural networks (NNs) that duel in a minimax game, where one NN minimizes the objective function maximized by the other. The first NN generates data through its output actions, the second NN predicts the data. The second NN minimizes its error, thus becoming a better predictor. But it is a zero sum game: the first NN tries to find actions that maximize the error of the second NN. The system exhibits what I called “artificial curiosity” because the first NN is motivated ... Bernhard Schölkopf

Talk Prof. Zhaoping Li 10-04-2019 A new path to understanding vision: theory and experiments Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research

Physical Intelligence Talk Jérôme Casas 04-04-2019 Vignettes of physical ecology of insects and insect based bio-inspiration Insect chemical ecology is a mature, long standing field, with its own journal. By contrast, insect physical ecology is much less studied and the worked scattered. Using work done in my group, I will highlight locomotion, both in granular materials like sand and at the water surface as well as sensing, in particular olfaction and flow sensing. The bio-inspired implementations in MEMS technologies will be the closing chapter. Metin Sitti

Event 28-03-2019 Girls‘ Day 2019 – Stuttgarter Max-Planck-Campus macht wieder mit Schülerinnen entdecken den spannenden Beruf der Wissenschaftlerin Barbara Kettemann

Talk Herke van Hoof 25-03-2019 Modularity and transfer in reinforcement learning Learning new control strategies for (possibly unknown) dynamical systems is a challenging task. Reinforcement learning algorithms typically require 'fresh' data regularly, but obtaining data safely and in sufficient quantities is a challenge on real systems. Thus, it is no surprise that most recent successes have been in domains where massive amounts of data can easily be generated in simulation (e.g., games such as Atari and Go). Georg Martius Mara Cascianelli

Empirical Inference IS Colloquium Benjamin Bloem-Reddy 25-03-2019 Probabilistic symmetry and invariant neural networks In an effort to improve the performance of deep neural networks in data-scarce, non-i.i.d., or unsupervised settings, much recent research has been devoted to encoding invariance under symmetry transformations into neural network architectures. We treat the neural network input and output as random variables, and consider group invariance from the perspective of probabilistic symmetry. Drawing on tools from probability and statistics, we establish a link between functional and probabilistic symmetry, and obtain functional representations of probability distributions that are invariant or eq... Isabel Valera

Talk Dr. Huang, Melody 24-03-2019 From tank to bedside: Larval zebrafish as models to study adaptive sensorimotor behaviors in the optokinetic system in both healthy and diseased conditions.

Physical Intelligence Talk Sangram Bagh 21-03-2019 Reprogramming Microbial Cells With An Engineering Language The molecular connectivity between genes and proteins inside a cell shows a good degree of resemblance with complex electrical circuits. This inspires the possibility of engineering a cell similar to an engineering device by plugging in genetic logic circuits. This approach, which is loosely defined as synthetic biology is an emerging field of bioengineering, where scientist use electrical and computer engineering principle to re-program cellular functions with a potential to solve next generation challenges in medicine, materials, energy, and space travel. In this talk, we discuss our effo... Metin Sitti

Talk Dr. Vinck, Martin 20-03-2019 Cell-type-specific burst-firing, stimulus-selectivity and synchronization in macaque V1

Intelligent Control Systems Talk Dr.-Ing. Thomas Seel 18-03-2019 Advances in inertial sensor fusion and learning control and how they enable biomimetic neuroprostheses Neurological disorders and injuries lead to a loss of sensorimotor function in the central nervous system, which controls the musculoskeletal system. Novel systems and control methods can be employed to create neuroprostheses that restore these functions to an unprecedented degree by two major advances: (1) Long standing limitations of inertial motion tracking are overcome by novel parameter estimation and sensor fusion methods. (2) A recent extension of classic learning control methods facilitates real-time pattern adaptation in artificial muscle recruitment. We review the role of these me... Sebastian Trimpe

Perceiving Systems Talk Nikos Athanasiou 13-03-2019 Sentiment Analysis and Cognitive,Cross-Topic Models for Natural Language Representations First, a short analysis of the key components of my participation in SemEval 2018, an emotion analysis contest from tweets. Namely, a transfer learning approach used for emotion classification and a context-aware attention mechanism. In my second paper, I explore how brain information can improve word representations. Neural activation models that have been proposed in the literature use a set of example words for which fMRI measurements are available in order to find a mapping between word semantics and localized neural activations. I use such models to predict neural activations on a full... Soubhik Sanyal

Perceiving Systems IS Colloquium Zhaoping Li 11-03-2019 A new path to understanding biological/human vision: theory and experiments Since Hubel and Wiesel's seminal findings in the primary visual cortex (V1) more than 50 years ago, progress in vision science has been very limited along previous frameworks and schools of thoughts on understanding vision. Have we been asking the right questions? I will show observations motivating the new path. First, a drastic information bottleneck forces the brain to process only a tiny fraction of the massive visual input information; this selection is called the attentional selection, how to select this tiny fraction is critical. Second, a large body of evidence has been accumu... Timo Bolkart Aamir Ahmad

Talk Dr. Fernandes, Miguel 03-03-2019 Neuronal circuitry for stimulus selection in the visual system

Talk Dr. Salvador Borrós Gómez 27-02-2019 Design of functional polymers for biomedical applications Functional polymers can be easily tailored for their interaction with living organismes. In our Group, we have worked during the last 15 years in the development of this kind of polymeric materials with different funcionalities, high biocompatibility and in different forms. In this talk, we will describe the synthesis of thermosensitive thin films that can be used to prevent biofilm formation in medical devices, the preparation of biodegradable polymers specially designed for vectors for gene transfection and a new familliy of zwitterionic polymers that are able to cross intestine mucouse ... Metin Sitti

Haptic Intelligence Talk Hojin Lee 25-02-2019 "Exploring” Haptics: Human-Machine Interactive Applications from Mid-Air Laser Haptics to Sensorimotor Skill Learning Haptic technologies in both kinesthetic and tactile aspects benefit a brand-new opportunity to recent human-machine interactive applications. In this talk, I, who believe in that one of the essential role of a researcher is pioneering new insights and knowledge, will present my previous research topics about haptic technologies and human-machine interactive applications in two branches: laser-based mid-air haptics and sensorimotor skill learning. For the former branch, I will introduce our approach named indirect laser radiation and its application. Indirect laser radiation utilizes a laser... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence Talk Ravali Gourishetti 25-02-2019 Virtual Reality Based Needle Insertion Simulation With Haptic Feedback: A Psychophysical Study Needle insertion is the most essential skill in medical care; training has to be imparted not only for physicians but also for nurses and paramedics. In most needle insertion procedures, haptic feedback from the needle is the main stimulus that novices are to be trained in. For better patient safety, the classical methods of training the haptic skills have to be replaced with simulators based on new robotic and graphics technologies. The main objective of this work is to develop analytical models of needle insertion (a special case of epidural anesthesia) including the biomechanical and psy... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence Talk Yongjae Yoo 14-02-2019 Perceptual and Affective Characteristics of Tactile Stimuli With the advent of technology, tactile stimuli are adopted widely in many human-computer interactions. However, their perceptual and emotional characteristics are not much studied yet. In this talk, to help in understanding these characteristics, I will introduce my perception and emotion studies, as well as my future research plan. For perceptual characteristics, I will introduce an estimation method for perceived intensity of superimposed vibrations, verbal expressions for vibrotactile stimuli, and adjectival magnitude functions. Then, I will present a vibrotactile authoring tool that ut... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Physical Intelligence Talk Ingmar H. Riedel-Kruse 14-02-2019 Synthetic Biology, Spatial Programming, and Human Interaction Design with Living Multi-Cell Systems I will share my vision that microbiological systems should be as programmable, interactive, accessible, constructible, and useful as our personal electronic devices. Natural multi-cellular organisms and symbiotic systems achieve complex tasks through division of labor among cells. Such systems transcend current electronics and robotics in many ways, e.g., they synthesize chemicals, generate active physical forms, and self-replicate. Harnessing these features promises significant impact for manufacturing (bioelectronics / smart materials /swarm robotics), health (tissue engineering), chemist...

Empirical Inference IS Colloquium Florian Marquardt 28-01-2019 Neural networks discovering quantum error correction strategies Machine learning with artificial neural networks is revolutionizing science. The most advanced challenges require discovering answers autonomously. In the domain of reinforcement learning, control strategies are improved according to a reward function. The power of neural-network-based reinforcement learning has been highlighted by spectacular recent successes such as playing Go, but its benefits for physics are yet to be demonstrated. Here, we show how a network-based "agent" can discover complete quantum-error-correction strategies, protecting a collection of qubits against noise. T... Matthias Bauer

Perceiving Systems Talk Yuliang Xiu 24-01-2019 Pose trajectory extraction and novel-view synthesis from visual content Multi-person articulated pose tracking is an important while challenging problem in human behavior understanding. In this talk, going along the road of top-down approaches, I will introduce a decent and efficient pose tracker based on pose flows. This approach can achieve real-time pose tracking without loss of accuracy. Besides, to better understand human activities in visual contents, clothes texture and geometric details also play indispensable roles. However, extrapolating them from a single image is much more difficult than rigid objects due to its large variations in pose, shape, and ... Siyu Tang

Talk Dr. Waiblinger, Christian 02-01-2019 Adaptive perception and behavior in a changing sensory environment.

Perceiving Systems IS Colloquium Peter Dayan 21-12-2018 Mind Games Much existing work in reinforcement learning involves environments that are either intentionally neutral, lacking a role for cooperation and competition, or intentionally simple, when agents need imagine nothing more than that they are playing versions of themselves. Richer game theoretic notions become important as these constraints are relaxed. For humans, this encompasses issues that concern utility, such as envy and guilt, and that concern inference, such as recursive modeling of other players, I will discuss studies treating a paradigmatic game of trust as an interactive partia...

Perceiving Systems Talk Yao Feng 19-12-2018 Deep learning on 3D face reconstruction, modelling and applications In this talk, I will present my understanding on 3D face reconstruction, modelling and applications from a deep learning perspective. In the first part of my talk, I will discuss the relationship between representations (point clouds, meshes, etc) and network layers (CNN, GCN, etc) on face reconstruction task, then present my ECCV work PRN which proposed a new representation to help achieve state-of-the-art performance on face reconstruction and dense alignment tasks. I will also introduce my open source project face3d that provides examples for generating different 3D face representations.... Timo Bolkart

Perceiving Systems Talk Stefanos Zafeiriou 17-12-2018 Generating Faces & Heads: Texture, Shape and Beyond. The past few years with the advent of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs), as well as the availability of visual data it was shown that it is possible to produce excellent results in very challenging tasks, such as visual object recognition, detection, tracking etc. Nevertheless, in certain tasks such as fine-grain object recognition (e.g., face recognition) it is very difficult to collect the amount of data that are needed. In this talk, I will show how, using DCNNs, we can generate highly realistic faces and heads and use them for training algorithms such as face and facial express... Dimitris Tzionas

Autonomous Vision Talk Prof. Dr. Björn Ommer 14-12-2018 Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Visual Behavior Analysis and Synthesis Understanding objects and their behavior from images and videos is a difficult inverse problem. It requires learning a metric in image space that reflects object relations in real world. This metric learning problem calls for large volumes of training data. While images and videos are easily available, labels are not, thus motivating self-supervised metric and representation learning. Furthermore, I will present a widely applicable strategy based on deep reinforcement learning to improve the surrogate tasks underlying self-supervision. Thereafter, the talk will cover the learning of disenta... Joel Janai

Perceiving Systems Talk Yanxi Liu 12-12-2018 Learning Dynamics from Kinematics: Estimating Foot Pressure from Video Human pose stability analysis is the key to understanding locomotion and control of body equilibrium, with numerous applications in the fields of Kinesiology, Medicine and Robotics. We propose and validate a novel approach to learn dynamics from kinematics of a human body to aid stability analysis. More specifically, we propose an end-to-end deep learning architecture to regress foot pressure from a human pose derived from video. We have collected and utilized a set of long (5min +) choreographed Taiji (Tai Chi) sequences of multiple subjects with synchronized motion capture, foot pressure ... Nadine Rueegg

Physical Intelligence Talk Dr. František Mach 11-12-2018 Magnetically Guided Multiscale Robots and Soft-robotic Grippers The state-of-the-art robotic systems adopting magnetically actuated ferromagnetic bodies or even whole miniature robots have recently become a fast advancing technological field, especially at the nano and microscale. The mesoscale and above all multiscale magnetically guided robotic systems appear to be the advanced field of study, where it is difficult to reflect different forces, precision and also energy demands. The major goal of our talk is to discuss the challenges in the field of magnetically guided mesoscale and multiscale actuation, followed by the results of our research in... Metin Sitti

Talk Marc Toussaint 11-12-2018 Physical Reasoning and Robot Manipulation Animals and humans are excellent in conceiving of solutions to physical and geometric problems, for instance in using tools, coming up with creative constructions, or eventually inventing novel mechanisms and machines. Cognitive scientists coined the term intuitive physics in this context. It is a shame we do not yet have good computational models of such capabilities. A main stream of current robotics research focusses on training robots for narrow manipulation skills - often using massive data from physical simulators. Complementary to that we should also try to understand how basic pri... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Ildikó Papp-Wiedmann Barbara Kettemann Matthias Tröndle

Perceiving Systems Talk Prof. Dr. Hedvig Kjellström 10-12-2018 Recognizing the Pain Expressions of Horses Recognition of pain in horses and other animals is important, because pain is a manifestation of disease and decreases animal welfare. Pain diagnostics for humans typically includes self-evaluation and location of the pain with the help of standardized forms, and labeling of the pain by an clinical expert using pain scales. However, animals cannot verbalize their pain as humans can, and the use of standardized pain scales is challenged by the fact that animals as horses and cattle, being prey animals, display subtle and less obvious pain behavior - it is simply beneficial for a prey animal ...

Intelligent Control Systems Talk Dr. Eugen Solowjow 10-12-2018 Robot Learning for Advanced Manufacturing – An Overview A dominant trend in manufacturing is the move toward small production volumes and high product variability. It is thus anticipated that future manufacturing automation systems will be characterized by a high degree of autonomy, and must be able to learn new behaviors without explicit programming. Robot Learning, and more generic, Autonomous Manufacturing, is an exciting research field at the intersection of Machine Learning and Automation. The combination of "traditional" control techniques with data-driven algorithms holds the promise of allowing robots to learn new behaviors through exper... Sebastian Trimpe Friedrich Solowjow

Physical Intelligence Talk Prof. Holger Stark 04-12-2018 Microswimmers: From design principles to their collective swimming Active motion of biological and artificial microswimmers is relevant in the real world, in microfluidics, and biological applications but also poses fundamental questions in non-equi- librium statistical physics. Mechanisms of single microswimmers either designed by nature or in the lab need to be understood and a detailed modeling of microorganisms helps to explore their complex cell design and their behavior. It also motivates biomimetic approaches. The emergent collective motion of microswimmers generates appealing dynamic patterns as a consequence of the non-equilibrium. Metin Sitti Zoey Davidson

Talk Peter Dayan 28-11-2018 The long and the short of serotonergic stimulation: Selective effects on the learning rate of rewards InstitutsSeminar Neurobiologie: Institute of Neurobiology, Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen

Perceiving Systems Talk Umar Iqbal 27-11-2018 Articulated Human Pose Estimation from Unconstrained Images and Videos In this talk, I will present an overview of my Ph.D. research towards articulated human pose estimation from unconstrained images and videos. In the first part of the talk, I will present an approach to jointly model multi-person pose estimation and tracking in a single formulation. The approach represents body joint detections in a video by a spatiotemporal graph and solves an integer linear program to partition the graph into sub-graphs that correspond to plausible body pose trajectories for each person. I will also introduce the PoseTrack dataset and benchmark which is now the de-facto s... Dimitris Tzionas

Talk Prof. Klaus Scheffler 22-11-2018 Ultra-high fields: Challenges and opportunities for brain imaging

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