Events & Talks

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

Haptic Intelligence Workshop 14-11-2018 Haptipedia: An Interactive Database for Selecting, Ideating, and Learning About Grounded Force-Feedback Devices We have developed Haptipedia, a large online gallery of haptic devices with an initial scope of 105 grounded force-feedback devices. Haptipedia was created to be a community resource that supports designers of all persuasions in ideating, finding, designing, and learning about kinesthetic haptic devices. In this AsiaHaptics workshop, you will learn how to use Haptipedia to address YOUR use case, and you can tell us how to make this resource more useful for you. Hasti Seifi Farimah Fazlollahi Gunhyuk Park Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Talk Peter Dayan 14-11-2018 Neural Reinforcement Learning 3: The Self and the Other Winter School on Quantitative Systems Biology: Learning and Artifical Intelligence

Talk Peter Dayan 13-11-2018 Neural Reinforcement Learning 2: Choice Winter School on Quantitative Systems Biology: Learning and Artifical Intelligence

Physical Intelligence Talk Prof. Dr. Rahmi Oklu 13-11-2018 Novel directions in the treatment of aneurysms, tumors and venous thrombosis Minimally invasive approaches to vascular disease and cancer have revolutionized medicine. I will discuss novel approaches to vascular bleeding, aneurysm treatment and tumor ablation. Metin Sitti

IS Colloquium Prof. Eric Tytell 12-11-2018 Muscle as active matter: How fish tune their body mechanics for effective swimming Many fishes swim efficiently over long distances to find food or during migrations. They also have to accelerate rapidly to escape predators. These two behaviors require different body mechanics: for efficient swimming, fish should be very flexible, but for rapid acceleration, they should be stiffer. Here, I will discuss recent experiments that show that they can use their muscles to tune their effective body mechanics. Control strategies inspired by the muscle activity in fishes may help design better soft robotic devices. Ardian Jusufi

Talk Peter Dayan 12-11-2018 Neural Reinforcement Learning 1: Prediction Winter School on Quantitative Systems Biology: Learning and Artifical Intelligence

Perceiving Systems Talk Prof. Dr. Stefan Roth 02-11-2018 Deep Learning with Perceptually-Motivated and Probabilistic Networks Supervised learning with deep convolutional networks is the workhorse of the majority of computer vision research today. While much progress has been made already, exploiting deep architectures with standard components, enormous datasets, and massive computational power, I will argue that it pays to scrutinize some of the components of modern deep networks. I will begin with looking at the common pooling operation and show how we can replace standard pooling layers with a perceptually-motivated alternative, with consistent gains in accuracy. Next, I will show how we can leverage self-simila... Michael Black

Perceiving Systems Talk Dima Damen 30-10-2018 A fine-grained perspective onto object interactions This talk aims to argue for a fine-grained perspective onto human-object interactions, from video sequences. I will present approaches for the understanding of ‘what’ objects one interacts with during daily activities, ‘when’ should we label the temporal boundaries of interactions, ‘which’ semantic labels one can use to describe such interactions and ‘who’ is better when contrasting people perform the same interaction. I will detail my group’s latest works on sub-topics related to: (1) assessing action ‘completion’ – when an interaction is attempted but not completed [BMVC 2018], (2) determ... Mohamed Hassan

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Veronica J. Santos 25-10-2018 Artificial Haptic Intelligence for Human-Machine Systems The functionality of artificial manipulators could be enhanced by artificial “haptic intelligence” that enables the identification of object features via touch for semi-autonomous decision-making and/or display to a human operator. This could be especially useful when complementary sensory modalities, such as vision, are unavailable. I will highlight past and present work to enhance the functionality of artificial hands in human-machine systems. I will describe efforts to develop multimodal tactile sensor skins, and to teach robots how to haptically perceive salient geometric features such ... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Adam Spiers

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Veronica J. Santos 24-10-2018 Artificial Haptic Intelligence for Human-Machine Systems The functionality of artificial manipulators could be enhanced by artificial “haptic intelligence” that enables the identification of object features via touch for semi-autonomous decision-making and/or display to a human operator. This could be especially useful when complementary sensory modalities, such as vision, are unavailable. I will highlight past and present work to enhance the functionality of artificial hands in human-machine systems. I will describe efforts to develop multimodal tactile sensor skins, and to teach robots how to haptically perceive salient geometric features such ... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium Chris Macnab 23-10-2018 Control Systems for a Surgical Robot on the Space Station As part of a proposed design for a surgical robot on the space station, my research group has been asked to look at controls that can provide literally surgical precision. Due to excessive time delay, we envision a system with a local model being controlled by a surgeon while the remote system on the space station follows along in a safe manner. Two of the major design considerations that come into play for the low-level feedback loops on the remote side are 1) the harmonic drives in a robot will cause excessive vibrations in a micro-gravity environment unless active damping strategies ar... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Talk Andreas Krause 23-10-2018 Learning to Act with Confidence Actively acquiring decision-relevant information is a key capability of intelligent systems, and plays a central role in the scientific process. In this talk I will present research from my group on this topic at the intersection of statistical learning, optimization and decision making. In particular, I will discuss how statistical confidence bounds can guide data acquisition in a principled way to make effective and reliable decisions in a variety of complex domains. I will also discuss several applications, ranging from autonomously guiding wetlab experiments in protein function optim...

Max Planck Lecture Roland Siegwart 22-10-2018 Autonomous Robots that Walk and Fly While robots are already doing a wonderful job as factory workhorses, they are now gradually appearing in our daily environments and offering their services as autonomous cars, delivery drones, helpers in search and rescue and much more. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Matthias Tröndle Ildikó Papp-Wiedmann Barbara Kettemann

Talk Prof. Klaus Scheffler 19-10-2018 Accelerated signal acquisition using locally modulated magnetic fields (LOOM)

Dynamic Locomotion Talk Charlotte Le Mouel 18-10-2018 Charlotte Le Mouel: Role of postural adjustments in motor coordination in humans Theories of motor control in neuroscience usually focus on the role of the nervous system in the coordination of movement. However, the literature in sports science as well as in embodied robotics suggests that improvements in motor performance can be achieved through an improvement of the body mechanical properties themselves, rather than only the control. I therefore developed the thesis that efficient motor coordination in animals and humans relies on the adjustment of the body mechanical properties to the task at hand, by the postural system. Charlotte Le Mouel Alexander Badri-Spröwitz

Intelligent Control Systems Talk Ravi Haksar 18-10-2018 Scalable Methods for Monitoring and Controlling Large-Scale Phenomena What do forest fires, disease outbreaks, robot swarms, and social networks have in common? How can we develop a common set of tools for these applications? In this talk, I will first introduce a modeling framework that describes large-scale phenomena and which is based on the idea of "local interactions." I will then describe my work on creating estimation and control methods for a single agent and for a cooperative team of autonomous agents. In particular, these algorithms are scalable as the solution does not change if the number of agents or environment size changes. Forest fires and the... Sebastian Trimpe

Talk Mario Herger 16-10-2018 „Der letzte Führerscheinneuling … ist bereits geboren.“ Über 1.000 selbstfahrende Testfahrzeuge von insgesamt 57 Unternehmen fahren im Silicon Valley bereits herum, und nun steht die Google-Schwester Waymo davor, 82.000 Robotertaxis auf die Straßen zu bringen. Und das nicht irgendwann, sondern noch dieses Jahr. Währenddessen rüstet sich Tesla mit seinem vollelektrischen Model 3 für einen Frontalangriff auf die deutschen Hersteller. In den USA sind die Verkaufszahlen deutscher Mittelklassewagen im Vergleich zum Vorjahr um 29 Prozent eingebrochen.

Perceiving Systems Talk Michael Cohen 12-10-2018 Still, In Motion In this talk, I will take an autobiographical approach to explain both where we have come from in computer graphics from the early days of rendering, and to point towards where we are going in this new world of smartphones and social media. We are at a point in history where the abilities to express oneself with media is unparalleled. The ubiquity and power of mobile devices coupled with new algorithmic paradigms is opening new expressive possibilities weekly. At the same time, these new creative media (composite imagery, augmented imagery, short form video, 3D photos) also offer unpreceden...

Max Planck Lecture Prof. Dr. Hideo Hosono 12-10-2018 Transparent Amorphous Oxide Semiconductors: from materials design to implementation to state of the art displays Thin film transistor (TFTs) is a fundamental building block in electronic circuits. Since the specification for TFTs to drive the pixel of flat panel displays rather differs from that for CPUs and memories because of their large dimension.

Talk Prof. Klaus Scheffler 10-10-2018 Erwin Hahn Lecture on Human Brain MRI at 9.4T: The Pros and Cons of ultra-high fields

Haptic Intelligence Talk Gokhan Serhat 05-10-2018 FEA-based Design of Continuum Structures for Optimal Dynamic Properties Continuum structures need to be designed for optimal vibrational characteristics in various fields. Recent developments in the finite element analysis (FEA) and numerical optimization methods allow creating more accurate computational models, which favors designing superior systems and reduces the need for experimentation. In this talk, I will present my work on FEA-based optimization of thin shell structures for improved dynamic properties where the focus will be on laminated composites. I will initially explain multi-objective optimization strategies for enhancing load-carrying and vibrat... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence Talk Mariacarla Memeo 05-10-2018 Interactive and Effective Representation of Digital Content through Touch using Local Tactile Feedback The increasing availability of on-line resources and the widespread practice of storing data over the internet arise the problem of their accessibility for visually impaired people. A translation from the visual domain to the available modalities is therefore necessary to study if this access is somewhat possible. However, the translation of information from vision to touch is necessarily impaired due to the superiority of vision during the acquisition process. Yet, compromises exist as visual information can be simplified, sketched. A picture can become a map. An object can become a geom... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

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