Marcel Binz, Research Scientist, Helmholtz Computational Health Center, Munich

Topic: “Building foundation models of human cognition”
Most cognitive models are domain-specific, meaning that their scope is restricted to a single type of problem. The human mind, on the other hand, does not work like this – it is a unified system whose processes are deeply intertwined. How can we develop models that cannot only simulate, predict, and explain human behavior in a single domain but that offer a truly universal take on our mind? In this talk, I will outline an interdisciplinary research programme – building on my earlier work in meta-learning and large language models – for establishing such foundation models of human cognition.

Dr. Marcel Binz is a research scientist and deputy head of the Institute of Human-Centered AI at the Helmholtz Computational Health Center in Munich, and a guest scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen. His work has been featured in top-tier journals such as PNAS, Psychological Review, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences, as well as in leading machine learning venues such as NeurIPS and ICML.