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
The Tucano project has won 1st place in the Most Interesting Results Competition at Bonn University's High Performance Computing (HPC) services. The competition occurred during the 1st anniversary event of Marvin, the university’s state-of-the-art Tier 3 HPC cluster, where researchers gathered to showcase their work powered by Marvin’s computational capabilities. Tucano, a series of natively pre-trained large language models for Portuguese, is fully open-source and was developed at the University of Bonn with the support of Marvin.
With the EU AI Act entering into force under the New Legislative Framework, the standardization of AI technologies transitions from a conceptual goal to a legal mandate. In recent years, efforts have been made to evaluate the societal impacts of AI technolo- gies beyond mere legal safeguards, aiming to “operationalize,” “standardize,” and even “certify” ethics. At the same time, actual ethical concerns regarding the operationalization of ethics have grown. In the forthcoming conference, our main questions focus on hidden stakeholders, values, and how profit-making might interfere with certifying and standard- izing AI technologies.
New Interdisciplinary Network Approved
The interdisciplinary network 'Feminist AI' at the University of Bonn will
start in January 2025 with the aim to strengthen the networking and visibility
of female researchers at the University of Bonn and to promote a critical
engagement with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
More Information
Here you can find additional news.
Events of the CST
Talk by Fabian Malms, May 22nd 2025, 19:00, Deutsches Museum Bonn
With the adoption of the EU AI Act, important regulatory requirements for the use of AI come into force. It is now important for companies to use the transition period to implement the regulatory requirements efficiently and as pragmatically as possible. Fabian Malms will explain how this can be done in a presentation at the Deutsches Museum Bonn.
Roundtable Discussion, March 20th 2025, 19:00, Deutsches Museum Bonn
In this round table discussion, we will examine “trustworthy AI” from the perspective of business, politics, computer science and ethics. We talk about this with Tim Achtermeyer, the NRW state chairman of
Bündnis 90/ Die Grünen; André Christ, Co-Founder & General Manager of SAP LeanIX; Dr. Florian Mai,
computer scientist and junior research group leader at the Conversational AI and Social Analytics (CAISA) Lab at the University of Bonn and Dr. Julia Maria Mönig,
philosopher and ethicist and project manager of the philosophy sub-project in the KI.NRW flagship project “Certified AI”.
Workshop, February 28th 2025, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
In today’s rapidly evolving world, advanced technologies like AI are not only transforming economies and governance but also reshaping societal values and human coexistence. While those technologies are already widely discussed within the disciplines of computer science, economics or applied ethics, their development and application concern core issues of the humanities. Over the course of the conference, we want to discuss not only how these technologies should be designed and used, but also how digital technologies influence concepts of humanity or society.
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.
