Projekte

The Collaborative Research Center 1283 is an interdisciplinary endeavor aiming to develop basic concepts and theories for dealing with “good” and “bad” uncertainty. The new insights are applied to unsolved problems in various fields of economics and the natural sciences, especially in biology and physics. The CRC consists of 18 projects, most of which are located at the Faculty of Mathematics, but also at the Center for Mathematical Economics, the Faculty of Physics, and the Faculty of Technology. The funding is provided by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and amounts to about 10 million Euro in the second funding period (2021-2025). In particular, it covers 12 PhD positions and 14 postdoc positions.

Nationen- und Staatsvergleiche, Nobelpreisverleihungen, rassifizierende Analogien und derzeit die vielen coronabezogenen Vergleiche – Praktiken des Vergleichens sind allgegenwärtig. Sie formen das Argumentieren und Handeln einer Vielzahl von Akteuren in Wirtschaft, Kultur, Wissenschaft und Politik. Praktiken des Vergleichens ordnen und verändern die Welt, errichten und hinterfragen soziale Hierarchien und Machtverhältnisse, in Geschichte und Gegenwart.

Der Sonderforschungsbereich 1288 untersucht die Geschichte der Vergleichspraktiken von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart und überführt sowohl die alltäglichen wie die institutionalisierten Formen als auch die wissenschaftlichen Methoden des Vergleichens in eine neue Forschungsagenda. Vergleichspraktiken sind mehr als eine vermeintlich objektive wissenschaftliche Methode. Wir stellen das Vergleichen als vielfältige Praxis ins Zentrum des Interesses, d.h. seine gesellschaftlichen und kulturellen Ursachen, die Verfahren sowie die Wirkungen des Vergleichens.

Oft setzen technische Erklärungen Wissen über KI voraus und sind deswegen nur schwer nachvollziehbar. Im Sonderforschungsbereich/Transregio 318 "Constructing Explainability" (Erklärbarkeit konstruieren) erarbeiten die Forschenden Wege, die Nutzer*innen in den Erklärprozess einzubinden und damit ko-konstruktive Erklärungen zu schaffen. Dafür untersucht das interdisziplinäre Forschungsteam die Prinzipien, Mechanismen und sozialen Praktiken des Erklärens und wie diese im Design von KI-Systemen berücksichtigt werden können. Das Ziel des Projektes ist es, Erklärprozesse verständlich zu gestalten und verstehbare Assistenzsysteme zu schaffen.

The algorithmic turn of prediction, connected with Big Data and Machine Learning, presents an exciting and urgent challenge for the social sciences. Recent advances in digital forecasting claim to provide a predictive score for individual persons or singular events, thereby introducing a new way to manage the uncertainty of the future. But knowing the future in advance is not only advantageous. In fact, for our society, uncertainty about the future is also a resource.

Since modernity, with the support of probability calculus various social institutions in different domains have developed means of coping with ignorance of the future by starting with the one thing that we all share - uncertainty. What happens to the stabilized forms of management of the future when their first resource - shared uncertainty - is missing?

This project includes a set of theory-driven empirical studies of the transition from probabilistic forms of uncertainty management to the new algorithmic forms of prediction.

The Water-Futures project aims to develop a theoretical basis for designing smart water systems, which can provide a framework for the allocation and development decisions on drinking water infrastructure systems.

Uncertainty has become a hallmark of today’s societies; think of environmental and climate policy, financial markets and their crises, health and pandemics, long-run stability of pension systems, or digitalization and technological development. Contrary to earlier episodes of uncertainty, however, the environmental, demographic, economic, and technological uncertainty we experience these days is perceived as persistent, as opposed to being a consequence of lacking experience in a new environment. This raises new positive and normative questions: How can we live with persistent uncertainty, and how should we live with it? With the proposed RTG 2865, we aim at improving our understanding of these (in spirit) classical economic questions, taking recent events and new methodological insights into account.

Many of the main challenges Europe currently faces, like mitigating climate change, fostering a transition to a low-carbon economy, or governing the development, diffusion of new technologies are difficult to deal with because of their dynamic complex nature.

The Innovative Training Network EPOC aims at advancing the state-of-the-art and the applicability of computationally intensive methods for decision and policy analysis in such complex and uncertain environments. Particular focus will be on the application of such methods in the domains of climate change and innovation. 

- Studying Regional Development Dynamics and their Political Consequences -

Living conditions in Germany today show evidence of increasing and rapidly changing regional disparities in structural, demographic and economic domains. These disparities often take the form of an adverse access to health care facilities, childcare provision, education and other public services as well as regional labour market opportunities, business climate, housing and transport ation infrastructures. The Leibniz-ScienceCampus researchers investigate how these regional social and economic opportunities influence social cohesion, expectations, political attitudes, preferences and behavior and thereby exacerbate or mitigate social inequality, social cohesion, political conflicts and radicalization.

SAIL is an interdisciplinary and interinstitutional collaboration of Bielefeld University, Paderborn University, Hochschule Bielefeld – University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSBI) and OWL University of Applied Sciences and Arts (TH OWL), funded by the MKW NRW. 

Current systems that incorporate AI technology mainly target the introduction phase, where a core component is training and adaptation of AI models based on given example data. SAIL’s focus on the full life-cycle moves the current emphasis towards sustainable long-term development in real life. The joint project SAIL addresses both basic research in the field of AI, its implications from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences, and concrete applications in the field of Industry 4.0 and Intelligent Healthcare.

Das Institut für interdisziplinäre Konflikt- und Gewaltforschung (IKG) wurde 1996 in Bielefeld gegründet mit dem Ziel eine Lücke in der interdisziplinären Konflikt- und Gewaltforschung zu schließen. Mittlerweile ist das IKG eine der führenden deutschen Forschungseinrichtungen in diesem Bereich und bietet eine umfassende Struktur für interdisziplinäre Theorieentwicklung und empirische Forschung zu politisch und gesellschaftlich relevanten Phänomenen um Konflikte und Gewalt sowie ihren Implikationen für sozialen Zusammenhalt, Partizipation, Demokratie und Frieden. Eine zentrale Verantwortung sieht das IKG in seinem Beitrag zu sozialen und politischen Diskursen. Dementsprechend besteht ein fortwährender Dialog zwischen Wissenschaft und Zivilgesellschaft. Verschiedenste Forschungsprojekte zu Aspekten um Konflikt und Gewalt sind daher am IKG angesiedelt und es kann auf ein umfassendes Netzwerk mit akademischen und nicht-akademischen Partnerinstitutionen sowie Forschungsgruppen auf lokaler, nationaler und globaler Ebene zurückgegriffen werden.

The new graduate school “Health Policy and Systems in Uncertainties” has been established in the School of Public Health. The graduate school aims to apply an interdisciplinary perspective to the study and design of health policy and health systems under situations of uncertainty, in order to better understand its consequences for health system resilience and capacity to act as well as ultimately for population health.

The Graduate School is offering funding for eight doctoral candidates for a three-year period.

In a constantly changing world, language as our primary tool of communication must allow for the effective expression of novel thoughts and experiences. This requires linguistic creativity, i.e., the creation of novel linguistic units that are used in communication just as successfully as linguistic routines. Linguistics has made significant progress in the last 50 years in understanding the regularities and routines behind conventionalised systems of linguistic signs, their underlying cognitive processes and how to model them. Thus far, the linguistic creativity that frequently occurs in everyday conversation has not been addressed with the systematicity that it deserves. CRC1646 will undertake such a systematic investigation of linguistic creativity as a vital feature of speakers' linguistic competence.