Decide!

Artificial intelligence increasingly serves as a decision-making aid. But who bears responsibility for its decisions and subsequent actions? Christoph Ammon from the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology at the Uni of Bern investigates this.

Since the pandemic, many of us have found it totally normal to set up the office at the kitchen table on a daily basis. It is also popular to travel to the mountains for two or three days in order to work on issues in peace. It is still unclear how advantageous the new guest workers are for the mountain regions.

Improving global food security is one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. However, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine shows how trade insecurity can destroy food security. The Word Trade Institute (WTI) at the University of Bern has been monitoring Ukraine’s grain exports, which are so important for Africa, since February. Now it is formulating demands.

Geoengineering could not entirely prevent the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet – an important climate tipping point. This is the conclusion of a study by the University of Bern.

Cultivating grains more sustainably without additional fertilizers or pesticides? Researchers demonstrate that specialized chemical from maize roots can lead to increased yields in subsequent wheat crops.

How can the theft of land and other collectively owned resources be stopped and how can the achievements of indigenous people to preserve biodiversity be recognised? These questions were the focus of an international conference on "Commons" in Kenya, which was jointly organized by the Universities of Bern and Nairobi in June 2023.

Tatiana Keller (Drozhzhova) is a particle physicist with a PhD and a filmmaker. As a member of astrophysicist Nicolas Thomas’ research group at the University of Bern, she came up with the idea of making a short film series about CaSSIS, the Mars camera developed in Bern, and the mysteries of the red planet.

Peter Wurz, Nicolas Thomas and Axel Murk have all been involved in the ESA mission Juice from the very beginning. For uniAKTUELL, they look back and talk about the challenges they have already encountered on the way to the largest planet in the solar system and those that still await them.

Administration, design, mechanics, electronics, software development, science and project management: for the construction of space instruments, as with complex puzzles, a wide variety of components must be compiled into a whole. How does this work?

Christian Vater is one of eight researchers at the University of Bern to receive a coveted Starting Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. He will use it to investigate the role of peripheral vision in complex decisions.

Immunologist Bahtiyar Yilmaz is one of eight researchers at the University of Bern to receive a coveted Starting Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. He will use it to study inflammatory bowel diseases.