Newsletter

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Issue #1 (2024-03)

We are happy to provide you with the inaugural release of our new internal newsletter, the CITEC UPDATE.

A lot is currently happening at CITEC!

For example, we welcomed nine additional PIs and research groups from five different faculties that have recently joined us:

• Anna Lisa Vollmer - Interactive Robotics in Medicine and Care
• Anja Abendroth - Technical and Social Change
• Joana Cholin - Psycholinguistics
• David Johnson - Human-Centric Explainable AI
• Klaus Neumann - Collaborative Robotics
• Helge Rhodin - Visual AI for Extended Reality
• Sabrina Backs - Entrepreneurship
• Kirsten Berthold - Educational Psychology
• Oliver Bott - Experimental Pragmatics

Furthermore, there are currently about 50 research projects funded by the EU, DFG, BMBF and others, of which more than ten were launched last year and this year alone. In order to maintain an overview of these developments, promote mutual exchange and make better use of synergies, we strive to publish this newsletter at regular intervals from now on.

 

Upcoming events

2024-05-10 16:00-18:00+ The final event of the KINBIOTICS project (https://kinbiotics.de/), which was sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) from 2021 to 2024 and coordinated by Philipp Cimiano, will take place in the CITEC lecture hall. From 18:00 there will be a get-together with drinks. You are all cordially invited!

2024-05-23 13:00-18:00 The SAIL university network invites you to an afternoon of exciting presentations and demonstrations on how AI can be put to good use in practice under the title "KI-Forschung trifft Praxis: Perspektiven für Unternehmen und Gesellschaft".

 

Upcoming CITEC Lecture Series

In the upcoming summer semester, we will start a new CITEC Lecture Series with interesting and exciting scientific talks centered around the research themes of CITEC.

We hope this will provide a forum for intellectual stimulation and lively exchange within the CITEC community. All lectures are public, but of course especially all CITEC members as well as students enrolled in our study programs are welcome.

The lectures will take place bi-weekly on Monday, 16:00-18:00 in the CITEC lecture hall. We will start on 2024-04-08. In the summer semester we will mainly have talks by researchers who recently joined CITEC as new PIs. You can find the schedule with all speakers and (hopefully soon) details about the talks on the CITEC web page: https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/zwe/citec/environment/lecture

The first talk on 2024-04-08 will be given by Benjamin Paaßen on knowledge representation and Machine Learning for education.

New research projects

2023-10-01: Start of project CoolEdgeHPC (U. Rückert, M. Hesse et al.)

2024-01-01 and 2024-03-01: Start of RailCampus OWL projects AuToRail, DiBaMi, and DZM - enable ATO (U. Rückert, M. Hesse et al.)

2024-01-29: Kick-off of EU project "Performance in Robots Interaction via Mental Imagery" (PRIMI) by the Sheffield Hallam University, UK, with the project partners Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), University of Ferrara, University of Manchester, TU Dresden, PAL Robotics and Bielefeld University (T. Schack, B. Strenge et al.)  

CRC 1646: "Linguistic Creativity in Communication"

This year, the new Collaborative Research Centre (CRC; dt. "Sonderforschungsbereich", SFB) 1646 led by spokesperson Ralf Vogel, as well as co-spokespersons Jutta M. Hartmann and CITEC PI Joana Cholin, has started and will undertake a systematic investigation of Linguistic Creativity in Communication as a vital feature of speakers' linguistic competence. A budget of up to 12 million € is available to the CRC during an initial funding period of four years.

Within the CRC, several CITEC researchers take part in specific projects:

Joana Cholin, Petra Wagner and Sina Zarrieß investigate "Creating novel phonetic representations across varying communication settings" (project A02) via experimental production studies and psycholinguistic and computational modelling. Petra Wagner also works with Farhat Jabeen in a project (A03) called "The creative listener: Interpretation at the interface of prosody, syntax and information structure", and Sina Zarrieß participates in investigations of "Contextualised metrics of linguistic creativity in literary and non-literary text" (project A05).

Oliver Bott takes part in a project (B01) about "Coercion as a creative mechanism in compositional interpretation". Hendrik Buschmeier and Sina Zarrieß co-lead project B02 "Computational linguistic creativity in reference games between interactive dialogue agents".

Another project (C01) by Joana Cholin investigates the underlying cognitive processes involved in "Producing and understanding creative word formations" like "Dunkelflaute" or "Juniversum". Stefan Kopp and Joana Cholin also conduct a project (C02) called "Multimodal creativity in speech-gesture production" that will investigate how humans and AI models can use gesture to accompany newly created linguistic constructions when given communicative resources are not available or not adequate. Johanna Kissler will use "Verbal fluency as a window into the mechanisms of creative language production" in project C05.

Furthermore, CITEC PIs Hendrik Buschmeier and Oliver Bott also participate in the coordination of the CRC's central projects "INF: User-oriented research infrastructure assisting linguistic data collection and (re-)use" and "Ö: Public relations project", respectively.

Awards

Best Paper Award: J.-P. Töberg and P. Cimiano, “Generation of Robot Manipulation Plans Using Generative Large Language Models”, Presented at the Seventh IEEE International Conference on Robotic Computing, Laguna Hills, CN, USA, Piscataway, NJ: IEEE, In Press.

Best Paper Award: H. Voß and S. Kopp, “AQ-GT: A Temporally Aligned and Quantized GRU-Transformer for Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis”, Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2023), ACM Press, 2023.

Best Poster Award: N. Krome and S. Kopp, “Minimal Latency Speech-Driven Gesture Generation for Continuous Interaction in Social XR”, Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and eXtended and Virtual Reality (AIxVR). Vol. 1, Piscataway, NJ: IEEE, 2024, pp.236-240.

New members

In addition to the affiliation of the new PIs and research groups mentioned above, the CITEC groups continously welcome new research staff members.

For example, Alina Deriyeva, Rui Liu and Aida Kostikova joined Benjamin Paaßen's group in October 2023.

Stefan Kopp took Fabian Heinrich under contract in December 2023.

Klaus Neumann's team was joined by Lara Bergmann in December 2023 and will affiliate Philipp Hartmann, Marco Grabowski, Thomas Günther, Jószef Lurvig, and Jannick Stranghöner in April and May 2024, respectively.

CITEC How-To: The quick start guide for "newbies"

We created a short document to facilitate new members from different status groups (incl. secretaries, group leaders, etc.) orienting themselves after joining CITEC. The purpose of this document is to make it easier for new colleagues to support the existing structures and make best use of CITEC's resources. We will update and extend the document over time.

Thank you for reading the first CITEC UPDATE!