Events & Talks

Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 23-02-2024 Creating a Haptic Empathetic Robot Animal That Feels Touch and Emotion Social touch, such as a hug or a poke on the shoulder, is an essential aspect of everyday interaction. Humans use social touch to gain attention, communicate needs, express emotions, and build social bonds. Despite its importance, touch sensing is very limited in most commercially available robots. By endowing robots with social-touch perception, one can unlock a myriad of new interaction possibilities. In this talk, I will present my work on creating a Haptic Empathetic Robot Animal (HERA), a koala-like robot for children with autism. I will demonstrate the importance of establishing desig... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Rachael Burns

Symposium 08-02-2024 IMPRS-IS 2024 Interview Symposium Keynotes All members of the IMPRS-IS community are invited to attend the eighth annual interview symposium taking place from Thursday, February 1, to Friday, February 9, 2024. The event will feature two keynote presentations from IMPRS-IS faculty Dr. Wieland Brendel and Prof. Andreas Bulling. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Leila Masri Sara Sorce

Haptic Intelligence Talk 23-01-2024 Constructing Perceptions: A Sociological Perspective on Sensors The sensory perception of the world, including seeing and hearing, tasting and smelling,touching and feeling, are necessary social skills to become a social counterpart. In this context,the construction of a perceptible technology is an intersection where technical artifacts have the capability to interact and sense their environment. Sensors as technical artifacts not only measure various (physical) states, with their presented results influencing perceptions and actions, but they also undergo technical and computational processing. Sensors generate differences by capturing and measuring ... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Perceiving Systems Talk 18-01-2024 Mining Visual Knowledge from Large Pre-trained Models Computer vision made huge progress in the past decade with the dominant supervised learning paradigm, that is training large-scale neural networks on each task with ever larger datasets. However, in many cases, scalable data or annotation collection is intractable. In contrast, humans can easily adapt to new vision tasks with very little data or labels. In order to bridge this gap, we found that there actually exists rich visual knowledge in large pre-trained models, i.e., models trained on scalable internet images with either self-supervised or generative objectives. And we proposed differ... Yuliang Xiu Yandong Wen

Haptic Intelligence Talk 07-12-2023 Biomechanics and Control of Agile Locomotion: from Walking to Jumping Animals seem to effortlessly navigate complex terrain. This is in stark contrast with even the most advanced robot, illustrating that navigating complex terrain is by no means trivial. Humans’ neuromusculoskeletal system is equipped with two key mechanisms that allow us to recover from unexpected perturbations: muscle intrinsic properties and sensory-driven feedback control. We used unique in vivo and in situ approaches to explore how guinea fowl (Numida meleagris) integrate these two mechanisms to maintain robust locomotion. For example, our work showed a modular task-level control of leg ... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Andrew Schulz

Perceiving Systems Talk 30-11-2023 RAVEN: Rethinking Adversarial Video generation with Efficient tri-plane Networks We present a novel unconditional video generative model designed to address long-term spatial and temporal dependencies. To capture these dependencies, our approach incorporates a hybrid explicit-implicit tri-plane representation inspired by 3D-aware generative frameworks developed for three-dimensional object representation and employs a singular latent code to model an entire video sequence. Individual video frames are then synthesized from an intermediate tri-plane representation, which itself is derived from the primary latent code. This novel strategy reduces computational complexity b... Yandong Wen

Event 11-11-2023 Tübingen Science&Innovation Days 2023 / Open House MPI-IS The Max Planck facilities of the Tübingen Max Planck Campus invite interested people of all ages to take a look behind the scenes of basic research. Claudia Daefler Nisha Tyagi

Perceiving Systems Talk 19-10-2023 Orthogonal Butterfly: Parameter-Efficient Orthogonal Adaptation of Foundation Models via Butterfly Factorization Large foundation models are becoming ubiquitous, but training them from scratch is prohibitively expensive. Thus, efficiently adapting these powerful models to downstream tasks is increasingly important. In this paper, we study a principled finetuning paradigm -- Orthogonal Finetuning (OFT) -- for downstream task adaptation. Despite demonstrating good generalizability, OFT still uses a fairly large number of trainable parameters due to the high dimensionality of orthogonal matrices. To address this, we start by examining OFT from an information transmission perspective, and then identify a ... Yandong Wen

Haptic Intelligence Talk 17-10-2023 Project neuroArm: Image-guided Medical Robotics Program Project neuroArm was established in 2002, with the idea of building the world’s first robot for brain surgery and stereotaxy. With the launch (2007) and integration of the neuroArm robot in the neurosurgical operating room (May 2008), the project continues to spawn newer technological innovations, advance tele-robotics through sensors and AI, and intelligent surgical systems towards improving safety of surgery. This talk will provide a high-level overview of two such technologies the team at Project neuroArm is currently developing and deploying: i) neuroArm+HD, a medical-grade sensory imme... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Rachael Lorsa

Perceiving Systems Talk 12-10-2023 Ghost on the Shell: An Expressive Representation of General 3D Shapes The creation of photorealistic virtual worlds requires the accurate modeling of 3D surface geometry for a wide range of objects. For this, meshes are appealing since they enable 1) fast physics-based rendering with realistic material and lighting, 2) physical simulation, and 3) are memory-efficient for modern graphics pipelines. Recent work on reconstructing and statistically modeling 3D shape, however, has critiqued meshes as being topologically inflexible. To capture a wide range of object shapes, any 3D representation must be able to model solid, watertight, shapes as well as thin, open,... Yandong Wen

Haptic Intelligence Talk 10-10-2023 Towards Seamless Handovers with Legged Manipulators Deploying perception and control modules for handovers is challenging because they require a high degree of robustness and generalizability to work reliably for a diversity of objects and situations, but also adaptivity to adjust to individual preferences. On legged robots, deployment is particularly challenging because of the limited computational resources and the additional sensing noise resulting from locomotion. In this talk, I will discuss how we tackle some of these challenges, by first introducing our perception framework and discussing the insights of the first human-robot handover... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 09-10-2023 Gesture-Based Nonverbal Interaction for Exercise Robots When teaching or coaching, humans augment their words with carefully timed hand gestures, head and body movements, and facial expressions to provide feedback to their students. Robots, however, rarely utilize these nuanced cues. A minimally supervised social robot equipped with these abilities could support people in exercising, physical therapy, and learning new activities. This thesis examines how the intuitive power of human gestures can be harnessed to enhance human-robot interaction. To address this question, this research explores gesture-based interactions to expand the capabilities ... Mayumi Mohan Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Embodied Vision Talk 28-09-2023 Physics-Based Rigid Body Object Tracking and Friction Filtering From RGB-D Videos Physics-based understanding of object interactions from sensory observations is an essential capability in augmented reality and robotics. It enables to capture the properties of a scene for simulation and control. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for real-to-sim which tracks rigid objects in 3D from RGB-D images and infers physical properties of the objects. We use a differentiable physics simulation as state-transition model in an Extended Kalman Filter, which can model contact and friction for arbitrary mesh-based shapes and in this way estimate physically plausible trajectorie... Yandong Wen

Event 14-09-2023 IMPRS-IS 2023 Boot Camp: Mental Health in Academia The 2023 IMPRS-IS Boot Camp will take place from Wednesday, September 13 to Friday, September 15, on the campuses of MPI-IS, the University of Stuttgart, and the University of Tübingen. Mental health awareness in academia is a focus of this year's event with special talk by by clinical psychologist and neuroscientist Dr. Desiree Dickerson, followed by a panel discussion covering the topic. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Leila Masri Sara Sorce

Event 13-09-2023 IMPRS-IS 2023 Boot Camp: Keynote by Iyad Rahwan The 2023 IMPRS-IS Boot Camp will take place from Wednesday, September 13 to Friday, September 15, on the campuses of MPI-IS, the University of Stuttgart, and the University of Tübingen. A highlight of this year’s boot camp will be a scientific keynote by Dr. Iyad Rahwan, an expert on the future impact of digital technologies. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Leila Masri Sara Sorce

Perceiving Systems Talk 17-08-2023 Face Exploration - Capture all Degrees of Freedom of the Face A high quality data capture is decisive for your scientific work. As a member of the data team, it is a core task of my daily routine to ensure good quality standards in this field. My talk will enlighten the background of this work, starting from scanner set-up and the corresponding data outcome with focus on the Face Scanner. A work, each scientist can profit from for his personal projects. I will take the occasion to present our most recent face capture study named FACE EXPLORATION, of which Timo Bolkart is the leading scientist. A selection of representative sequences including facial m... Yandong Wen

Robotic Materials Talk 18-07-2023 Nature-inspired designs for innovating soft robotic grippers and prosthetics In this talk, I will discuss the cutting-edge research conducted at our Soft Robotics Research Center and Biorobotics Lab, with an emphasis on the development of grippers and prosthetics inspired by the adaptive behaviors and embodied intelligence observed in nature. Traditional robots are designed for structured environments and navigate unstructured environments using sensors and intricate computation. To adapt to and flourish in unstructured environments, nature employs simple embodied intelligence, which does not necessarily require sensing or complex computation. Christoph Keplinger Metin Sitti

Event 14-07-2023 2023 Intelligent Systems Summer Colloquium & Summer Party The Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems is delighted to invite you to its <br> annual scientific summer event & alumni meeting Michael Black Matthias Tröndle Barbara Kettemann Nisha Tyagi

Talk 14-07-2023 Why This is (Not) the End of Research in Generative AI: Stable Diffusion & the Revolution in Visual Synthesis Recently, deep generative modeling has become the most prominent paradigm for learning powerful representations of our (visual) world and for generating novel samples thereof. At the same time, most of the progress came from sizing up models - to the point where the development seemed to be restricted to few big tech companies with boundless resources and with implications on future (academic) research, industry, and society. Michael Black

Perceiving Systems Talk 13-07-2023 Full-body avatars from single images and textual guidance The reconstruction of full body appearance of clothed humans from single-view RGB images is a crucial yet challenging task, primarily due to depth ambiguities and the absence of observations from unseen regions. While existing methods have shown impressive results, they still suffer from limitations such as over-smooth surfaces and blurry textures, particularly lacking details at the backside of the avatar. In this talk, I will delve into how we have addressed these limitations by leveraging text guidance and pretrained text-image models, introducing two novel methods. Firstly, I will prese... Hongwei Yi

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium 07-07-2023 Wearable Haptics for Virtual Reality Current virtual reality systems mainly rely on hand-held controllers, which can only provide six-dimensional motion tracking and vibrotactile feedback to users. One promising solution for improving immersion is to develop wearable systems that can capture over 20-DoF hand motion and provide distributed kinesthetic and tactile feedback to the skin. In this talk, I will discuss the technical challenges for developing high-fidelity wearable haptic systems, and then introduce our work on haptic gloves, hand-based haptic rendering algorithms, and the applications of wearable haptic systems in me... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Physical Intelligence Talk 04-07-2023 Collective Dynamics: from natural to artificial systems Collective dynamics is referred to as the correlations in the cooperative motion of a many-particle system. It exists on all lengths and time scales and in different systems, ranging from bacteria to robots. Here, the interactions between large numbers of relatively simple individuals result in complex emergent global patterns. The success of these systems is typically associated with their functional robustness and adaptability against perturbations. Here I will discuss swarming with the help of different examples, as viewed from the perspective of the complex system. I will focus on ach... Metin Sitti

Talk 12-06-2023 IntCDC Constructive Conversations: "Opportunities in Collective Robotic Construction, viewpoints from the robotics field". The increasing need for safe, inexpensive, and sustainable construction, combined with novel technological enablers, has made large-scale construction by robot teams an active research area. Collective robotic construction (CRC) specifically concerns embodied, autonomous, multirobot systems that modify a shared environment according to high-level user-specified goals. CRC tightly integrates architectural design, the construction process, mechanisms, and control to achieve scalability and adaptability. In this lecture, which is closely tied to the related review article in Science Robotics 2...

Haptic Intelligence Talk 09-06-2023 Biomechanics, Estimation, and Augmentation of Human Balance during Perturbed Locomotion Recent advances in wearable robotics have unveiled the potential of exoskeletons to augment human locomotion across a variety of environments. However, few studies have evaluated the capability of these devices to augment human balance during unstable locomotion. In this talk, I will discuss how we’re threading together biomechanics, mechanical and mechatronic design, wearable sensor-informed machine learning, and controls to work towards a balance-augmenting exoskeleton. I’ll start by discussing human balance, recovery strategies, and some of the most challenging destabilizing scenarios th... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Andrew Schulz

Max Planck Lecture 26-05-2023 Common Sense: the Dark Matter of Language and Intelligence The Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems is delighted to invite you to its 2023 Max Planck Lecture in Tübingen. Moritz Hardt Michael Black Bernhard Schölkopf Matthias Tröndle Barbara Kettemann Nisha Tyagi

Talk 24-05-2023 Designing Robotic Systems with Collective Embodied Intelligence Natural swarms exhibit sophisticated colony-level behaviors with remarkable scalability and error tolerance. Their evolutionary success stems from more than just intelligent individuals, it hinges on their morphology, their physical interactions, and the way they shape and leverage their environment. Mound-building termites, for instance, are believed to use their own body as a template for construction; the resulting dirt mound serves, among other things, to regulate volatile pheromone cues which in turn guide further construction and colony growth. Throughout this talk I will argue how we... Metin Sitti Barbara Kettemann

Talk 23-05-2023 Abstraction Barriers for Embodied Algorithms Designing robotic systems to reliably modify their environment typically requires expert engineers and several design iterations. This talk will cover abstraction barriers that can be used to make the process of building such systems easier and the results more predictable. By focusing on approximate mathematical representations that model the process dynamics, these representations can be used both to design high-level algorithms and physical robotic systems to solve complex construction tasks. This talk will present ongoing work for two types of abstraction barriers, which can represent ... Metin Sitti Barbara Kettemann

Talk 22-05-2023 Special Talk: Certifiably Robust Learning via Knowledge-Enabled Logical Reasoning The ubiquity of intelligent systems underscores the paramount importance of ensuring their trustworthiness. Traditional machine learning approaches often assume that training and test data follow similar distributions, neglecting the possibility of adversaries manipulating either distribution or natural distribution shifts, which can lead to severe trustworthiness issues in machine learning. Our previous research has demonstrated that motivated adversaries can circumvent anomaly detection or other machine learning models at test-time through evasion attacks, or inject malicious instances in... Moritz Hardt Eva Laemmerhirt

Haptic Intelligence Talk 16-05-2023 Movement Augmentation for Robot-Assisted Surgery Many surgical tasks require using three or more tools simultaneously. Currently, surgeries are typically performed by a main surgeon and an assistant, where it is known that their performance can be affected by miscommunications. Providing the surgeon with tools and techniques to control three or four surgical tools by themself would avoid miscommunication and could improve the outcome of surgery. However, the current interfaces allowing a surgeon to control several tools offer only limited precision, dexterity and intuitiveness. Therefore, I developed a dedicated foot interface and techniq... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Haptic Intelligence Talk 15-05-2023 Embedded Sensing and Control for Multi-unit Soft Robotic Systems Due to the deformable and compliant nature of soft systems, there has been an ongoing need to address the challenges of state estimation and environmental interaction using embedded and distributed sensing. In this talk, I will be sharing the steps I took to develop reliable soft sensors that can be scaled up to control the movements and interactions of various multiunit, electrostatic systems. Initially, I focused on characterizing, sensing, and controlling a single HASEL actuator. However, during this process, we discovered issues with the current method of sensing the movement of these e... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Robotic Materials Talk 12-05-2023 Instability-driven Pattern Formations for Dynamically Tunable Functionalities in Soft Magneto-Active Materials Nature actively uses sophisticated designs of microstructures to achieve astonishing material properties and functionalities. Thus, microstructures give rise to the incredible toughness of mother-of-pearl. Another example is an octopus, an amazingly effective soft machine created by nature. The creature can squeeze its whole body through an extremely narrow space while preserving a large variety of functionalities. The nature-created soft machine comprises highly deformable composites that are characterized by different dynamically tunable microstructures and phase properties, depending on ... Christoph Keplinger Xiying Li Brian Johnson

Haptic Intelligence Talk 03-05-2023 Continual Ambulatory Monitoring (Bio-Monitor) & Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) Advancements in technology have enabled human physiology and health to be assessed in places and ways that were not previously possible. This presentation provides an overview of the smart-shirt technology used during bed rest and spaceflight investigations both on the ground and aboard the International Space Station. Techniques to obtain high-fidelity, un-intrusive physiological measurements of ambulatory individuals and the application of machine learning to predict oxygen uptake from the wearable sensor data will be discussed. The utilization of near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) on the ... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Rachael Lorsa

Haptic Intelligence Talk 03-05-2023 Novel Methods for Assessing Jugular Hemodynamics Spaceflight induces a headward fluid shift that alters the distribution of blood volume in the human body, leading to distension of astronauts’ veins in their head and neck region while in space. Recently, a jugular venous thrombosis was identified in an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, suggesting an increased risk of thrombus formation. New techniques are needed to better characterize jugular hemodynamics in order understand the risks associated with spaceflight. This presentation provides an overview of high frame rate ultrasound and coded hemodynamic imaging, which are n... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Rachael Lorsa

Perceiving Systems Talk 13-04-2023 Pose, Kinematics, and Dynamics Recovering accurate 3D human pose and shape from monocular input remains a challenging problem despite the rapid advancements powered by deep neural networks. Existing methods have limitations in achieving both robustness and mesh-image alignment, and the estimated pose suffers from physical artifacts such as foot sliding and body leaning. In this talk, we present two new methods to address these limitations. Firstly, we introduce NIKI, an inverse kinematics algorithm that utilizes an invertible neural network to model both the forward kinematics process and the inverse kinematics process. ... Michael Black

Talk 30-03-2023 Special Talk: Scaling Robot Learning with Language, Logic, and Youtube My long-term research goal is to enable real robots to perform many different tasks in a wide variety of application scenarios, such as in our homes, in hospitals, warehouses, or factories. Many of these tasks require long-horizon reasoning and sequencing of skills to achieve a goal state, which is typically tackled using a hierarchical approach that involves task and motion planners. I will present our work on scaling up long-horizon reasoning for a diverse set of objects, manipulation skills, and tasks. The talk will take a system-level perspective and demonstrate how learning-based appro... Michael Black Eva Laemmerhirt

Perceiving Systems Talk 29-03-2023 Language is the key to robust vision systems The ability to extend a model beyond the domain of the training data is central to building robust computer vision models. Methods for dealing with unseen test distributions or biased training data often require leveraging additional image data, but linguistic knowledge of the task and potential domain shifts is much cheaper and easier to obtain. In this talk, I will present three recent works that focus on different ways one can improve accuracy with language advice and incomplete training data via large-scale vision and language models. Lea Müller

Talk 27-03-2023 Special Talk: Socially Responsible Language Technologies for Social Impact Natural language processing (NLP) has had increasing success and produced extensive industrial applications. Despite being sufficient to enable these applications, current NLP systems often ignore the social part of language, e.g., who says it, in what context, for what goals, and with what social implications, all of which severely limits the functionality of these applications and the growth of the field. In this talk, I introduce socially aware NLP to show how we can study and build NLP systems from a social perspective using two specific studies. The first part looks at bias in NLP aga... Moritz Hardt Eva Laemmerhirt

Perceiving Systems Talk 23-02-2023 Neural Graphics in a Generative World Recent years have seen significant advancements in deep learning, which has led to a growing belief that Moore's law, which traditionally pertained to the packing of transistors, is now transitioning towards the improvement of photo-realistic 3D graphics. The advancements in this research field can be broadly categorized into two areas: neural fields, which are capable of modeling photo-realistic 3D representations, and diffusion models, which are able to generalize to large scale data and produce photo-realistic images. To combine these technologies for large scale 3D generative modeling, ... Sai Kumar Dwivedi

Perceiving Systems Talk 16-02-2023 What do language models tell us about human-object interaction? Research in artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance quickly and outperforms humans in many tasks, making its way into our daily lives. However, beneath their superior performance, current technologies, limited in how to perceive, process, and understand our visual world, struggle with understanding and interacting with people. These issues raise the core question of my research: How do we build intelligent systems that can interact with people and offer assistance in a natural and seamless way? In this talk, I will present our recent works on using the CLIP model for object intera... Muhammed Kocabas

Haptic Intelligence Talk 10-02-2023 Designing Embodied Vibrotactile Feedback Technology shapes our perception of the world in many ways. From an Human Computer Interaction (HCI) perspective, one important way in which this happens is through mediation of information. In HCI, vibration is often used to create symbols for mediating information hermeneutically. One of my research interests is to design vibrotactile signals which employ embodied mechanisms of mediation. I demonstrate how a useful approach for such designs is to switch the focus away from the object or event which is to be represented with a vibrotactile signal, and instead focus on the action the user m... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Talk 10-02-2023 International Day of Women and Girls in Science Talk by Dr. Aenne Brielmann: "Quantifying beauty: Finding my way into combining arts and science", followed by a panel discussion Alona Shagan Daniela Macari Oliwia Gust

Physical Intelligence Talk 24-01-2023 Next-generation Fiber-based Biomedical, Neural, and Robotic Interfaces To investigate and control the biological/neural system, it is essential to develop the techniques and devices capable of recording and modulating cellular signals as well as freely moving inside the body. However, current interfaces are limited in many factors such as mechanical invasiveness, non-adaptability (flexibility/stretchability), less-functionality, and limited form factors. Naturally, there is a huge need for new systems allowing for precise manipulation and monitoring of cellular and neural activities with high adaptability and minimal invasiveness. Application of fiber-based ...

Haptic Intelligence Talk 23-01-2023 Mechanics and Materials of the Elephant Trunk with Applications to Conservation Technology An elephant trunk is both flexible and strong, able to pick up peanuts and uproot entire trees. This versatility has made the elephant a model for soft robotics studies that seek to build strong, flexible manipulators. By observing elephant behaviors during different mechanical tasks including elongation, wrapping, and suction feeding we can begin to understand the limitations and capabilities of this hydrostat. We further the understanding of these behaviors by looking into the mechanical properties of the elephant trunk’s skin including the wrinkled behavior commonly seen externally. Us... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Perceiving Systems Talk 19-01-2023 Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Models Human motion modeling is important for many modern graphics applications, which typically require professional skills. In order to remove the skill barriers for laymen, recent motion generation methods can directly generate human motions conditioned on natural languages, speech, and music. However, it remains challenging to achieve diverse and fine-grained motion generation with comprehensive condition signals. Inspired by the success in image generation, recent works attempt to apply diffusion models to motion generation tasks (Motion Diffusion Models) and achieve impressive progress in as... Shashank Tripathi

Symposium 17-01-2023 - 20-01-2023 IMPRS-IS 2023 Interview Symposium Keynotes All members of the IMPRS-IS community are invited to attend the seventh annual interview symposium taking place from Tuesday, January 17, to Friday, January 20, 2023. The event will feature two keynote presentations from IMPRS-IS faculty Dr. Daniel Häufle of the University of Tübingen and Dr. Mathias Niepert of the University of Stuttgart. Leila Masri Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Sara Sorce

Perceiving Systems Talk 12-01-2023 Data Infrastructure for Scaling up Human Understanding and Modelling to the Real World Human sensing and modelling are fundamental tasks in vision and graphics with numerous applications. However, due to the prohibitive cost, existing datasets are often limited in scale and diversity. This talk shares two of our recent works to tackle data scarcity. First, with the advances of new sensors and algorithms, paired data can be obtained from an inexpensive set-up and an automatic annotation pipeline. Specifically, we demonstrate the data collection solution by introducing HuMMan, a large-scale multimodal 4D human dataset. HuMMan has several appealing properties: 1) multimodal data... Shashank Tripathi

Haptic Intelligence PhD Thesis Defense 21-12-2022 Multi-Timescale Representation Learning of Human and Robot Haptic Interactions The sense of touch is one of the most crucial components of the human sensory system. It allows us to safely and intelligently interact with the physical objects and environment around us. By simply touching or dexterously manipulating an object, we can quickly infer a multitude of its properties. For more than fifty years, researchers have studied how humans physically explore and form perceptual representations of objects. Some of these works proposed the paradigm through which human haptic exploration is presently understood: humans use a particular set of exploratory procedures to... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker Ben Richardson

Haptic Intelligence Talk 16-12-2022 Vibrotactile Communications: Delivering Immersive Remote Touch Experiences Vibrotactile signals play an important role in human perception of haptic interactions and object surfaces. Thus, conveying these cues with high quality is vital for an immersive and pleasant experience. In order to create true immersion, many points of interaction need to be conveyed to human users. Thus, when conveying vibrotactile cues over the internet, a large number of signal channels must be transmitted that results in a high data throughput. In order to enable this, we design efficient data compression methods. For the human user receiving the signal to perceive these signals at hig... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Conference 12-12-2022 - 13-12-2022 Max Planck & Amazon Science Hub Inauguration On December 12 and 13, 2022, Amazon and the Max Planck Society (MPG) will jointly host an inauguration event, celebrating the launch of our new collaboration, the Max Planck & Amazon Science Hub, and bringing together our research communities.

Haptic Intelligence IS Colloquium 08-12-2022 Interdisciplinary Pathways to Responsible Human-Technology Partnership How can we design technology in a way that optimally supports human demands in everyday life? And how can we mitigate system-generated biases to facilitate a trustworthy human-technology partnership? At the intersection of cognitive psychology, human-machine interaction, education, and artificial intelligence, my team and I apply a broad portfolio of experimental lab, field, and online studies, user-centered software development, and modeling and simulation techniques. Together with collaborators from academia, industry, and education, our ultimate goal is to design and evaluate responsible... Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

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