Laura Candiotto is a philosopher of emotion who works on the epistemology of emotions. She is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value at the University of Pardubice. She was a visiting scholar at the IMèRA Institute for Advance Study of the Aix-Marseille University (2018-2019) and she received her PhD in philosophy in 2011 at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. At ICA4, she aims to explore the philosophical significance of our engagement with affective robots simulating human emotions, as in the case of care robots. She would like to analyze the affective intentionality in the human-robot embodied interactions and discuss the ethical and societal implications of affective robotics.
Natasha Alex Cayco Gajic is a neuroscientist who works on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in flexible learning. She is junior professor at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where she is in the Group for Neural Theory at the Laboratory for Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience. Previously, she was research associate at University College London. She received her PhD in Applied Mathematics in 2015 from the University of Washington. For her project at the 4th Intercontinental Academia, she proposes to investigate the links between sensorimotor and cognitive behaviors with a focus on cerebello-cortical coordination. In particular, she wishes to explore how a cognitive internal model in the cerebellum could aid the neocortex in adapting to unexpected changes in cognitive tasks.
Patricia Coelho de Suarez is an expert in Health Technology Assessment, Health Economic Evaluation, and Decision Analysis Models. She is Associate Professor at the Department of Preventive Medicine, at University of São Paulo (USP). She is also a member of the research group Science, Technology and Innovation in Health, based at USP’s Institute of Advanced Studies. She received her PhD in Preventive Medicine in 2009, from USP. Her proposal for ICA4 is to adopt a holistic standpoint in evaluating AI’s contribution to healthcare, including economic, ethical, and societal impacts. More specifically, she is interested in the implications of incorporating AI in health policies, decision-making processes, and equity in the Brazilian health care system.
Evandro L. T. P. Cunha is a computational linguist interested in computer-mediated communication and in the use of computational methods to solve linguistic problems, especially related to historical linguistics, revitalization of endangered languages, and the neuroscience of language. Professor at the Faculty of Letters of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG, Brazil), he holds a double PhD in Linguistics from Leiden University and in Computer Science from UFMG, and a specialization degree in Forensic Linguistics from the University of Porto. Previously, he was a research intern at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a postdoctoral fellow in the project Covid Data Analytics, at UFMG. His aim for ICA4 is to discuss applications of language science in AI and the effects of technology on human communication, particularly regarding manipulation, extremism and the spread of misinformation in the current scenario of pandemic and climate crisis
Massimiliano Di Luca is a cognitive scientist with a multidisciplinary background spanning psychology, neuroscience and engineering. Currently holding the position of Senior Lecturer at University of Birmingham’s School of Psychology, he has previously been a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics working on Bayesian modelling, researcher at Oculus Research and subsequently Facebook Reality Labs where he worked on VR. He performs both fundamental and applied research to determine how humans process multisensory stimuli, with an accent on understanding the temporal, dynamic, and interactive nature of perception. The leitmotiv of his research is to create computational models that constitute quantitative and testable theories about the underlying cognitive and neural processes. At ICA4, he would like to find ways to build virtual musicians who mimic the synergistic experience of a rehearsal with multiple partners. His second proposal is to work on human-machine interaction by building model-based AI solutions that will allow both a deeper scientific understanding of the human cognitive system and a richer and more effective behavior of artificial agents.
Diego Frassinelli’s research aims to enhance the understanding of cognitive processes engaged in language comprehension and processing. Having received his Ph.D. in Informatics from University of Edinburgh in 2015, he is now Assistant Professor in Artificial Intelligence at University of Konstanz (Germany) and has been a visiting researcher at UCL’s Language and Cognition Lab since 2016. He takes an interdisciplinary approach using tools from both computational linguistics and psycholinguistics to address questions targeting the ways speakers integrate multimodal linguistic and non-linguistic contextual information in the processing of upcoming linguistic input. Recently, his research has been moving towards the use of large-scale human behavioral data (e.g., reading and reaction times, eye-movements, linguistic norms) to describe and understand the behavior of computational linguistic models. His proposal for ICA4 is to investigate cultural aspects of language and to leverage interdisciplinarity to identify and model such very rich and diversified information with computational approaches.
André Fujita is a computer scientist who is specialized in bioinformatics. Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and coordinator of the Bioinformatics graduate program at the University of São Paulo (USP), he received his PhD from USP in 2007. Generally, his research focuses on understanding how the interaction of biological components (molecules, genes, cells, tissues, individuals, environment) raises a specific phenotype. To this end, he developed statistical methods for networks and applied them to analyze "omics" and fMRI/EEG data. He has received several awards and fellowships for his work in Germany, Japan, the UK, and the USA, and he will contribute to ICA4 with his interdisciplinary experience and expertise in biological network analysis.
Jakub Growiec is an economist (PhD 2007) specializing in the theory of long-run economic growth and technological change, macroeconomic production functions, human and social capital. Professor and head of the department of Quantitative Economics at Warsaw School of Economics, he has published 30 articles in internationally respectable JCR-listed journals. Currently, his main topic of interest is the importance of the digital revolution for global economic growth, income inequality, and factor shares. For ICA4, he proposes to discuss the stance that rapidly developing AI algorithms will likely become a game-changer for the global economy and society, overcoming the recent slowdown in global productivity growth while also producing a range of disruptive results and creating a wave of important ethical and societal challenges.
Benjamin Guedj is a senior researcher in machine learning, based in London, UK. He is the scientific leader of a research group affiliated with University College London and Inria (Lille, France). He is also visiting researcher at the Alan Turing Institute in the UK. He received his PhD in Mathematics from Sorbonne Université and Telecom ParisTech in 2014. He has a broad interest for science, including machine learning, statistics, probability, computer science. While a theoretician by training, he enthusiastically embraces the whole spectrum from theory to algorithms and applications. In line with his long-term project to integrate semantical representations into the mathematical framework of learning to make AI more like human intelligence, he proposes to discuss semantic-aware, data-frugal learning at ICA4.
Suranga Kasthurirathne is a computer scientist and a health and biomedical informatician by training. His research focusses on the generalizability and fairness of healthcare AI tools, AI-driven innovations for resource constrained settings and the accountability of AI tools used in the healthcare domain. His ICA4 proposal focuses on investigating how stakeholders representing a broad range of skillsets and expertise areas influence the acceptance, use and ongoing assessment of AI tools within complex socio-technical health systems. He resides in Carmel (Indiana, USA) with his wife and their two cats and holds the positions of Research Scientist at the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Regenstrief Institute (Indiana, USA) and Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine.
Yasutomo Kawanishi received his Ph.D. degree in Informatics from Kyoto University, Japan, in 2012. Since 2021, he has been a team leader at RIKEN Guardian Robot Project. His main research field is Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. His research interests are robot vision for environmental understanding and surveillance for human understanding, especially pedestrian detection, tracking, retrieval, and recognition. At ICA4, he would like to focus on two questions: “How can humans remember and recall the 3D environment around them?” and “Can this functionality be implemented on robots?”. He would like to work on incorporating knowledge from cognitive science and neuroscience into the robot vision field.
Philipp Kellmeyer is a neurologist, neuroscientist and researcher in neuroethics and AI ethics at the University Medical Center Freiburg (UKF) and Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). He co-founded of the research initiative “Responsible Artificial Intelligence” at the University of Freiburg. He earned his doctorate in medicine from the Department of Neurology at the UKF and a Master of Philosophy in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge. At ICA4, he proposes to discuss the question of how to effectively govern and regulate emerging AI-based neurotechnologies in the consumer domain, given that emerging direct-to consumer systems pose substantial legal and ethical challenges. Specifically, he would like to further develop a multi-level governance approach for brain data and neurotechnology that he has been working on with colleagues in neuroethics and AI.
Michael A. Livermore is a law scholar who uses artificial intelligence tools to understand the law and legal institutions. He frequently collaborates on interdisciplinary projects with researchers in other academic fields, including economics, computer science, neurology and the humanities. His substantive areas of expertise are environmental law, cost-benefit analysis, and regulatory law and policy. Currently Law professor at the University of Virginia, he earned his J.D. from New York University School of Law and served as a law clerk to Judge Harry T. Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. His project for ICA4 explores how data-driven artificial intelligence techniques can be used to construct models of legal and moral reasoning that can address important outstanding questions in systems design.
Deshen Moodley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and co-founder and co-director of the South African National Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research. His research focuses on the development of Adaptive and Cognitive Systems. He is specifically interested in general mechanisms for model learning, model update, knowledge discovery and belief revision. His research has a strong applied focus and he is investigating novel ways to engineer adaptive “thinking” systems for data fusion, situation analysis and prediction and knowledge discovery in diverse application domains, including health, biodiversity, finance, and earth observation.
Ithai Rabinowitch is a neurobiologist and synthetic biologist, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on the tiny (1mm-long) nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, taking advantage of its relatively simple nervous system to unravel molecular and cellular underpinnings of presumed early precursors of intelligence. Concomitantly, the amenability of C. elegans to genetic manipulation makes it possible to reconfigure its neural circuits, and thus incorporate human design into its behavior, opening the way for a new animal-based form of AI. At ICA4 he would like to collaboratively conceptualize an imaginative yet concrete animal AI archetype, and use it to contemplate about the significance and foreseeable consequences of human-endowed animal intelligence.
Laureate of the 2017 L’Oréal UNESCO for women in science French fellowship, Tahina Ralitera is a PhD and computer engineer, specialised in agent-based modelling and simulation. She works as a research engineer at the Laboratory for Trustworthy, Smart and Self-Organizing Systems (LICIA) of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), Saclay, France. Her current research interests are agent-based engineering and simulation for the design and the implementation of blockchain-based solutions for drone systems. She is very active in the fight for gender equality and especially in promoting women's participation in science. In this context, she is ambassadress of the L'Oréal Foundation "For Girls in Science" program and member of the "Elles Bougent" association. For ICA4, she wants to answer the following question: How to tackle open problems related to the economy of Decentralised EXchanges using rational agents?
Oksana Stalnov is a scientist who is driven by natural curiosity to understand physical processes and desire to make a difference in the world. Her work brings together knowledge from across different disciplines, enabling development of smart acoustic systems through understanding, predicting, and controlling generation of aerodynamic noise. During her academic career, she has had the pleasure of solving problems in the field of Engineering, primarily in aerodynamics and aeroacoustics, and more specifically in the fields of noise control, modeling, and analysis. She is particularly excited about using acoustic emission (AE) technique combined with artificial intelligence (AI) methods, for instance condition monitoring and flow state detection and diagnostics. She holds that AI can dramatically transform our society, not so much in terms of what we can do today, but rather what can be achieved in the near future, if we combine machine learning with physics-based models.
Henry Taylor primarily works on the interface of philosophy and cognitive science. He is especially interested in how philosophy can productively work with psychophysics to address questions concerning perception, consciousness and attention. His project for ICA4 involves using natural kinds theory to inform research at the interface of human psychology and artificial intelligence, for example in the development of more useful and scientifically productive definitions of psychological faculties such as working memory, attention, and consciousness. Natural kinds theory is the philosophical study of scientific classification: how scientists define certain key scientific concepts and ideas; and how these concepts group the phenomena that they study. He was awarded his PhD from the University of Durham in 2015, for a thesis on attention and its relation to consciousness. He was then a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge, working on the metaphysics of consciousness. He has been a Birmingham Fellow at University of Birmingham since 2017.
Melvin Wevers is a computational historian who combines research methods across the humanities and computational linguistics, applied mathematics, social sciences, and computer sciences. He is Assistant Professor in Urban History and Digital Methods at University of Amsterdam. Formerly a research fellow of UCLA’s Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics, and Carnegie Mellon’s Lab for Social Minds, he applies mathematical and social scientific methods to cultural studies. He received his PhD in Cultural History from Utrecht University in 2017. His proposal for ICA4 is to shed light onto how historical awareness could be modeled into AI systems by leveraging interdisciplinary insights.