January 14, 2027 at 3:45pm 

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Speaker: Anuenue Baker-Kukona (School of Human Sciences, Greenwich University - United Kingdom; invite by Christopher Allison)

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Location: RPTU - Campus Kaiserslautern, Building 57, Room 508

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Zoom Link: https://uni-kl-de.zoom-x.de/j/68181042830?pwd=KooOOOaq1ZU4KQL80mitsiA1uYfRLO.1 

January 21, 2027 at 3:45pm 

Title: From Individual Perception to Collective Cognition: Sociomorphic Systems in Robotics

Speaker: Jürgen Graf (Cognitive Systems and Robotics - Trier University of Applied Sciences; invited by Omar Jubran)

Abstract: Robots are leaving the laboratory and entering public space, where they must act alongside humans and other machines under uncertainty and partial occlusion. In such settings, no single agent perceives enough to act safely; what matters is what the collective can know. This talk introduces sociomorphic systems: collectives of humans and machines whose scene understanding, navigation and decisions cannot be reduced to a central observer. I present a formal definition with explicit membership criteria and falsification conditions, and discuss the building blocks we are developing at the Cognitive Systems and Robotics Laboratory: collective scene interpretation including natural-language description, integrated navigation with geo-referenced real-world data, and the modelling of collective epistemic states in human teams.

Location: RPTU - Campus Kaiserslautern, Building 57, Room 508

OR

Zoom Link:  https://uni-kl-de.zoom-x.de/j/68181042830?pwd=KooOOOaq1ZU4KQL80mitsiA1uYfRLO.1 

January 28, 2027 at 3:45pm 

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February 04, 2027 at 3:45pm 

Title: How We See Materials

Speaker: Filipp Schmidt (Department of Experimental Psychology -Justus Liebig University Giessen; invited by Thomas Schmidt)

Abstract: How do we make sense of the vast diversity of materials that surround us? Materials such as metal, wood, water, skin, or fabric vary enormously in their visual appearance, yet we can rapidly recognize them and infer properties that guide everyday interactions. In this talk, I will discuss recent work investigating the dimensions and contextual factors that shape human material perception. First, I will present a large-scale, data-driven approach to uncovering the core dimensions underlying our mental representation of materials. Using 600 photographs of 200 systematically sampled materials and 1.87 million triplet similarity judgments, we identified 36 reproducible and interpretable dimensions that capture much of the structure of perceived material similarity. These dimensions encompass perceptual characteristics, such as colour and graininess, as well as more conceptual properties, such as viscosity and material category. Second, I will discuss the role of visual context in material perception. Using identical material patches embedded in different surrounding scenes, we found that context can substantially alter both material identification and the perception of material properties. Together, these findings highlight material perception as a multidimensional and context-sensitive process, in which appearance, conceptual knowledge, and surrounding visual information interact to determine how we perceive the “stuff” of the world.

Location: RPTU - Campus Kaiserslautern, Building 57, Room 508

OR 

Zoom Link: https://uni-kl-de.zoom-x.de/j/68181042830?pwd=KooOOOaq1ZU4KQL80mitsiA1uYfRLO.1