Welcome to the Center for Science and Thought
The Center for Science and Thought (CST) is a radically interdisciplinary platform designed to address urgent questions that arise at the intersection of philosophy and various natural sciences.
The CST is located at Konrad-Zuse-Platz 1-3, 53227 Bonn.
Current News of the CST
Dr. Nicholas Kluge Corrêa, Postdoctoral AI Researcher at the Center for Science and Thought, University of Bonn, was recently invited by the OECD to participate in the OECD-African Union (AU) Artificial Intelligence (AI) Dialogue 2.0 – AI in Africa: From strategy to implementation.
To stimulate the future of open development of neural text generation in Portuguese, Nicholas Kluge Corrêa and colleagues present both GigaVerbo, a concatenation of deduplicated Portuguese text corpora amounting to 200 billion tokens, and Tucano, a series of decoder-transformers natively pre-trained in Portuguese.
Dr. Chelsea Haramia was appointed as a new member of the Science Advisory Board of the SETI Institute in California in August 2024. The institute focuses on the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life.
Here you can find additional news.
Events of the CST
Friday, November 22nd, 14:15-16:00
Juridicum Bonn, Room 1.016
An interoperable lesson from comparative studies of AI policies and jurisdictions among international fora.
The use of AI should be ethical, fair, reliable, secure, inclusive, transparent and controllable. However, this also raises questions, for example about how these goals can be achieved in practice and what happens when they come into conflict with each other.
These and similar questions will be discussed by the experts Olivia J. Erdélyi, Theodore S. Boone and Robert Kroplewski.
Tuesday, November 12, 2024, 7pm
Deutsches Museum Bonn
The event series "KI erklärt" aims to make the „myth“ of artificial intelligence more accessible to a broader audience.
Together with leading experts, we explain fundamental concepts and functionalities of artificial intelligence and discuss ethical, economical and political question.
For the first event, the focus will be on regulation of AI: In two talks, AI experts Olivia J. Erdélyi and Was Rahman will explain the fundamental concepts behind AI-technology and shed light on what control and regulation of AI (can) look like. Afterwards, there will be the opportunity for questions and discussion. The event well be held in German.
The seminar series "Cross-Cultural Approaches to Desirable AI" aims to encourage intercultural and interdisciplinary discussion on the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI). Its primary focus is to support and develop research on AI and social justice, particularly from intersectional feminist and anti-racist perspectives. "Cross-Cultural Approaches to Desirable AI" is a collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge, Bonn, Tokyo and the University of Europe for Applied Sciences.
Here you can find more events.
Research of the CST
The aim of the project is to develop procedures to examine generally accepted standards for AI systems and their verification, as well as to explore business models for an AI certification. Our research investigates the ethical-philosophical significance of these dimensions.
Rethinking AI for Just and Sustainable Futures.
We investigate how to design AI (artificial intelligence) and other digital technologies in a responsible way, placing the questions of social justice and environmental sustainability at the very heart of our work.
Our research program is a collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge and Bonn and numerous international partners, and is funded by the Mercator Foundation in Germany.
The 'Towards New Demarcation Criteria for Borderline Consciousness' Project is an interdisciplinary project involving a collaboration between philosophers of Bonn and Cambridge and neuroscientists from the epilepsy clinic in Bonn. Its main purpose is to create an international research forum to develop new criteria for determining whether and when non-human entities, such as non-linguistic animals, new brain organisms, or advanced AI systems can be considered conscious.
You can find more information about our research projects here.
This summer semester, most of the sessions of the CST AI research group will be convened by Audrey Borowski, as part of her "AI and the Digital" Seminar Series.
You can find a selection of publications here.
Register here here for our AI-Mailinglist.