Projects

NeuroCoRe: From Collaborative Extended Reality to Neuroscience: Neural and Cognitive Data Modelling in Health and Borderline Personality Disorder

• Principal Investigator: Huyen Nguyen

• Institutions: CNRS - LISN, ENS Paris-Saclay - Centre Borelli, INSERM - CNRL

Summary:

NeuroCoRe integrates extended reality (XR), cognitive neuroscience, computer vision, generative artificial intelligence (AI), and multimodal data analysis to investigate the mechanisms underlying human social interaction, with a particular focus on emotional regulation and social functioning in borderline personality disorder (BPD). The project addresses the lack of robust cognitive, computational, and neural models of social-emotional processes by using virtual and augmented reality to manipulate social signals, such as facial expressions, body gestures, and auditory cues, and examine their effects on emotion, cognition, and behaviour.

Co-Designing with Light: Interactive Tools for Creative Exploration and Collaboration in Museum and Exhibition Lighting Design

• Principal Investigator: Huyen Nguyen

• Ph.D Student: Francesco Dettori

• Ph.D. Cosupervisor: Christian Sandor

For a museum exhibition, curators, scenographers and lighting designers jointly develop how artefacts are presented. As the proposal evolves, a change in layout or desired appearance can reopen decisions that have already been made about lighting and equipment. At each revision, the team must reconcile these decisions.

This complex and iterative workflow makes coordination between different actors difficult. Indeed, curators, scenographers and lighting designers bring different vocabularies and priorities to the workflow, while their various software tools and luminaire catalogues organise information around technical specifications. Lighting designers must repeatedly interpret descriptions, adjust computational lighting parameters, and compare results to establish whether a revised proposal still achieves the desired effect.

The project addresses the effort placing on lighting designers throughout the creative process. It investigates how interactive tools can help them express ideas, explore alternatives, and discuss choices, while assisting with the technical work those activities require. Our aim is to give lighting designers greater control over the proposal and more scope to co-develop it with others.