Brains, Bites & Bots
Wednesday, 20 May 2026
Doors open
6:00 pm
Event starts
6:30 pm
Stammen Cafe & Bar
Kongens gate 55, 7012 Trondheim, Norway
Tonight’s talks:
🥔 Must New Food Be Ultra Processed? Developing Side Streams From Food Systems With Green Processing and Sustainability Mapping
Food is essential to culture, work, and health — but it’s also a major source of pollution and inequality. This talk explores how green processing and sustainability mapping can help turn side streams from potatoes, oilseeds, and fish into valuable new food, making more food from the same fields and fish stocks.
🧠 When Harmful Behaviour Makes Sense: How the Brain’s Survival Models Shape Youth Behaviour
What if behaviours we label as “risky” are actually the brain’s best survival strategy? Drawing on neuroscience, this talk explains how young people’s brains adapt to unstable environments — and how this perspective can help design better, more supportive services.
🔁 Feedback Loop – Control Systems in Everyday Life
Control systems are everywhere, even if we rarely notice them. From thermostats and washing machines to ships and planes, feedback loops help automate decisions. Through everyday examples and current research, this talk reveals how the “think” part of sense think act systems quietly runs much of the modern world.
Andreas Langdal
NTNU/UiT
Must new food be ultra processed? Developing side-streams from food systems with green processing and sustainability mapping.
Food is a major part of culture, employment and health! But, in parallel, it is found to be an equally large part of global pollution, non-communicable diseases and inequalities. Using green processing and sustainability mapping in collaborate with food-system actors and consumers, we evaluate how side-streams of potatoes, oilseeds and pelagic fish value chains can further develop. Aiming to make more food from the same fields and the same fish stocks.
Janelle Shari Weir
When Harmful Behaviour Makes Sense: How the Brain's Survival Models Shape Youth Behaviour
What if behaviors we label as 'risk' are actually the brain's best survival strategy? The brain constantly builds predictions about safety, belonging, and opportunity. For young people growing up in unstable environments, behaviors like aggression, substance use, or criminal involvment can emerge from survival-based internal models of the world. This talk explores how neuroscience can help us understand youth risk behavior differently and design service responses that support adaptive capacity.
Josip Kir Hromatko
University of Zagreb, Croatia
Feedback loop - Control systems in everyday life
Although they are usually invisible, control systems are everywhere around us. From our thermostats and washing machines, to the ships and planes we use for transport, feedback loops help us automate decisions. In this talk, I will present the basics of the "think" part in the "sense-think-act" loop, making such automation possible. Through several examples from both current research and our daily lives, I hope to provide a better understanding of the amazing technology we regularly use.