About the Centre for Cognitive Science

The Centre for Cognitive Science at Technische Universität Darmstadt unites faculty members across multiple disciplines, who joined forces in the scientific study of adaptive, intelligent behavior in humans and machines.

At the Centre of Cognitive Science we work towards a computational-representational understanding of human perception, cognition, and action through a tight integration of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. TU Darmstadt is one of the preeminent research universities in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotics in Germany and Europe. We develop computational and algorithmic solutions to challenging AI- and ML-problems and we also employ insight from AI and ML to psychology, movement science, and neuroscience. Furthermore, we believe that cognitive science can help to drastically improve our future interaction with and explainability of artificial intelligence.

News

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February 2, 2024 – Successful next step in the Excellence Strategy. TU Darmstadt has the opportunity to establish three Clusters of Excellence: “Reasonable Artificial Intelligence” (RAI) , “The Adaptive Mind” (TAM) and CoM2Life. Members of the Centre for Cognitive Science are involved in all three initiatives. The principal investigators of the Centre for Cognitive Science are particularly involved in RAI and TAM with main topics along Artificial Intelligence and cognitive science. Learn more

January 26, 2024 – Cognitive Science @ TU Darmstadt, supported by the Centre for Cognitive Science, hosted a Mentoring Event on career prospects for cognitive science students. With around 120 attendees, the event was a big success. Learn more

January 2024 – In a publication in the renowned journal “Nature Human Behaviour”, WhiteBox researchers investigate the properties of behavioral economic theories automatically learned by artificial intelligence. The study highlights that cognitive science still cannot be easily automated by artificial intelligence and that a careful combination of theoretical reasoning, machine learning and data analysis is needed to understand and explain why human decisions are the way they are and deviate from the mathematical optimum. Learn more (in German)

December 7, 2023– In the ProLOEWE discussion format “Hessen's cutting-edge research in 45 minutes”, WhiteBox discussed with interested members of the Hessian state parliament. The topic was: “AI – more human than expected?”.Read more

July 6, 2023IKIDA & CCS participated in The Hessian AICon and presented current projects results.

July 4, 2023Hessen schafft Wissen published a new animated video on project WhiteBox.

May 1, 2022 – Launch of the DFG funded Research Training Group (Graduiertenkolleg) LokoAssist. The RTG aims at a “seamless” integration of assistive devices into the human body schema. Partners: TU Darmstadt, University of Heidelberg, Central Institute for Mental Health in Mannheim. Learn more

April 27, 2023 – On Girls' Day, a group of 15 girls paid a visit to the Centre for Cognitive Science. During their time at the Centre’s labs, they were able to see robots in action, had the opportunity to test a number of visual and weight illusion experiments, and enjoyed performing motion experiments using Virtual Reality (VR) technology. Learn more

April 27, 2023 Susanne Trick was honoured by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the German Informatics Society (GI) as AI Newcomer of the Year. Congratulations!
Susanne is doing her doctorate at the Centre for Cognitive Science and is currently team member of the BMBF funded research group IKIDA.
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March 27, 2023 – WhiteBox and the Centre for Cognitive Science hosted the “Symposium on Explainability”. Different facets of explainability were discussed and the results of the WhiteBox project so far were presented. Learn more

January 31, 2023 – Thomas Wallis receives the highly prestigious Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for his project “SEGMENT – 3D scene understanding in two glances” Learn more

December 8, 2022 – The Centre for Cognitive Science hosted the Symposium “Explaining adaptive vision” with an international line-up of speakers and 40+ participants. The Event was funded by the Hessian State Ministry of Higher Education, Research and the Arts and supported by “WhiteBox” and “TAM – The Adaptive Mind”. Learn more

December 2022 – Prof. Dr. Angela Yu has started her Humboldt Professorship for “Computational and Cognitive Neuroscience” at the Centre for Cognitive Science. Welcome! Learn more

October 20, 2022 – 6. Darmstädter Start-up & Innovation Day. In the category “Scientists” of the TU ideas competition #DeineIdee2022, Constantin Rothkopf and Florian Kadner convinced with a digital font and won the 1st place. The AdaptiFont interactive font automatically adapts its design to the reader: letter size and shape, screen brightness. Learn more

October 2022 – The ERC funded project “ACTOR – Towards a computational account of natural sequential behavior” is starting! Learn more

September 5, 2022 – CCS goes KogWis 2022. Join Symposium 2: Flexible Representations for Human(-like) Problem Solving!
3:00pm – 4:40pm, Lecture Room 1: KG I, HS 1199 @ Uni Freiburg

July 2022 – What is Cognitive Science about? To shed some light, participants of the GK Doctoral Symposium 2022 wrote blog posts about their research topics with the special focus on science communication with the general public.
The blog is now published under https://www.perspectives-on-learning.de

April 13, 2022 – Nils Neupärtl successfully defended his PhD thesis “Interacting With an uncertain physical World: Probabilistic models of human perception and action”. Congratulations!

April 6-8, 2022 – The Technical University Darmstadt and its Centre for Cognitive Science hosted the 2nd GK Doctoral Symposium, from the 6th to the 8th of April, 2022. Overall, we welcomed 37 doctoral students from 14 different institutions across Germany and Austria, presenting their work on topics such as cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence and education. Learn more

March 18, 2022 – Jan Peters receives the first EIC Transition Grant from the European Innovation Council (EIC) for his project “Visual Robot Programming” Learn more

March 2022 – Constantin Rothkopf receives the highly prestigious Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for his project “ACTOR – Towards a computational account of natural sequential behavior” Learn more

January 10, 2022 – The research projects IKIDA and PlexPlain presented and discussed their ongoing work and intermediate results at the BMBF online conference “AI All-Hands-Meeting”.

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