CeTI Summer School - Human-Cyber-Physical Systems – Challenges and Innovations

31.08.2026, 09:00 → 04.09.2026, 13:00 Europe/Berlin

tbd (TU Dresden)

Project Descriptions.pdf

Mo., 31. August

09:30 → 10:00 Registration

10:00 → 10:30 Welcome Note

by Prof. Frank Fitzek

10:30 → 12:00 Facets of Anthropomorphism in Robotic Design - Activating Social Perceptions and Scripts for HRI

by Prof. Linda Onnasch

It is widely assumed that anthropomorphic design features of robots automatically activate social perceptions and scripts from human interaction. Perceiving robots as team partners rather than tools is believed to foster more intuitive and seamless interaction, even at first encounter. But do human-like design features really elicit mind perception, and does this, in turn, translate into social evaluations, for example, in terms of empathy and trust, and ultimately improved coordination?
In my talk, I will explore these questions with a nuanced perspective on anthropomorphism as a design strategy across various contexts. Eventually, I will raise the question of how the social perception of robots affects self-attribution and the sense of agency in human-robot interaction.

Linda Onnasch is professor of psychology of action and automation at Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. Her research focuses on human-technology interaction considering system characteristics, psychological mediators and context factors. Together with her team, she investigates, for instance, how to integrate inherently social interaction patterns into human-robot collaboration to make interaction more intuitive, what explainable AI needs to explain to promote human-AI synergy, and how to allocate tasks between human and automation for appropriate overall performance. In national and international projects, she investigates how to design automation and decision support systems for high-tech agricultural systems (CUBES Circle: https://cubescircle.de/en/, AgRimate: https://agrimate-project.eu/). Linda is the Europe Chapter President of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, and member of the spokesteam engineering psychology of the German Psychological Society.

12:00 → 13:00 Lunch

13:00 → 14:00 Introduction Science Communication & Demonstrators

by Dr. Tina Bobbe

Tina Bobbe is a German designer and design researcher. From 2016 to 2026, she pursued her PhD at TU Dresden, where she was part of the Chair for Industrial Design Engineering and the Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (CeTI). Her research focused on the design of demonstrators that translate emerging technologies into tangible experiences.

14:00 → 14:30 Forming Phase for Project Groups

14:30 → 15:00 Coffee Break

15:00 → 18:00 Poster Presentations

by participants

18:00 → 21:00 Barbecue

Di., 1. September

09:30 → 10:30 Grasping the virtual world

by Prof. Gavin Buckingham

In the last few years, immersive virtual reality (iVR) has become a significant part of the entertainment industry. In parallel, there has been a significant uptake in iVR for training in the context of sports, medicine, and dangerous industries. It also has exceptional potential for cognitive research, allowing for the strict control of sensory inputs in a range of ecologically-valid tasks. In this talk, I will give an overview of some of our recent iVR research in the context of lab-based perception and action research, remote assessment of upper-limb movements, and sports training.

Gavin Buckingham is a cognitive psychologist interested how humans perceive and act upon their environment with their hands. He was awarded his PhD in Psychology form the University of Aberdeen in 2008, and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health and Sport Sciences at the University of Exeter. He leads the Object Interaction Lab and is a member of the Virtual Immersive Training and Learning group. At Exeter, Gavin co-leads the Exeter Immersive Research Network, and also serves as the University of Exeter UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) institutional co-lead, with a focus on research culture. He maintains a blog called 'Making it as an early-career academic', and runs workshops for PhD students and for academics at the start of their career as a lecturer.

10:30 → 10:45 Coffee Break

10:45 → 12:00 Body-Centric Design for Affective, Social, and Transformative Experiences

by Dr. Ekaterina Stepanova

This presentation will discuss body-centric design approaches to interaction that can support affective, social, and transformative experiences. These approaches foreground the felt, lived body as the primary site of meaning-making, connection, and transformation. Grounded in phenomenological theory and embodied cognition, these approaches challenge the dominant disembodied paradigms in digital systems and instead emphasizes relational, sensory engagement between bodies and with technology.
Through a series of research-through-design projects and art installations, including social VR experiences that explore breathing synchronization, mediated human touch in mixed reality, pseudo-haptics enabled ethereal virtual touch, and dancing with giant inflatable robots, the talk will demonstrate how centering the design process in the felt embodied experience could lead to nuanced observations and generative design outcomes pushing the status quo. Particularly, technology supporting social touch interactions provide an especially fertile space for exploring how felt and relational embodied experience can guide design. We will discuss how social interaction can be reconceptualized as a fundamentally intercorporeal experience, offering alternatives to information-exchange models of mediated touch interaction.
By centering embodied experience, these work reimagine the role of technology in providing aesthetic experiences, and supporting wellbeing, social cohesion, and a deeper sense of interconnectedness with others and the environment.

12:00 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 14:00 Introduction to Demonstrator/Prototype Development

by Max Pötter

14:00 → 17:30 Project Group Work

Mi., 2. September

09:30 → 10:30 Haptic Displays for high-fidelity haptic feedback to enhance multimodal interaction - Engineering at the Crossroads of Neuroscience

by Prof. Ercan Altinsoy

The Tactile Internet is a key future-oriented field that focuses on real-time communication between humans and machines. Applications of the Tactile Internet require haptic sensor and actuator solutions that are low-latency, lightweight, flexible, easy to use, wearable, and easily integrable. This presentation introduces several wearable haptic interfaces developed by a research team led by the author, employing a range of technologies. Perceptual knowledge and multimodal interaction principles are leveraged to enhance both the hardware capabilities and the design of haptic signals. Multimodal integration models are essentially bridge between “raw data (audio, haptic, visual, olfactory, etc.)” and “human-like understanding for humanoid robotic applications. These advances are enabled through the integration of knowledge and principles from neuroscience and engineering.

Prof. Ercan Altinsoy received the M.Sc. degree in mechanical engineering from the Technical University of Istanbul and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. After receiving his Ph.D. degree, he worked with HEAD acoustics, Germany. Since 2006, he has been with TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany, where he is currently a Professor in acoustic and haptic engineering. His research interests include perception-based engineering, haptics, vehicle acoustics, psychoacoustics, vibroacoustics, electroacoustics, whole-body vibrations, product sound, and vibration design, and haptic perception.
Dr. Altinsoy was a member of the International Graduate School for Neuroscience with Ruhr-University Bochum. In 2018, he was awarded a Visiting Professorship from Tohoku University, Japan. He has also Visiting Professorship at Tianjin University, China and at Le Mans University, France. He is a Lothar-Cremer Medalist of the Acoustical Society of Germany, DEGA. He has several patents and he is advisor of several car and household/multimedia appliance manufacturers.

10:30 → 10:45 Coffee Break

10:45 → 12:00 Machine Learning for Molecular Sensing

by Prof. Gianaurelio Cuniberti

Olfaction, an ancient sensory system, provides intricate information about the environment. In emulation of this biological process, neuromorphic devices in conjunction with machine learning algorithms, endeavor to replicate and digitize the olfactory capabilities. This presentation focuses on the gas discrimination and identification capabilities of neuromorphic nanosensors. These nanosensors, constructed with functionalized nano materials, were integrated into multi-channel gas sensor devices, and their sensing signals were recorded upon exposure to diverse gases. To unravel the temporal characteristics embedded in the sensing signals, we employ machine learning algorithms to extract meaningful patterns and discern specific gases. The integration of machine learning significantly enhances the electronic olfaction system's gas identification performance across a wide spectrum of gases. This innovative platform not only downsizes electronic noses but also digitizes olfactory information, enabling the precise detection and identification of various gases and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). By leveraging machine learning, our electronic olfaction system demonstrates exceptional capabilities applicable to diverse fields such as pathogen detection, environmental monitoring, and disease diagnosis. The fusion of neuromorphic nanosensors and machine learning algorithms creates a powerful synergy, paving the way for advanced molecular sensing technologies with broad-ranging applications.

12:00 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 17:30 Project Group Work

Do., 3. September

09:30 → 10:30 Resilient Communication using Cross-Technology Communication and Network Coding

by Prof. Falko Dressler

Resilient communication is still a dream, but we are getting closer. One aspect in wireless communications is co-existence of radio communication technologies. Coding, frequency hopping, and dynamic channel assignment techniques have been developed as mitigation strategies. Recently, co-existence has been studied as an opportunity rather than just an annoying nuisance. Cross-technology communication (CTC) is the key to solve performance issues in co-existence scenarios through collaboration and coordination among co-located networks. For example, commercial WiFi chips can be used to emulate ZigBee, Bluetooth, LTE, LoRa, and more. Such CTC obviously also helps enhancing the resilience of larger scale communication platforms. Going beyond, teaming up CTC and network coding opens up an entirely new playground for designing next generation communication networks: high throughput, low latency, and particularly also resilient by design.

Falko Dressler is full professor and Chair for Telecommunication Networks at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, TU Berlin. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Dept. of Computer Science, University of Erlangen in 1998 and 2003, respectively. Dr. Dressler has been associate editor-in-chief for IEEE Trans. on Network Science and Engineering, IEEE Trans. on Mobile Computing and Elsevier Computer Communications as well as an editor for journals such as IEEE/ACM Trans. on Networking, Elsevier Ad Hoc Networks, and Elsevier Nano Communication Networks. He has been chairing conferences such as IEEE INFOCOM, ACM MobiSys, ACM MobiHoc, IEEE VNC, IEEE GLOBECOM. He authored the textbooks Self-Organization in Sensor and Actor Networks published by Wiley & Sons and Vehicular Networking published by Cambridge University Press. He has been an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer as well as an ACM Distinguished Speaker. Dr. Dressler is an IEEE Fellow, an ACM Fellow, and an AAIA Fellow. He is a member of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech). He has been serving on the IEEE COMSOC Conference Council and the ACM SIGMOBILE Executive Committee. His research objectives include next generation wireless communication systems in combination with distributed machine learning and edge computing for improved resiliency. Application domains include the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, and the internet of bio-nano-things.

10:30 → 10:45 Coffee Break

10:45 → 11:25 Reconfigurable Physical Computing and its Potential: Forging the REDAC Hybrid Architecture for Energy-Efficient Edge Processing

by Prof. Bernd Ulmann, Dr. Lucas Wetzel

As we push the boundaries of the Tactile Internet and of communication systems in general, the traditional digital Von Neumann architecture is hitting a "power wall." The demand for ultra-low latency and extreme energy efficiency in edge devices - from autonomous robots to wearable haptic interfaces - requires a fundamental rethink of how we process information. This keynote explores the revival of analog computing, not as a relic of the past, but as a high-performance, reconfigurable, and software-integrated future.
We introduce the REDAC (REconfigurable Discrete Analog Computer), a paradigm-shifting platform that replaces the manual patching of historical systems with a digital configuration layer. By allowing researchers to describe, compile, and execute mathematical problems directly on analog hardware, the REDAC combines the physical speed of dynamical systems with the programmability of modern digital environments.

Prof. Dr. Bernd Ulmann, born on July 19, 1970, studied mathematics as his major and philosophy as his minor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, where he obtained his diploma in mathematics. He went on to complete his Ph.D. at the University of Hamburg. Today, he is a professor at FOM University of Applied Sciences and a co-founder of anabrid GmbH. In addition to his academic and entrepreneurial work, he is the author of two standard works in the field of analog and hybrid computing: Analog Computing (3rd edition, De Gruyter, 2026) and Analog and Hybrid Computer Programming (2nd edition, De Gruyter, 2023).
Dr. Lucas Wetzel is Chief Scientific Officer at anabrid GmbH, where he directs research and development in unconventional computing. He holds a Diploma in Physics from the University of Leipzig and ETH Zurich (2008) and a Dr. rer. nat. in Theoretical Physics from TU Dresden (2012), earned under Prof. Frank Jülicher at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPI-PKS).
In 2008, he joined MPI-PKS in Dresden as a PhD student and later as a postdoctoral researcher and project leader. In 2019, Lucas Wetzel was awarded a VIP+ validation grant from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Since January 2023, he has led R&D on modern hybrid computer architectures at anabrid GmbH, and in July 2024 he was appointed Chief Scientific Officer. In this role he has extended his academic trajectory into R&D. Lucas Wetzel is a member of the German Physical Society (DPG) and was featured as a speaker at the 2025 Falling Walls Science Summit.

11:25 → 12:00 Harnessing the Fundamentals of Intelligence with in vitro Neural Cultures

by Dr. Brett Kagan

Dr Brett J. Kagan is the Chief Scientific Officer and Chief Operations Officer at Cortical Labs. Cortical Labs is a multidisciplinary deep-tech startup looking at integrating hardware, software, and synthetic biology approaches to explore how to harness intelligence from neurons on a chip. Dr Kagan has a PhD in neuroscience focusing on stem cell therapy and completed post-doctoral work in bioinformatics and regenerative medicine. Recent work includes developing the first real-time closed-loop demonstration of in-vitro intelligence in a simplified pong-game environment, along with working to better test and understand these systems. Dr Kagan has led the scientific development of the first commercialisable device for harnessing the information processing capabilities of biological neurons, called the CL-1. Dr Kagan also explores neurocomputational implications along with philosophical and ethical approaches to the development and use of this new technology.

12:00 → 13:30 Lunch

13:30 → 17:30 Project Group Work

17:30 → 22:30 Socia Event at City Beach

Fr., 4. September

09:30 → 11:00 Showcase Prototypes and Pitches

by participants

11:00 → 11:15 Coffee Break

11:15 → 12:00 Awards Ceremony