Dear Colleagues, We invite applications for participation in the WE Heraeus Seminar “Physics of Human Sensing” (March 21-24, 2027). This international workshop will offer 13 invited talks as well as poster presentations and demonstration experiments by participants. It will be held in the wonderful Physikzentrum Bad Honnef close to the city of Bonn (Germany), where participants will receive free on-site accommodation and full board. The facilities of the Physikzentrum and the organization of the workshop allow for fruitful scientific discussions and give opportunity for informal exchange. More information on the workshop is given below and can be found at https://www.we-heraeus-stiftung.de/veranstaltungen/physics-of-human-sensing Please apply using the web form at https://www.we-heraeus-stiftung.de/veranstaltungen/physics-of-human-sensing/application/#c15157 with short descriptions of your affiliation, career status, scientific interests, motivation for participation and include a descriptive title if you plan a poster contribution or a demonstration experiment. We encourage all participants to contribute a poster and to bring a demonstration experiment where feasible. Please submit your application by December 1, 2026. We will then start evaluating applications on a rolling basis (if you need earlier assessment of your application, please contact us via e-mail at human-sensing@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx). Applications after Dec 1st are possible if slots are still available (latest Jan 24, 2027). Please forward this invitation for applications to your collaborators and students. We hope to see many of you in March 2027 in Bad Honnef and look forward to an interesting and fruitful workshop. Alexandra Bendixen & Roland Bennewitz
Abstract of the WE Heraeus Seminar “Physics of Human Sensing” Understanding human perception is an interdisciplinary endeavor, with much recent progress thanks to combining concepts and methods across fields. Here we propose to focus on physical aspects of human sensing. This pertains to describing the stimuli in the outer world in physical terms (such as the propagation and superposition of sound waves) as well as to physical phenomena in the sensory organ itself (such as the coupling of sound waves into collective motion of hair cells in the cochlea, the optics of the eye and their relation to retinal structure and spectral sensitivity, the frequency-dependence of skin mechanics, or the thermal effusivity and resistance at the skin-material contact). In this workshop we will discuss experimental and modelling approaches to understanding the physics of human sensing. From molecular switching forces on receptor molecules to the tracking of micro-saccadic eye movements, from collective oscillation models of sensory cells to the contact mechanics of skin deformation, we will cover all relevant length and energy scales. We will share experiences of experiments with human participants and our concepts of transferring insights into novel technological aids to our senses. The main goal of the workshop is to identify the multiple ways in which physics research can improve our understanding of unimodal and multimodal perception. We thus invite physically inclined researchers on human sensing to join us in finding synergies and novel joint approaches towards comprehensive interdisciplinary models. List of confirmed speakers Katja Dörschner-Boyaci (Gießen, Germany) Knut Drewing (Gießen, Germany) Wolfgang Einhäuser-Treyer (Chemnitz, Germany) Ralf Engbert (Potsdam, Germany) Isabella R. Graf (Heidelberg, Germany) Christian Kaernbach (Kiel, Germany) Astrid Kappers (Eindhoven, Netherlands) Melanie Köhler (München, Germany) Markus Lappe (Münster, Germany) Martina Poletti (Rochester, USA) Sabyasachi Rakshit (Mohali, India) Hannes Saal (Sheffield, UK) Sarah Verhulst (Gent, Belgium) |