Since the beginning of 1996, a collaborative research centre, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), at the University of Saarbrücken has been investigating the adaptation of cognitive processes to limited resources. More than 50 scientists from psychology, computer science and computational linguistics participate in interdisciplinary collaboration within 11 projects. A close cooperation between the disciplines involved is guaranteed by the overall conception of the research centre and by collaboration between representatives of different disciplines even within individual projects.
The central topics of this this research centre are:
whether through
natural evolution, in the case of humans, or through artificial
construction, in the case of computational systems. With this perspective, approaches to modelling can be adopted and extended which are considerably more realistic than conventional cognitive models. Scientific issues that arise in diverse research contexts are combined in new ways via reference to the central topic of the resource-adaptivity of cognitive processes. This topic is currently receiving a great deal attention in various disciplines. For example, previously, in artificial intelligence limitations of resources such as time, memory, and processing capacity were typically abstracted away from; more recently, especially in connection with real-time applications, explicit models of resource-adaptivity have been discussed.
Thirteen project directors and more than 50 other researchers
participate in the research of the collaborative research centre.
Within the university, they belong to the Department of Computer
Science andwithin the Philosophical
Facultyto the Divisions of General
Linguistics, and Psychology. The individual projects are grouped into
two research areas:
| Area EM | Empirics and Modelling |
| Area MI | Modelling and Inference |
The research centre integrates different research traditions with regard to the topic of resource adaptivity within a unified perspective. A further innovative component is the attempt to replace the traditional conception of computation by the concept of concurrent computation, which can serve as a more general basis for the study of resource-adaptive cognitive processes.
A listing of projects and staff can be found under https://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/sfb378/2005-2007/projects.php4.
You can find the former web pages under https://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/sfb378/1999-2001/ and https://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/sfb378/2002-2004/ respectively.
(Note: not all links may be working, but we made an effort to preserve
themplease let us know if there is a
problem.)
Colophon: https://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/sfb378/2005-2007/colophon.php4