Natural and Artificial Cognition V

When: 19 October at 9.30 to 15.30 CET

Where: Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Lecture Hall Riesz, Märkesbacken 4, Lund, Sweden

Registration: https://www.ai.lu.se/2026-10-19/registration

We will publish the program gradually throughout September. 

Confirmed talks

Invited talk: Challenges in Fine-Grained Image Analysis

Speaker: Serge Belongie, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen
Abstract: Fine-grained image analysis (FGIA) is a longstanding and fundamental problem in computer vision and pattern recognition, underpinning a diverse set of real-world applications. The task of FGIA concerns visual objects from subordinate categories, e.g., species of birds or models of cars. Capitalizing on advances in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), in recent years we have witnessed remarkable progress on a variety of FGIA problems. In this talk we review representative examples in the context of recognition and retrieval alongside other key issues such as publicly available benchmark datasets, domain-specific applications, and connections with other modalities including text and audio. We conclude by highlighting several research directions and open problems.

Dynamics of Polarization and Agreement in Socio-Technical Networks

Speaker: Emma Tegling, Senior lecturer, Automatic Control

Irony Re-examined in Interactive Settings (IRIS): Towards a paradigm change in Experimental Pragmatics

Speaker: Camilo Rodriguez Ronderos, Assistant Professor, General Linguistics, Lund University
Abstract: Understanding how language is used often involves going beyond a literal meaning by thinking about the intentions of speakers. While theoretical work in pragmatics typically aims to account for how addressees (intended recipients of an utterance) understand a speaker’s intentions, most experiments testing pragmatic theories have studied the comprehension of participants in laboratory experiments who do not take part in the conversation and are not the explicitly intended recipients of an utterance – the overhearers. A prime example of this is irony, a language strategy that relies on a contrast between the literal and intended meaning of an utterance (e.g., hearing someone say that a football player who missed an easy goal ‘took a beautiful shot’). The focus on the overhearer’s perspective has been particularly problematic for the study of irony, where experiments have resulted in contradictory and inconclusive results. 

In this talk, I will introduce my ERC-funded project IRIS, which seeks to bring about a paradigm shift in experimental pragmatics by studying differences in comprehension between conversational roles (i.e., addressees and overhearers), using irony as a test case. IRIS will pioneer an experimental paradigm that studies both groups, combining accuracy and rating-scales measures with recent technical advances in cognitive pupillometry. The paradigm will be used to test a novel irony comprehension account that stipulates how, why, and when addressees and overhearers differ in how they understand irony. 

Other confirmed speakers

• Volker Krueger, Professor, Robotics and Semantic Systems, Lund University
• Fredrik Tufvesson, Professor, Communications Engineering, Lund University

While waiting, you are welcome to check out recordings from last year's workshop, Natural and Artificial Cognition IV - 7 October 2025

Programme outline

9.30 Registration, posters* & fika

10.00 Morning programme

12.00 Lunch and poster*  session

Posters

13.00 Afternoon programme**

15.00  Poster session* , fika and mingle

Organisation and contact

• Hanna Bäck, Political Science
• Melvyn B Davies, Mathematics
• Marianne Gullberg, Linguistics
• Kalle Åström, Computer Vision and Machine Learning
• Jonas Wisbrant, AI Lund, NAC