Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed by machines to some extent. Yet, the artificial creatures are lagging behind. The key foundation is an internal representation of the body that the agent - human, animal, or robot - has developed. The mechanisms of operation of body models in the brain are largely unknown and even less is known about how they are constructed from experience after birth. In collaboration with developmental psychologists, we conducted targeted experiments to understand how infants acquire first "sensorimotor body knowledge". These experiments inform our work in which we construct embodied computational models on humanoid robots that address the mechanisms behind learning, adaptation, and operation of multimodal body representations. At the same time, we assess which of the features of the "body in the brain" should be transferred to robots to give rise to more adaptive and resilient, self-calibrating machines. We extend traditional robot kinematic calibration focusing on self-contained approaches where no external metrology is needed: self-contact and self-observation. Problem formulation allowing to combine several ways of closing the kinematic chain simultaneously is presented, along with a calibration toolbox and experimental validation on several robot platforms. Finally, next to models of the body itself, we study peripersonal space - the space immediately surrounding the body. Again, embodied computational models are developed and subsequently, the possibility of turning these biologically inspired representations into safe human-robot collaboration is studied.

触摸是人类之间互动和交流的关键部分，但在人类机器人的互动中仍然很少探索。在这项工作中，要求参与者接近并触摸手上的人形机器人（NAO -26名参与者； Pepper -28名参与者），以引起注意。我们为机器人设计了反应行为，该机器人由四种不同的手臂运动组合组成，而被触摸的手向前或向后移动，另一只手向前移动或保持到位，同时向后倾斜，然后看参与者。我们研究了机器人的哪种反应发现最合适的是他们选择的原因。对于两个机器人，被触摸的机器人手的首选反应正在向后移动。另一方面，根本没有任何动作对胡椒来说最自然，而NAO则是向前移动的。发现了参与者人格特征的焦虑量表与机器人反应的主动/侵略性的被动性分量表之间的相关性。大多数参与者注意到倾斜的后背并积极地对其进行了评分。一些参与者在非结构化评论中对参与者进行了积极评论。我们还分析了参与者在哪里以及如何自发接触机器人手上的地方。总而言之，这里设计的触摸反应行为是一个很好的候选人，可以更普遍地在社交机器人中部署，可能包括在拥挤的环境中偶然触摸。机器人尺寸构成了一个重要因素，该因素塑造了如何感知机器人反应。

我们研究了在紧邻人类机器人相互作用的背景下，最先进的人关键点探测器的性能。在这种情况下的检测是具体的，因为只有手和躯干等身体部位的子集在视野中。特别是（i）我们从近距离图像的角度调查了具有人类姿势注释的现有数据集，并准备并使公开可用的新人（HICP）数据集； （ii）我们在此数据集上进行定量和定性比较人类全身2D关键点检测方法（openpose，mmpose，onphapose，detectron2）； （iii）由于对手指的准确检测对于使用交接的应用至关重要，因此我们评估了介质手工检测器的性能； （iv）我们在头部上带有RGB-D摄像头的人形机器人上部署算法，并在3D Human KeyPoint检测中评估性能。运动捕获系统用作参考。在紧邻近端的最佳性能全身关键点探测器是mmpose和字母，但两者都难以检测手指。因此，我们提出了在单个框架中为人体和手介载体的mmpose或字母组合的组合，提供了最准确，最强大的检测。我们还分析了单个探测器的故障模式 - 例如，图像中人的头部缺失在多大程度上降低了性能。最后，我们在一个场景中演示了框架，其中类人类机器人与人相互作用的人类机器人使用检测到的3D关键点进行全身避免动作。

Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed by machines to some extent - yet, as is so often the case, the artificial creatures are lagging behind. The key foundation is an internal representation of the body that the agent - human, animal, or robot - has developed. In the biological realm, evidence has been accumulated by diverse disciplines giving rise to the concepts of body image, body schema, and others. In robotics, a model of the robot is an indispensable component that enables to control the machine. In this article I compare the character of body representations in biology with their robotic counterparts and relate that to the differences in performance that we observe. I put forth a number of axes regarding the nature of such body models: fixed vs. plastic, amodal vs. modal, explicit vs. implicit, serial vs. parallel, modular vs. holistic, and centralized vs. distributed. An interesting trend emerges: on many of the axes, there is a sequence from robot body models, over body image, body schema, to the body representation in lower animals like the octopus. In some sense, robots have a lot in common with Ian Waterman - "the man who lost his body" - in that they rely on an explicit, veridical body model (body image taken to the extreme) and lack any implicit, multimodal representation (like the body schema) of their bodies. I will then detail how robots can inform the biological sciences dealing with body representations and finally, I will study which of the features of the "body in the brain" should be transferred to robots, giving rise to more adaptive and resilient, self-calibrating machines.

This short paper discusses continually updated causal abstractions as a potential direction of future research. The key idea is to revise the existing level of causal abstraction to a different level of detail that is both consistent with the history of observed data and more effective in solving a given task.

Many researchers have voiced their support towards Pearl's counterfactual theory of causation as a stepping stone for AI/ML research's ultimate goal of intelligent systems. As in any other growing subfield, patience seems to be a virtue since significant progress on integrating notions from both fields takes time, yet, major challenges such as the lack of ground truth benchmarks or a unified perspective on classical problems such as computer vision seem to hinder the momentum of the research movement. This present work exemplifies how the Pearl Causal Hierarchy (PCH) can be understood on image data by providing insights on several intricacies but also challenges that naturally arise when applying key concepts from Pearlian causality to the study of image data.

Research around AI for Science has seen significant success since the rise of deep learning models over the past decade, even with longstanding challenges such as protein structure prediction. However, this fast development inevitably made their flaws apparent -- especially in domains of reasoning where understanding the cause-effect relationship is important. One such domain is drug discovery, in which such understanding is required to make sense of data otherwise plagued by spurious correlations. Said spuriousness only becomes worse with the ongoing trend of ever-increasing amounts of data in the life sciences and thereby restricts researchers in their ability to understand disease biology and create better therapeutics. Therefore, to advance the science of drug discovery with AI it is becoming necessary to formulate the key problems in the language of causality, which allows the explication of modelling assumptions needed for identifying true cause-effect relationships. In this attention paper, we present causal drug discovery as the craft of creating models that ground the process of drug discovery in causal reasoning.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Modelling the temperature of Electric Vehicle (EV) batteries is a fundamental task of EV manufacturing. Extreme temperatures in the battery packs can affect their longevity and power output. Although theoretical models exist for describing heat transfer in battery packs, they are computationally expensive to simulate. Furthermore, it is difficult to acquire data measurements from within the battery cell. In this work, we propose a data-driven surrogate model (LiFe-net) that uses readily accessible driving diagnostics for battery temperature estimation to overcome these limitations. This model incorporates Neural Operators with a traditional numerical integration scheme to estimate the temperature evolution. Moreover, we propose two further variations of the baseline model: LiFe-net trained with a regulariser and LiFe-net trained with time stability loss. We compared these models in terms of generalization error on test data. The results showed that LiFe-net trained with time stability loss outperforms the other two models and can estimate the temperature evolution on unseen data with a relative error of 2.77 % on average.

Steerable convolutional neural networks (CNNs) provide a general framework for building neural networks equivariant to translations and other transformations belonging to an origin-preserving group $G$, such as reflections and rotations. They rely on standard convolutions with $G$-steerable kernels obtained by analytically solving the group-specific equivariance constraint imposed onto the kernel space. As the solution is tailored to a particular group $G$, the implementation of a kernel basis does not generalize to other symmetry transformations, which complicates the development of group equivariant models. We propose using implicit neural representation via multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) to parameterize $G$-steerable kernels. The resulting framework offers a simple and flexible way to implement Steerable CNNs and generalizes to any group $G$ for which a $G$-equivariant MLP can be built. We apply our method to point cloud (ModelNet-40) and molecular data (QM9) and demonstrate a significant improvement in performance compared to standard Steerable CNNs.