Interdisciplinary College 2017

Last week, I participated in this year’s interdisciplinary college (https://www.interdisciplinary-college.de). In the course of this spring school, I was able to meet many other students working on exciting research projects. By taking lectures, I acquired basic knowledge of neuroscience, some ideas about creativity (both from the behavioral/neural viewpoint as from the AI perspective) and many impulses on language grounding in robotics.

I was also able to present my overall PhD research project (“Concept Formation in Conceptual Spaces”) both during the poster session and as a “rainbow course” lecture. On both occasions I got very valuable feedback and stimulating impulses for my further research. I’ve uploaded the respective resources in case you are interested: the pdf file of my poster and the slides of my presentation.

Long story short: it was a great week with a lot of input and impulses. 🙂

About AI Safety

So one of the current hot topics these days about artificial intelligence seems to be AI safety: How can we make sure that AI will actually be beneficial?

Some top thinkers from science and technology (namely Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates) have expressed their concerns about the dangers of artificial intelligence. If those three guys are worried, shouldn’t we all be? Continue reading “About AI Safety”

What are “conceptual spaces”?

After having sketched what hides behind the term “Artificial General Intelligence” in my last post, today I would like to give a short introduction to conceptual spaces.

The term “conceptual spaces” describes a framework proposed by Peter Gärdenfors [1] that aims at a geometric representation of concepts. It is the starting point of my PhD research on concept formation.

But first things first: what is a concept?

Continue reading “What are “conceptual spaces”?”

What is “Artificial General Intelligence”?

My website says that I’m interested in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). But what does this term actually refer to? There are a bunch of buzz words out there like “Artificial Intelligence”, “Machine Learning”, “Deep Learning”, “strong AI”, “weak AI”, and so on. “Artificial General Intelligence” is one of them (although probably not the most prominent one).

So let’s disentangle this a little bit: Continue reading “What is “Artificial General Intelligence”?”

Hello world!

So this is officially my first blog post on my new website. Welcome everyone! 🙂
What is this website all about? Well, there are two parts: the static and the dynamic one.

The static part of this website (“About me”, “Publications”, and “Teaching”) give an overview over my research interests, my publications in the AI area and the courses I have been teaching.

The dynamic part of this website is a blog where I will regularly post updates about my current research. This includes discussions of frameworks and approaches I am working with, summaries of interesting research papers, and results and insights from my own ongoing research.

This first post is of course only a placeholder for the more interesting entries to be written in the future. The overall plan is that I will write a new entry roughly every other week. If you want to stay up to date, just add this website’s RSS feed and/or follow me on Twitter!