Site Network: Cognitive Systems | SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition | Fachbereich 03 | Universität Bremen

Teaching

General Classes

Class / Event Lecturer Abstract
Cognitive Systems

Thomas Barkowsky, Frank Dylla,
Christian Freksa

A two-semester course on natural and artificial cognitive systems. The first semester provides an introduction to basic concepts, terminology, and methods used in the interdisciplinary study of cognitive systems; it covers foundations of perception, memory and reasoning, learning and action, and verbal and non-verbal communication.

The course consists of lectures and practical implementation tasks. The goal of the course is to provide a basic understanding of concepts and methods of cognitive science. The course will be both in English and in German such that

  • german students will experience a smooth introduction to English courses and that
  • international students will be able to participate in this course.
Spatial Cognition

Thomas Barkowsky

This seminar provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary research field of spatial cognition from an informatics point of view. Spatial cognition deals with the acquisition, organization, utilization, and communication of information about spatial environments. As such, it is fundamental to intelligent human behavior and forms the basis of many other, even abstract cognitive capabilities. In the seminar, we also will learn about specific topics in spatial cognition like spatial knowledge representation, spatial memory, wayfinding and navigation, or spatial communication.

Cognitive Modeling

 

Holger Schultheis
Thomas Barkowsky,
Christian Freksa

A two-semester course on natural and artificial cognitive systems. The first semester provides an introduction to basic concepts, terminology, and methods used in the interdisciplinary study of cognitive systems; it covers foundations of perception, memory and reasoning, learning and action, and linguistic and non-linguistic communication.

The second semester investigates methods from psychology, neuroscience, and informatics in more detail; cognitive architectures and modeling approaches are studied; we perform case studies in cognitive modeling and discuss challenges for the field of cognitive science. The course consists of lectures, reading, modeling, and writing assignments, and discussion groups. The goal of the course is to provide a firm grasp on concepts and methods of cognitive science.

Creativity in Cognitive Systems

Ana-Maria Olteteanu

How are humans creative? How can machines be creative? This seminar on the interdisciplinary field of Creativity in Cognitive Systems, aims to answer such questions, by blending state of the art topics and methods from the study of human creative cognition and computational creativity. In the field of human creative cognition, various types of creative cognitive processes and types of knowledge representation are discussed. In the field of computational creativity, we explore systems in the domains of mathematics and physics, drawing and painting, poetry and language, and even magic trick making. We then learn about how such cognitive systems are assessed, and examine systems which blend cognitive and computational goals.

SFB/TR 8 / IQN colloquium
Spatial Cognition
Christian Freksa,
Kerstin Schill, 
John Bateman,
Wolfram Burgard, 
Bernhard Nebel

This colloquium is part of the International Quality Network of the Universities of Bremen, Freiburg, and Hamburg in cooperation with 23 international partner universities and the Transregional Collaborative Research Center Spatial Cognition: Reasoning, Action, Interaction of the Universities Bremen and Freiburg. Scientists of the participating institutions and guests report on their research in the area of spatial cognition. Usually research groups from other locations are connected through an interactive teleconferencing network.

Graduate seminar
Cognitive Systems
Christian Freksa
Carl Schultz 
 

Ph.D. and master/diploma students discuss their current research. For the preparation of the session the candidates distribute a research paper one or two weeks ahead of time to the seminar participants. In the seminar session, the most important aspects of the paper are summarized by the author to initiate an in-depth discussion of the work in progress.

Student Projects    

CogQDA:

Cognitive Qualitative Descriptions and Applications

Zoe Falomir

website

The seminar provides an introduction to Qualitative Descriptions and Reasoning from a Cognitive point of view. It is divided into 2 learning modules and 1 working module. The topic of each module is introduced as follows:

Module I: If you were a robot, you would see the world pixelized through your camera. How would you explain to a human being what do you see? What concepts could you use for the human to understand you?

Module II: Psychological studies proved that people with good spatial cognition skills, are successful in STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math). Other studies say that we humans can train these spatial skills. Therefore:

  • How do we measure our spatial cognition skills? How do we improve them? Can we build systems that help us to improve them?
  • Can a robot have spatial cognition skills? What logical thinking must the robot have?

Module III: From all the contents, what is the most interesting topic for you? Which one would you like to explore/learn/research more? How? Theoretically or practically? Let's explore it together. What have you learned? What can you teach us?

     

 

 

List of all lectures