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
Date: December 18, 2025
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Venue: DZNE, Lecture Hall, Venusberg Campus
As part of the DZNE’s “Brain and Beyond” lecture series, Professor Markus Gabriel will give a talk on “Emotional AI.”
On May 29, 2025, the seminar series titled Cross-Cultural Approaches to Desirable AI received the AI ELSI Award (Perspective Division) from the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI).
Dr. Chelsea Haramia from the Center for Science and Thought will be a guest at the research colloquium of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy on November 20, 2025, at 3:00 p.m. In her English-language lecture titled “Ethics for Post-Detection Scenarios and Pre-Detection Messaging,” she will shed light on current ethical questions surrounding contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. The talk offers critical insights into the philosophical, technical, and societal dimensions of a possible interstellar exchange.
Here you can find additional news.
Events of the CST
The possibility of absolutely general quantification is often taken to be obvious, since even its critics appear to presuppose it. This paper critically examines and rejects standard arguments for that assumption. It then develops an alternative approach that acknowledges the inherent restrictions of every form of quantification. Second-order quantification is used as a case study to illustrate these restrictions and to contrast the resulting view with Hellman’s (2006) position.
09-13 March 2026 @ IMPULSE-Haus
This Polyglot Workshop is a four-day, hands-on program focused on sharing expertise in building large language models, with a special emphasis on underrepresented languages. Our goal is to empower a new generation of practitioners to advance LLM development beyond high-resource settings. The Workshop covers all key stages of an LLM training pipeline, making this knowledge accessible to a broad and diverse audience.
Seminar Series: Cross-Cultural Approaches to Desirable AI, 2nd Edition
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.
Polyglot: Developing Open Source Foundation Models for Low-Resource Languages
Polyglot is an initiative to close the linguistic divide in NLP by developing efficient and accessible foundation models for low-resource languages.
Polyglot is a project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (MWK) as part of TRA Sustainable Futures (University of Bonn) and the Excellence Strategy of the federal and state governments.
You can find more information about our research projects here.
We connect female* students, scientists at all career levels as well as employees from technology and administration who research and work in various disciplines on artificial intelligence (AI) at the University of Bonn.
Our goal is to bring women* at the University of Bonn together, increase their visibility and engage in a critical exchange about AI. As a female* network, “Feminist AI” supports the interdisciplinary dialog on artificial intelligence and contributes to the strengthening of female* researchers at the University of Bonn.
The network is supported by the Equal Opportunities Office of the University of Bonn with funds from the Fund for the Promotion of the Structural Anchoring of Gender Equality.
You can find a selection of publications here.
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