Natural and Artificial Cognition IV

Konferens

From: 2025-10-07 09:00 to 15:30
Place: Lund City Hall, Stortorget 1 Lund, Sweden and online.
Contact: Jonas [dot] Wisbrant [at] control [dot] lth [dot] se

Fika-to-fika Workshop about research on how aspects of human, animal, or artificial cognition, through communication and other forms of interaction, influence behaviour in the individual, dyadic, or collective context.

When: 7 October 09.00 – 15.30 (CET)

Where: Lund City Hall, Stortorget 1 Lund, Sweden and online.

Registration

To participate is free of charge. Sign up for on-site or online participation at ai.lu.se/2025-10-07/registration/.

Confirmed speakers and preliminary programme

9.00 Registration, posters & fika

9.25 Online meeting opens

09.30 Morning programme

Introduction

Kalle Åström, Computer Vision and Machine Learning, Coordinator Lund University profile area Natural and Artificial Cognition

Keynote 1: Active sensing collectives - a multi-disciplinary venture

Thejasvi Beleyur, Active Sensing Collectives group, Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, University of Konstanz [abstract]

Session 1: Cognition and decision-making

Short presentations and panel discussions with:

• Panos Athanasopoulos, English Studies, Lund University
  Experimental cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, linguistic relativity, bilingual cognition, language acquisition to understand to what extent speakers of different languages think and perceive the world differently and to what extent additional language learning transform the way we perceive the world.
• Ines Bramao, Psychology, Lund University
  Cognitive and neural processes underlying episodic memory.  Behavioural and cognitive testing in combination with advanced analysis methods
• Erik Wengström, Economics, Lund University
  Decision making, delving into the intricacies of how incentives, social concerns, and cognitive processes shape our choices.

Keynote 2: Christine Howes, Philosophy, Linguistics, Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg 

12.00 Lunch and poster session

12.55 Online meeting opens

13.00 Afternoon programme**

Session 2: AI, vision and language

Short presentations and panel discussions with:

• Sonja Aits, Cell Death, Lysosomes and Artificial Intelligence, Lund University
  AI/ML methods in Medical and Biological Research, AI/ML for structural biology, neutron and x-ray science, Educational tools for learning about AI, AI in health care and pharma. AI Lund Coordination group.
• Hanna Bäck, Political Science, Lund University
  Political behaviour and political psychology, focusing mainly on explaining protest activity, radicalisation and affective polarisation. NAC Steering group.
• Viktor Larsson, Computer Vision and Machine Learning, Lund University
  Focused on robust estimation problems that appear in 3D computer vision e.g. Structure-from-Motion, visual localisation and Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping

Session 3: Networks and communication

Short presentations and panel discussions with:

• Michael Bossetta, Media and Communication Studies, Lund University
  How politicians and citizens use social media to campaign during elections. Particularly interested in how platform design influences how social media are used for politics.
• Anamaria Dutceac Segesten, Strategic Communication, Lund University
  AI as a method in social science research, computational social science, NLP, social network analysis, AI and politics.
• Anders Rantzer, Automatic Control, Lund University
  Modelling, analysis and synthesis of control systems, with particular attention to uncertainty, optimisation and distributed control.

≈ 14.30  Poster session, fika and mingle

**Continue the afternoon at SweCog25

This year the anual NAC workshop is co-located in space, and partly in time with the Swedish national conference SweCog25 - open for registration at ht-lu.se. After, and partly in parallell, with the NAC workshop you are welcome to participate in one ore more workshops at the Swedish national conference SweCog25 also at Lund City Hall. On the SweCog25 website the following workshops are listed:

• Exploring Human-Robot Interaction: A Wizard of Oz Workshop with Epi
• Felt and Situated Ethics: Beyond Regulations, Approval and Consent
• Introducing DuckSoup: A platform to perform social interaction experiments online while manipulating participants’ voice and face
• Magic & Cognitive Science: Adapting Tricks for Research and Teaching

Read more and sign up for the SweCog Workshops at konferens.ht.lu.se/swecog-2025

Continue at SweCog25 Conference 8 and 9 October?

You find the full programme and sign up form at: https://konferens.ht.lu.se/swecog-2025

Registration to NAC WS 7 October

To participate is free of charge. Sign up for on-site or online participation at ai.lu.se/2025-10-07/registration/.

Organisation and contact

• Hanna Bäck, Political Science
• Erik Wengström, Economics
• Ines Bramao, Psychology
• Panos Athanasopoulos, English Studies
• Sonja Aits, Cell Death, Lysosomes and Artificial Intelligence
• Jonas Wisbrant, AI Lund, NAC

Thejasvi Beleyur abstract: When multiple active sensing agents (animals or robots) come together in decentralised groups they face the issue of jamming. Truly decentralised active-sensing robot groups are difficult to engineer. Animals like echolocating bats however live and fly regularly in large groups of tens to thousands of individuals only using sound. I will discuss our attempts at understanding what happens in echolocating bat groups and the strategies they may be using through a mix of computational modelling, controlled swarm robotics experiments and multi-sensor characterization of bat groups in the wild.