ERC Starting Grant: Uniquely Human Features of Intelligence

1.5 million euros awarded to Charley Wu for five-year project

Charley Wu receives an ERC Starting Grant for his groundbreaking research project “Compositional Compression in Cognition and Culture”. Over a period of five years, the funding of almost 1.5 million euros will allow him to investigate the uniqueness of human intelligence in terms of compositionality and cumulative culture.

While the concept of compositionality describes the human ability to solve new problems by recombining familiar elements in novel ways, cumulative culture refers to the capacity to build on the knowledge of previous generations. Both features have been proposed separately as unique characteristics of human intelligence, distinguishing it from other animal cognition and from AI. The funded project aims to unite these two core concepts in a single mathematical framework. "My goal is to provide transformative insights into how we encode, transmit, and creatively build on knowledge across generations," says Wu. "This could revolutionize our understanding of human intelligence."

Wu’s research group will be hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. "The MPI excels in integrating modern computational methods with experimental research on human learning and decision making," Wu explains his choice of this institution.

Currently, Wu heads the Human and Machine Cognition Lab (University of Tübingen), which is part of the Excellence Cluster "Machine Learning for Science" and the Tübingen AI Center, both close cooperation partners of the MPI for Biological Cybernetics.

ERC Starting Grants are awarded by the European Research Council. These highly coveted fellowships support excellent early-career researchers who show potential to become leaders in their fields.