Seminar Spatial Cognition - How machines see the world

Perceiving the surrounding space, operating in and communicating about it is an everyday procedure of human beings. But how to enable machines to cope with spatial information? This seminar will be concerned with this question: How do computers represent and process their perception of the world?

Starting from a view on human spatial cognition concepts we will take a look at the ways space is handled in various computer driven applications, including for example geographic information systems like route planners, autonomous robot navigation or human machine interaction. Each application context focuses on various aspects of space, and so different representation and reasoning paradigms prove to be successful for dealing with the huge and vague amount of sensor information.

As this seminar is supposed to provide a broad overview on spatial cognition in humans and machines it covers an assortment of technical, conceptual, and theoretical topics of Artificial Intelligence.

The seminar will be held in English.