Topic: communication

Investigate how cultural grooming behaviour relates to communication, coordination and social bonds in great apes in Zoë Goldsborough’s group. The project combines existing video records, wild fieldwork and quantitative behavioural analysis, including the grooming handclasp. The fully funded 3.5-year doctorate is a full-time position paid at 65% of TVöD E13, with a planned start between January and March 2027.

Chris Budd describes conversations between AI researchers and UK parliamentarians during Evidence Week. The episode examines algorithmic bias, potential medical applications and the mathematical foundations needed to understand AI. It considers how communication between researchers and policymakers, together with stronger mathematics education, can inform decisions about the technology.

Non-human great apes inform one another in ways that can seem very humanlike. Especially in the gestural domain, their behavior exhibits many similarities with human communication, meeting widely used empirical criteria for intentionality. At the same time, there remain some manifest differences. How to account for these similarities and differences in a unified way remains a major challenge. This presentation will summarise the arguments developed in a recent paper with Christophe Heintz. We make a key distinction between the expression of intentions (Ladyginian) and the expression of specifi

What do nonhuman primates know about each other and their social environment, how do they allocate their attention, and what are the functional consequences of social decisions in natural settings? Addressing these questions is crucial to hone in on the co-evolution of cognition, social behaviour and communication, and ultimately the evolution of intelligence in the primate order. I will present results from field experimental and observational studies on free-ranging baboons, which tap into the cognitive abilities of these animals. Baboons are particularly valuable in this context as differen

Understanding the brain is not only intrinsically fascinating, but also highly relevant to increase our well-being since our brain exhibits a power over the body that makes it capable both of provoking illness or facilitating the healing process. Bearing in mind this dark force, brain sciences have undergone and will undergo an important revolution, redefining its boundaries beyond the cranial cavity. During this presentation, we will discuss about the communication between the brain and other systems that shapes how we feel the external word and how we think. We are starting to unravel how ou

Bioluminescence, which is rare on land, is extremely common in the deep sea, being found in 80% of the animals living between 200 and 1000 m. These animals rely on bioluminescence for communication, feeding, and/or defense, so the generation and detection of light is essential to their survival. Our present knowledge of this phenomenon has been limited due to the difficulty in bringing up live deep-sea animals to the surface, and the lack of proper techniques needed to study this complex system. However, new genomic techniques are now available, and a team with extensive experience in deep-

The Interdisciplinary College is an annual spring school which offers a dense state-of-the-art course program in neurobiology, neural computation, cognitive science/psychology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics and philosophy. It is aimed at students, postgraduates and researchers from academia and industry. This year's focus theme "Flexibility" covers (but not be limited to) the nervous system, the mind, communication, and AI & robotics. All this will be packed into a rich, interdisciplinary program of single- and multi-lecture courses, and less traditional formats.

Being fundamentally a non-equilibrium process, synchronization comes with unavoidable energy costs and has to be maintained under the constraint of limited resources. Such resource constraints are often reflected as a finite coupling budget available in a network to facilitate interaction and communication. In this talk, I will show that introducing temporal variation in the network structure can lead to efficient synchronization even when stable synchrony is impossible in any static network under the given budget. Our strategy is based on an open-loop control scheme and alludes to a fundament

Our world is full of living creatures that must share information to survive and reproduce. As humans, we easily forget how hard it is to communicate within natural environments. So how do organisms solve this challenge, using only natural resources? Ideas from computer science, physics and mathematics, such as energetic cost, compression, and detectability, define universal criteria that almost all communication systems must meet. We use insect swarms as a model system for identifying how organisms harness the dynamics of communication signals, perform spatiotemporal integration of these sign

Analogies, broadly defined, map novel concepts onto familiar concepts, making them essential for perception, reasoning, and communication. We argue that analogy-building served a critical role in the evolution of cumulative culture, by allowing humans to learn and transmit complex behavioural sequences that would otherwise be too cognitively demanding or opaque to acquire. The emergence of a protolanguage consisting of simple labels would have provided early humans with the cognitive tools to build explicit analogies and to communicate them to others. This focus on analogy-building can shed ne

Ingebrigt Steen Jensen discusses cooperation, communication and collective achievement, drawing on experiences in football and organizational life. First conversation in Norwegian.