TAM and RAI – Two Clusters of Excellence for TU Darmstadt
2025/05/22
A major success for Technical University of Darmstadt and the Centre for Cognitive Science: The Excellence Commission in the competition for the prestigious Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments selected the proposals ‘The Adaptive Mind’ (TAM) and ‘Reasonable Artificial Intelligence’ (RAI) from the fields of cognitive science and artificial intelligence for funding.
Both Clusters of Excellence were acquired with the extensive participation of members of the Centre for Cognitive Science.
The actual funding of the selected projects shall start on January 1, 2026 for a period of seven years.
The commission consisted of an interdisciplinary panel of experts and the federal and state ministers responsible for science. A total of 98 projects were submitted to the German Research Foundation, 70 of which will now be able to call themselves ‘Clusters of Excellence’.
The Adaptive Mind (TAM) Cluster of Excellence
In “The Adaptive Mind” the researchers will investigate how human behaviour is impacted by changing external conditions – with humans remaining stable in some situations and adapting in others. A key question being investigated by the research cluster is how to balance these two strategies in adaptive and learning systems. The aim is to develop new approaches for how we can understand human perception, thought, decision-making, actions, and learning using computational models. This topic is relevant for many academic fields – such as cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, research on learning robots, and the training of neural networks.
Applicant universities: Justus Liebig University Giessen, Philipps University Marburg, TU Darmstadt
Participating institutions: Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS)
The ‘Reasonable Artificial Intelligence’ (RAI) Cluster of Excellence
The RAI Cluster of Excellence is dedicated to the development of a new generation of AI systems based on the reasonable use of resources, data protection standards and continuous improvement. Multidisciplinary teams are working together in four research areas to shape the future of AI. Although deep learning has enabled important advances in the field of artificial intelligence over the last ten years, current AI systems have displayed some significant weaknesses, such as an inability to reason, difficulty handling new situations and a need for continuous adjustments. Last but not least, current AI systems also require substantial resources. The aim of the Cluster of Excellence project “Reasonable Artificial Intelligence” (RAI) is thus to develop the next generation of reasonable AI.
Applicant university: TU Darmstadt
Institutions of the participating scientists: Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, Goethe University Frankfurt, University of Bremen, University of Tübingen, Saarland University
