BBDC 2025 - Award ceremony
One more sleep, then it's time: on Friday, May 23, 2025, the award ceremony of the Bremen Big Data Challenge 2025 will take place in the Sparkasse Campus Space. Admission is from 13:30, the event starts at 14:00. This year's BBDC is a very special event: firstly, we are celebrating the tenth consecutive edition of the programming competition [...]
MindTalk: From cryptic distortions to distortional cryptography: is there a mosquito in my brain?
Prof. Dr. Jörg Albert Distortion of signals occurs as a disturbance in most human-made electronics, or human communication at large. At least so goes the general view. Accordingly, human engineers usually take a great effort - and a great pride - in reducing distortions to minimal levels. However, the engineers of evolution may beg to [...]
MindTalk: Visual distraction - event-related-potential markers and the dimension weighting account
Dr. Heinrich Liesefeld Despite the vivid subjective impression of a rich sensory world, people actually process only little information from their environment at a time. Which aspects of the world are processed under which conditions is studied in research on selective attention. Ideally, objects would be prioritized based on their relevance to current behavioral goals. [...]
MindTalk: Adaptivity in deep neural networks: the long road to lifelong learning
Prof. Dr. Martin Mundt Deep neural networks (DNNs) are often framed as being inspired by the brain. Although their advent has led to remarkable success stories and a plethora of large-scale applications, they however lack a key ability humans posses: the capacity for lifelong learning. That is, DNNs are primarily successful when trained on predefined training [...]
MindTalk: The impact of age-related hearing loss on brain structure and function
Prof. Dr. Christiane Thiel The presentation will provide an overview of our neuroimaging studies involving elderly volunteers with uncompensated age-related hearing loss. I will demonstrate that hearing loss enhances audiovisual integration but does not trigger cross-modal responses in the auditory cortex. Instead, we found increases in the functional connectivity of the auditory cortex to visual, [...]
MindTalk: AI for Neuroscience
Prof. Dr. Nergis Tömen Machine learning and neuroscience have a profoundly interconnected history with modern deep learning having its roots in neurophysiology. In the last couple of decades, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) and neuroscience have advanced our understanding of both domains and unveiled exciting new research opportunities at their intersection. Currently, AI can help [...]
MindTalk: Building a theory of sensory coding for active behavior
Prof. Dr. Wiktor Mlynarski Sensory systems are the brain's window to the world - they represent the organism's surrounding in order to enable successful action. To instantiate such representations efficiently and accurately, the brain must adapt to the structure of natural environments. However, nothing in the natural world is completely static - environments change, animals' [...]
ComAI Lecture: "Science Communication and Artificial Intelligence: How AI is Changing Public Communication about Science"
Prof. Dr. Mike S. Schäfer (University of Zürich) Abstract Generative AI - producing novel outputs based on extensive digital data and human training - is changing public communication profoundly. Citizens and communication professionals use it to communicate about political and economic topics, healthcare, technology and other issues, with potentially far-reaching implications. Scholars and pundits have [...]
Neurodynamics during quasi-realistic social decision making - Evidence from fMRI-informed multi-channel EEG analyses
Prof. Dr. Thorsten Fehr There is a variety of well-thought-out models explaining important aspects of complex social decision behavior in humans. These models address biophysiological, genetic, contextual, socialisatory, internal trait and state conditions, and other potential modulators of social development, current status, and behavioral predictors. There is also some neuroscientific evidence that substantiate several model [...]
Mind Talk: Flexible behavior through adaptive brain network dynamics
Prof. Dr. Tobias H. Donner Cognitive behavior rapidly adapts to changing environmental contexts. This flexibility distinguishes cognitive behavior from reflexes. I propose that this flexibility results from the rapid reconfiguration of distributed cortical networks that implement the transformations required by a given task and context. This reconfiguration is enabled by rapid plasticity mechanisms that are [...]
