Max Planck Institutes and Experts

A research project at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome) studies the interactions among figures, space and beholder. The working term spazio figurato denotes spaces designed to house an encounter with figures specifically created to be placed within them. Focusing on medieval spazi figurati, the project aims to understand how these interactions have changed over time and how these spaces are perceived.

Robots acquire information from the environment, process it and then use it to autonomously perform tasks. A big challenge is to have robots and humans cooperate effectively in our every day’s life. To realize this vision the role of humans must be taken into account. Robot design and control must be conceived to meet the human needs and facilitate the interaction. Our research efforts are guided by these principles and aimed at realizing semi-autonomous robotic systems able to perform local tasks – supervised by a human – on their own in a so-called shared control scenario.

How does demographic change impact the life cycle? How will public finances, private transfers or savings rates develop in the future? These questions are of vital importance to future societal arrangements and economic prospects and are thus tackled by research carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock. This article shows how the individual economic life cycle is characterized in Germany, how it varies across regions and time, and how it impacts on the sustainability of public finances.

Model reduction significantly accelerates the computer simulation of dynamical systems. It facilitates or even enables their control and optimization. Thus, model reduction is becoming more and more an indispensable tool in computational sciences and engineering. The mathematical model of the dynamical process is replaced by a compact model. Simulating the compact model is then often sufficient to obtain the quantities of interest of the process. We will give a brief introduction into the model reduction of dynamical systems and illustrate its potential using some engineering applications.

A newly established Max Planck Research Group is writing an epistemic history of art that focuses on the circulation of knowledge within and beyond the artist’s workshop. Between 1350 and 1750, the artist’s workshop evolved from a centre of craft practices to a place where other than artisanal bodies of knowledge (such as optics and alchemy) were exchanged. This research project highlights the role of art in the emergence of the new science and enriches the terms in which the current debate on artistic research is conducted.