Newsletter
Current issue #4 (2024-09)
We start off with this issue of CITEC UPDATE with an op-ed by PhD student Lara Bergmann reflecting on the CITEC Lecture Series during the summer term 2024 and will get you up-to-date about our most recent happenings.
CITEC Lecture Series retrospective: Exploring CITEC’s interdisciplinary research fields
The CITEC Lecture Series is designed to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and inspire discussions about current research topics, as many new research groups have been established within the last months. Recent talks have showcased a diverse range of innovative research fields, including machine learning for education, video-based learning, contextual language generation, visual AI for extended reality, or robotics in health care and automation:
Machine Learning for Education and Video-based Learning
Large language models are used in intelligent tutoring systems for computer programming. In these tutoring systems, students are given tasks corresponding to their learning level and hints are provided with the help of large language models. The systems are designed to consider individual needs, teacher input, and pedagogical theory. Video-based learning is also commonly used in schools or technical apprenticeships. These videos are not passively consumed but must be actively processed. Current research at CITEC focuses on the benefits of self- explanation prompts.
Contextual Language Generation
Humans commonly adapt their language depending on the context when talking to each other. Current research at CITEC focuses on improving artificial language generation by incorporating non-linguistic contextual knowledge.
Robotics in Health Care and Automation
In health care, robots will assist a diverse range of users who usually do not know about robotics or machine learning. Therefore, robots should be able to learn from interactions with humans. Imitation learning in robotics and automation enables even small and medium-sized companies to afford simple, robust, and cost-effective robotic systems. Magnetic levitation is a new technology that is about to revolutionize individualized product and inline-machine transport in manufacturing systems due to additional degrees of freedom and the resulting flexibility of the entire machine.
Considering the large variety of different topics, the lecture series offered a unique opportunity to engage with the latest advancements in Cognitive Interaction Technology. We hope that future events will encourage students and researchers to start discussions, connect, and collaborate on innovative research projects. A second edition of the lecture series will start in the upcoming semester. All relevant information can be found on the website. We hope to see you there!
-Lara Bergmann-
Past events
2024-07: Helge Rhodin co-organized the African Computer Vision Summer School (ACVSS) in Kenya, which was a great success.
2024-09: Sabrina Backs and her team presented a current research project on the topic of entrepreneurial ecosystems, Luhmann's system theory and agent-based simulation at the G-Forum in Ingolstadt. In addition, the Jörg Schwarzbich Inventor Award was presented and handed over.
2024-09: David Johnson joined Hanna Drimalla and Jonas Paletschek in Glasgow at ACII 2024, where they presented their research from TRR318 regarding Social Signs of Understanding.
2024-09-18: The AI-Academy OWL, funded by BMBF for 4.5 years, started with a kickoff. Together with Paderborn University, HS Bielefeld, and TH OWL, the project will focus on research aspects and concepts of science communication on safe AI technologies and AI for inclusion.
2024-09-24: Kira Loos (AG IR) organized a workshop for Eingeloggt! Bielefeld with the Topic "Ihre Daten im Blick – Sicher und informiert im digitalen Alltag".
Upcoming events
2024-10: A workshop "XAI FOR U“ (Explainable AI for Ubiquitous, Pervasive, and Wearable Computing), in conjunction with UbiComp ´24, co-organized by Stefan Kopp, will take place for a full day either on 2024-10-05 or 2024-10-06 in Melbourne.
2024-10-10: Sina Zarrieß will deliver a keynote at the NFDI Text+-Meeting in Mannheim on the topic "Linguistic investigations into small and large language models".
2024-10-14: Anna-Lisa Vollmer is organizing a Workshop on Interactive Robots and AI for Healthcare (IRAIH) at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in Abu Dhabi, UAE.
2024-10-19 to 2024-10-20: Philipp Cimiano is organizing a workshop on "Multimodal, Affective and Interactive eXplainable Artificial Intelligence" (MAI-XAI) at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
2024-11: A workshop „Multimodal Co-Construction of Explanations with XAI Workshop“ at the ACM ICMI 2024 will be organized by Hendrik Buschmeier and Stefan Kopp in cooperation with Teena Hassen (Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg) for a full day between 2024-11-04 and 2024-11-08 in Costa Rica.
2025-01-24: The Social Cognitive Systems Group is organizing a Family & Friends Day with Open Lab (from 14:00 in the group's CITEC laboratory on the ground floor).
Awards
Andrew Melnik and his team "UniTeam" have won first place in the "HomeRobot Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation" competition during the CVPR 2024 conference (Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition) in Seattle (USA). The competition aimed to develop robotic agents capable of recognizing and manipulating novel objects. They have to solve tasks in unknown domestic environments that are formulated in natural language. The IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) is regarded as the world's leading annual conference for image processing. The "UniTeam" included students and researchers: Dr. Andrew Melnik, Michael Büttner, Lyon Brown, Gaurav Kumar Yadav, Arjun PS, GC Nandi and Jonathan Francis. Andrew Melnik works in the working groups of Helge Rhodin and Helge Ritter and conducts research on "AI for Home Robotics". Melnik wants to develop intelligent robots that can perform complex tasks in real household environments.
Computer scientist Andrew Melnik from Bielefeld University and his team have developed an AI agent with which they won an international Open Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation (OVMM) challenge. AI agents are technical systems that act autonomously on the basis of artificial intelligence (AI) in order to achieve goals. The group called ‘UniTeam’ competed against 79 other entries from around the world at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in New Orleans. The prize for this success in the field of home robotics is a robot itself, which will have an impact on research and teaching in Bielefeld.
André Artelt and colleagues received the Best Paper award at the IJCAI workshop on AI for Critical Infrastructure with their paper entitled "A Toolbox on Supporting Research on AI in Water Distribution Networks".
Helen Beierling and colleagues (AG IR) received the Best Paper award at the RSS 2024 Workshop on Mechanisms for Mapping Human Input to Robots with their paper “Advancing Human-Robot Collaboration: The Impact of Flexible Input Mechanisms”.
Simeon Junker and Sina Zarrieß are the winners of the best paper award at INLG 2024 in Tokio for their paper on "Resilience through Scene Context in Visual Referring Expressin Generation".
New members
Helge Rhodin's group has now grown to 5 researchers (4 PhD and 1 Research engineer): Jerin Philip, Bianca Schröder, Guangjun Xu, Ananta Bhattarai, and Blaise Appolinary.
Publications
Five long papers (thereof four with SAIL contributions) and three workshop papers by Sina Zarrieß and her colleagues have been accepted by EMNLP 2025, one of the world-leading conferences on natural language processing (ranked A* by CORE).
As part of the project SAIL, another paper by Aida Kostikova, Benjamin Paaßen et al. titled "Fine-Grained Detection of Solidarity for Women and Migrants in 155 Years of German Parliamentary Debates" has also been accepted into the main track of EMNLP 2025. The paper investigates to which degree a complex sociological concept, namely solidarity, can be detected in German parliamentary debates via large language models - relating to the CITEC research tradition of detecting and processing deeper parts of human communication via technical means. Surprisingly, they found that the zero-shot version of GPT-4 outperforms a range of other models by a wide margin, even trained classifiers for the task. The resulting annotations also permit insight into the development of solidarity over time in (west) Germany. Still, GPT-4's moderate annotation accuracy, as well as the low agreement between human annotators, indicate that solidarity in political speech remains a highly challenging concept for both humans and machines.
Archive
Previous issues
- Issue #3 (2024-07)
This CITEC UPDATE recollects and honors the probably most important scientist in CITEC's history, brings you up to date concerning the current happenings, and initiates a series of "spotlights", each featuring one of the various disciplines and research areas beyond a purely technical focus that amount to CITEC's interdisciplinary strengths - starting with Linguistics and Literature.
Thanks to Helge Ritter
On 2024-03-25, Professor Helge Ritter was formally retired from active service, but will remain with us as Senior Professor.CITEC owes a lot to Helge Ritter, more than can be summarized in a short text. Together with Professor Gerhard Sagerer, Helge Ritter is one of the founding fathers of CITEC. Without him, the term "Cognitive Interaction Technology" would not exist, nor would this wonderful building in which CITEC is located today. Helge Ritter had an early vision of what was possible at this location and how Bielefeld University could develop further. He has consistently and extremely successfully driven this forward. Helge led CITEC into the Excellence Initiative and managed to get it funded as a Cluster of Excellence for two phases. He led CITEC as scientific coordinator for 15 years. Always with a strong vision, but also with a great deal of openness to the ideas, approaches and arguments of others. Even the DFG review group noted after the first phase that Helge Ritter led the cluster “in a particularly cooperative manner". We can only confirm this to this day. He has impressed us time and again by taking ideas and distilling them in his own special way, reinterpreting them and making them even better in order to develop a clear perspective and communicate it convincingly both internally and externally.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank Helge once again on behalf of all former, current and future members of CITEC for what he has achieved. We wish him a continued exciting scientific journey with many new ideas and insights, but also time for the other beautiful things that he had to put aside during his active time.
Philipp Cimiano and Stefan Kopp, for CITEC
Spotlight: Linguistics and LiteratureCITEC's illustrious and diverse range of interdisciplinary research comprises six groups associated to the Faculty of Linguistics and Literature:
The Phonetics and Phonology group headed by Petra Wagner investigates and models the shapes and functions of communicative speech signals both in the verbal and non verbal domain, across various situations, languages, emotions or speakers. In their work, they are interested in interactions between humans as well as interactions between humans and artificial agents. Across several ongoing projects, they are currently working on the multimodal signaling of understanding, agreement or uncertainty in conversational interactions, on leveraging neural speech synthesis to enhance the (scientific and non-scientific) explanation of voice characteristics, on the evaluation of current TTS systems as well as on the scope and limits of speech perception and production deviating from canonical or expected forms. They have a strong focus on speech-in-interaction (HHI, HCI), and while much of the research focuses on German, they aim to take into account less studied languages and varieties as well as a wide range of individual speakers in their research as well. The group is happy to collaborate with anybody interested in (multimodal) speech signals, and with anybody interested in conversations or interactions in HHI and HCI/HRI.
The Experimental Pragmatics group headed by Oliver Bott focuses on the semantic and pragmatic interpretation of complex meaning by applying methods from psycholinguistics. They investigate the incremental construction of meaning from the sentence to the discourse level. In the context of CRC 1646 "Linguistic Creativity in Communication" they are intensifying their research on coercion - that is implicit shifts in meaning during compositional interpretation - both from a psycholinguistic perspective using eyetracking as well as from a formal modeling perspective. They are particularly interested in coercion as a creative mechanism underlying meaning enrichment (Project B01, PIs Oliver Bott, Torgrim Solstad & Jens Michaelis). Also within the CRC, they have started to work on citizen science approaches to linguistic creativity in the CRC's PR project (Project Ö, PIs Oliver Bott, Barbara Job & Petra Pansegrau). They are also working intensively on "anticipation of explanations due to implicit causality in language - from verbs to discourse", for which they are currently revising a project proposal and also have a number of current publications, the last of which was accepted a few days ago by Semantics and Pragmatics (title: "Cataphoric resolution of projective content: The case of occasion verbs"; Oliver Bott & Torgrim Solstad). There is also a cooperation in the project "NIHIL - Nothing is Logical" by Maria Aloni (ILLC, Amsterdam) and Fabian Schlotterbeck (Tübingen) on "Interpretation of Quantifiers - Empty Restrictors versus Empty Scope Sets". For example, there will be a joint "Sinn und Bedeutung (SuB)" talk in September in Noto, Sicily: Bott, O., F. Schlotterbeck, T. Klochowicz, S. Ramatowska & M. Aloni (2024) "Neglect-Zero Effects in the Interpretation of Quantifiers and Disjunction". The group is looking for a parental leave replacement from now until the end of March in project B01 (as a 100% PostDoc position) with the profile: "Computational modelling of coercion phenomena in type composition logic (e.g. Asher 2011) or frame semantics e.g. in combination with hybrid logic (e.g. Kallmeyer, Osswald & Pogodalla, 2017) of data on complement coercion elicited in psycholinguistic experiments".
The Computational Linguistics group headed by Sina Zarrieß develops and investigates computational models of language and linguistic phenomena in semantics, pragmatics, dialogue and multimodal communication. Their research combines methods from AI and linguistics to understand the principles and mechanisms behind human communication. Currently, they investigate whether and how language models of different sizes learn linguistic knowledge. They observe that even extremely small models often learn certain rules very effectively, but that, at the same time, very large language models still show surprising gaps in their linguistic knowledge, particularly in the domain of pragmatics. Upcoming is a ZiF resident group on "Mapping evidence to theory in ecology: Addressing the challenges of generalization and causality" with international researchers from biology, philosophy, AI. The group seeks to fill a PhD position in a project on modeling linguistic creativity in interactive reference games.
The Psycholinguistics group headed by Joana Cholin focuses on the experimental investigation and psycholinguistic modeling of fluent and non-fluent aspects of spoken language production in mono- and multilingual speech-healthy and neurologically impaired speakers. They are currently investigating the cognitive processes underlying creative language use in spoken language production and multimodal creativity in speech-gesture production. Another focus of their work is the interface between linguistic and motor planning, including monitoring and control processes. The group seeks to fill PhD positions in projects on “Linguistic Creativity in Communication” in CRC 1646.
The Clinical Linguistics group headed by Martina Hielscher-Fastabend focuses on diagnostic methods and therapy for language and speech disorders of neurological origin (aphasia, dysarthria), language acquisition problems as well as voice and communication handicaps in demanding contexts.
The Digital Linguistics group headed by Hendrik Buschmeier investigates computational modelling of the representations, processes, and behaviours underlying the human capability for interacting in dialogue. In particular, they are interested in the issue of how a joint understanding can be achieved among autonomous conversational agents (human or artificial).
Past events2024-06: At the beginning of June, the OWL Business Plan Competition took place, for which Sabrina Backs was part of the jury. The winning team in the "Research and High-Tech" category (Julian Schmitz and Luisa M. Blöbaum) comes from Bielefeld University.
2024-06-25 to 2024-06-27: The final conference of the NRW-wide graduate school DataNinja, sAIOnARA 2024, commemorated the achievements of the DataNinja.nrw research training group under the theme "Shaping Trustworthy AI: Opportunities, Innovation, and Achievements for Reliable Approaches." Highlights included keynotes by national and international AI experts, including Prof. Dr. Holger Hoos (RWTH Aachen), Prof. Dr. Kerstin Bunte (University Groningen), Prof. Dr. Christian Igel (University of Copenhagen), Prof. Dr. Sebastian Trimpe (RWTH Aachen), and more; a poster sessions that gave researchers the opportunity to showcase their work, contributed to the discourse on ethical, transparent and reliable AI systems, and awarded the DataNinja 2024 Poster Prize; and a panel discussion on "AI – needs and risks", featuring experts from academia and industry who delved deep into needs and challenges of innovation while ensuring ethical and reliable AI development.
2024-07-17 to 2024-07-21: The RoboCup@Home Team of Bielefeld (ToBi) participated in the RoboCup World Championships in Eindhoven in the Netherlands and was also heavily involved in running the complete @home competition. Johannes Kummert is member of the Executive Committee steering the @home league, Sven Wachsmuth was heading the Organizing Committee, and two of Bielefeld University's students (Kathrin Lammers and Leander von Seelstrang) helped in the on-site organization of the league and as a referee assistant.
2024-07-18: The CITEC research group Entrepreneurship led by Sabrina Backs, as always in the summer semester, offered a course where students developed their own business ideas and then pitched them to a jury. In this context, they attended pitch training at the Founders Foundation and conducted a Final Pitch Day.
Upcoming events2024-10-19 to 2024-10-20: Philipp Cimiano is organizing a workshop on "Multimodal, Affective and Interactive eXplainable Artificial Intelligence" (MAI-XAI) at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
2024-10: A workshop "XAI FOR U“ (Explainable AI for Ubiquitous, Pervasive, and Wearable Computing), in conjunction with UbiComp ´24, co-organized by Stefan Kopp, will take place for a full day either on 2024-10-05 or 2024-10-06 in Melbourne.
2024-11: A workshop „Multimodal Co-Construction of Explanations with XAI Workshop“ at the ACM ICMI 2024 will be organized by Hendrik Buschmeier and Stefan Kopp in cooperation with Teena Hassen (Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg) for a full day between 2024-11-04 and 2024-11-08 in Costa Rica.
Other newsHanna Drimalla has accepted the offer of a W2 professorship in "Human-centered Artificial Intelligence" at the Technical Faculty. Congratulations!
The research tool "Dona" for donating de-identified social messaging data by the CITEC group "Multimodal Behavior Processing" is now open source and a first dataset was made publicly available. With this tool, the group is currently trying to analyze the "digital footprint of war" by collecting data from Ukrainian refugees.
- Issue #2 (2024-05)
While many of us are actively working on the advancement of CITEC as a sustainable, future-proof institution and strengthening its strategic partnerships, it is time for round two of our newsletter, the CITEC UPDATE.
Corrections
In the previous issue's list of new CITEC PIs and research groups, Anna-Lisa Vollmer's group "Interactive Robotics in Medicine and Care" was missing, and David Johnson's group "Human-Centric Explainable AI" had been slightly misnamed. We apologize for these slips.
Past events
2024-02-02: The "Interactive Assistance in Medicine and Care" showroom of the "Medical Assistance Systems" and "Interactive Robotics in Medicine and Care" working groups was officially opened in the Medical Faculty. On 2024-04-08, the showroom was presented to the Bethel-CITEC steering committee. For inquiries or interest in exhibiting a research prototype, please contact showroom-medizin@uni-bielefeld.de. (In the future, further information about the showroom will be available here.)
2024-04-08: At the semi-annual meeting of the Bethel-CITEC steering committee, all participants were able to make significant progress in developing a common agenda.
2024-04-10: The final presentation of the KINBIOTICS project took place with great participation.
2024-04-24: A project meeting of the 3B project took place, which is sponsored by the VW Foundation and develops bots that can automatically intervene in polarizing discourses on the web. Participants are the Trinity College Dublin, University of Canberra, and Indiana University.
Upcoming events
2024-05-27: The workshop "Actionable Knowledge Representation and Reasoning for Robots" organized by Bielefeld, Bremen, Amsterdam and Open University will take place at the European Semantic Web Conference in Crete.
2024-06-05 to 2024-06-07: The final conference of the priority program "Robust Argumentation Machines" will take place at CITEC.
2024-06-12: Sina Zarrieß and other members of the Computational Linguistics Group organize the workshop "NLG in the Lowlands", which will take place in Germany for the first time, at Bielefeld University.
2024-10-19 to 2024-10-20: Philipp Cimiano is organizing a workshop on "Multimodal, Affective and Interactive eXplainable Artificial Intelligence" (MAI-XAI) at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
2024-10: A workshop "XAI FOR U“ (Explainable AI for Ubiquitous, Pervasive, and Wearable Computing), in conjunction with UbiComp ´24, co-organized by Stefan Kopp, will take place for a full day either on 2024-10-05 or 2024-10-06 in Melbourne.
2024-11: A „Multimodal Co-Construction of Explanations with XAI Workshop“ at the ACM ICMI 2024 will be organized by Hendrik Buschmeier and Stefan Kopp in cooperation with Teena Hassen (Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg) for a full day between 2024-11-04 and 2024-11-08 in Costa Rica.
Ongoing CITEC Lecture Series
The lectures still take place bi-weekly on Monday, 16:00-18:00 in the CITEC lecture hall. They are public, but especially all CITEC members as well as students enrolled in our study programs are welcome! You can find the schedule with all speakers and talks on the CITEC web page: https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/zwe/citec/environment/lecture The next talk on 2024-06-03 will be given by Klaus Neumann on "Magnetic Levitation, Robotics and Imitation Learning in Automation".
New research projects
2024-03-01: Start of EU Horizon project Infra4NextGen, in which Anja-Kristin Abendroth serves as the academic expert of the " Make it Digital" pillar.
Awards
The International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) has elevated Petra Wagner to ISCA Fellow, for her contributions to multimodal prosody, conversational interaction, and speech synthesis. The title ISCA Fellow is one of ISCA’s most prestigious honors for an individual in the field of speech science and technology, and will be openly announced during the INTERSPEECH 2024 conference.
New members
Lasse Marz is a new staff member in the EU project "Infra4NextGen – Make it Digital" with Anja-Kristin Abendroth.
Lisa Gottschalk joined the SCS Group (led by Stefan Kopp) as of May 2024, to work on AI-based multimodal creativity in speech-gesture generation within subproject C02 of CRC 1646.
Another new PhD student started on May 1st at David Johnson's group. Her name is Seham Nasr.
Thank you for reading the second CITEC UPDATE!
- 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 projects2023-10-01: 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.
AwardsBest 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 membersIn 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!