Cognition and Artificial Life 2025

Mgr. Karla Štěpánová, PhD., Czech Inst. of Informatics, Robotics, and Cybernetics, CTU in Prague
Karla Štěpánová is a researcher at the CIIRC CTU and the head of the Robotic Perception Group. Her research focuses on developing AI-driven systems that enable robots to learn from human instructions and demonstrations. She is particularly interested in how robots can understand human intent and context by integrating data from multiple modalities using probabilistic models and multimodal neural networks. She has led the Robotic Perception Group since 2024. She earned her Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence and Biocybernetics from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at CTU in Prague in 2017 and a Master’s degree in Condensed Matter Physics from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in 2010.

With talk: Human-Guided Task Specification for Flexible Robotics
As robotics continues to expand into dynamic and small-batch production settings, the need for intuitive and flexible task specification is becoming increasingly important. This talk presents a novel approach to natural task specification, enabling rapid task definition and deployment without the burden of extensive programming. By integrating human demonstrations, language, and gestures, we create more accessible and adaptable ways to define task parameters and constraints. Additionally, we explore robust task representation methods that structure these specifications for easy transfer across different robotic setups and enable fluent transformation into executable robot plans. This approach also enhances adaptability to new environments and represents a significant step toward more human-centric, flexible robotic systems—bringing us closer to truly natural collaborative automation.

doc. Mgr. Juraj Hvorecký PhD., Institute of Philosophy of the CAS, Prague
Juraj Hvorecký is the head of the Department of Applied Philosophy and Ethics at the Philosophical Institute of the CAS. He is interested in philosophical and ethical issues of AI and social robotics, but he has not left the domain of cognitive science, especially the debate on the boundary and nature of conscious states. He is convinced that there is nothing more practical than philosophy.

With talk: Artificial intelligence and the unconscious
Advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) reignited debates on possibilities of artificial system to possess consciousness. Our contribution will reverse the optics of current views on the issue. We will start with the genesis of current debates on consciousness in GenAI networks and foundational arguments in its defense. Then we introduce the counterarguments and indicate reasons behind our sympathies with them. In the concluding part we will introduce a novel approach that reject the ascription of consciousness to GenAI systems yet considers them an interesting model of the unconscious. We will demonstrate how multimodal experiments with these systems support the idea of analogy with unconscious processing in humans and will also point out ethical and social consequences that follow from such analogy.

doc. RNDr. Ján Bakoš, PhD., Faculty of Medicine, Comenius University and the Department of Neurosciences, Biomedical Centre of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava
doc. RNDr. Ján Bakoš, PhD. works as a university lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine, Comenius University Bratislava and heads the Department of Neurosciences, Biomedical Centre, SAS, v.v.i. He is a specialist in neurosciences, neurodevelopment and neuroendocrinology. The most important scientific results are the elucidation of the effects of oxytocin on the shape and growth of neurons in different brain regions in models of autism.

With talk: Oxytocin in brain development and autism
Oxytocin is a well-known neuropeptide hormone that, in addition to regulating reproductive functions (childbirth, lactation), is involved in the brain in influencing social behaviour. Oxytocin is secreted in the brain during mother-offspring contact, eye contact and many other social interactions. Disturbances in the production and secretion of oxytocin in specific brain regions, or abnormalities in oxytocin receptor signaling cascades, may contribute to the etiology of neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorders. Particularly in the early stages of brain development, changes in oxytocin levels affect neuron number, shape, growth and synaptogenesis, which may be functionally manifested by increased or decreased activity of neural circuits necessary for the recognition and interpretation of socially relevant stimuli (facial features and expression, tone of voice, social context). In our studies, we systematically study molecular and cellular changes in neural tissue under conditions of oxytocin system manipulation and in the context of animal models exhibiting autistic symptoms.