Fellows

Michelle 'Misha' Oraa Ali (they/them)

Brown University

I'm a PhD student in Cognitive Science at Brown University. I got my undergraduate degree at Mount Holyoke College where I studied neuroscience, and graphic narrative & visual storytelling. I study aspects of abstract compositional thought (aka, how do we productively combine basic concepts together to form more complex ideas?). I'm particularly interested in learning how we develop a robust visual communicative system, which is relatively understudied compared to text or spoken language. This touches on ideas related to the evolutionary origins of communication, vision, development, semantics and pragmatics, information theory, representation learning, and, of course, intelligence. I care deeply about science communication and creating accessible, practical and useful educational tools. I also love designing toys (whether it's for experimental stimuli or for play).

1. I'm looking forward to meeting and learning from people with a wide range of intellectual and creative interests - as well as engaging with ideas that I may not usually have the opportunity to interface with directly!

2. I can contribute knowledge about developmental psychology (in humans, primarily), psycholinguistics, language evolution, and cognitive science more broadly. I'm also very interested in aspects of creativity and play (in humans and otherwise), semantics and semiotics (how symbols come to acquire meaning).

3. I would love to learn from philosophers, comparativists and computational scientists about how they conceptualize communicative systems across their different areas or species of interest. I'm also really interested in talking about creativity with people from different backgrounds!

4. I'd love to participate in projects which (1) look at how we create meaning from visual symbols (like Venn diagrams or art) over the course of development (regardless of whether this happens over the development of a culture, or development in a creature's lifespan), (2) are related to ideas of curiousity and creativity especially when dealing with problems about which we have incomplete information (do we actually want "rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty"? - as was claimed by Vroomfondel, the philosopher in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

Romi Banerjee

Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India

Alum (DISI Fellow '19)

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India. It's been a while that I've been curious about all the different processes (curiosity, imagination, creativity, memory formation, meaning representation, time & space representation, qualia, sense of comprehension, sense of self, implicit learning, consciousness, attention, affects & emotions, intuitive physics, volition, etc.) that underlie cognition - across age and species...

· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?

I look forward to all lectures and interactions, and possible short-term / long-term interdisciplinary projects and collaborations that could stem from them...

· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?

I truly am not sure about my 'expertise' in anything :)... I enjoy thinking about the big and the small questions, and try to understand how to model / arrive at answers for them from different perspectives...

· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?

I am particularly eager to learn about attention, affect, consciousness, comprehension, curiosity, imagination and creativity...

· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)

I would love to be part of projects that would deal with imagination and creativity in babies - across species... I am also interested in projects that would center around curiosity and representation of meanings/deep semantics...

Laurie Bayet

American University

I am a developmental cognitive neuroscientist, and an Assistant Professor at American University in Washington DC. My research lab investigates how human infants/toddlers come to understand the visual world, such as faces or objects. I am particularly interested in how infants come to understand facial expressions in affective terms -- which is important for social and emotional communication, and is affected in conditions such as anxiety. To do this, I integrate neuroimaging, behavioral studies, and computational tools.

1. I’m looking forward to getting a “booster shot” in cross-disciplinary thinking! I am particularly enthusiastic about learning from scientists in the fields of AI, animal cognition, anthropology, and philosophy, as knowledge from those fields is relevant to understanding cognitive development. I am also particularly interested in potential collaboration with people with overlapping interests in affective communication and/or high-level vision, including but not limited to people with complementary expertise in, say, machine vision, Bayesian inference, cross-cultural studies, etc. who would like to interact with a developmental cognitive neuroscientist.

2. Much of my research focuses on figuring out how human infants (0-3 year-olds) come to understand the visual world, particularly faces and facial expressions, using behavioral/neuroimaging studies. I also have some expertise in applying simple ML for data analysis, such as “decoding” human neural (EEG) data.

3. See (1). To pick a more specific topic, I do have basic experience with some flavors of ML/AI but am always eager to learn more!

4. A starter toolkit for affective cognition?

From emoticons to Darwin’s observations of expressions of emotion in animals, nonverbal expressions of affect are ubiquitous. Yet, how we actually infer affect/emotion from these nonverbal expressions remains contested.

On one hand, universalist explanations tend to emphasize biologically-determined mappings between some emotions and corresponding expressions (e.g., fear <-> gasping face). However, such explanations make it difficult to explain how affective communication can operate flexibly, under uncertainty, etc. On the other hand, constructivist explanations tend to emphasize cultural knowledge, language, and concepts. However, such explanations make it difficult to bridge our understanding of affective communication in humans and other animals.

I propose to explore cognitive tools that enable humans and other animals to communicate affects/emotions nonverbally, combining expertise in AI/modeling (e.g., Bayesian), animal cognition, and human cognition/development. We could collaborate to build a model, write a concept paper, or pilot an experiment on MTurk, then write a seed funding proposal to conduct experiments with preverbal infants and non-human animals.

Such a project would shift the narrative from quantifying cultural similarity/variation in affective communication to examining what generates it, and may ultimately contribute to building emotionally-competent AI.

Andrew Buskell (he/him)

University of Cambridge

I am a philosopher of science based in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. My research looks at the sciences of diversity. In the past, this was focused on cultural evolution and human cognitive diversity—in my current project, I look at the epistemology and logic of cross-cultural comparison, claims around (bio)cultural diversity, and the risks and harms involved as operationalizations of culture move across scientific domains and into the public sphere.

1) There's a lot to be excited about—but I'm particularly interested to hear what people across the humanities and social and natural sciences think of as being the most pressing and pursuit-worthy projects of today.

2) My specialization is in the philosophy of science, especially biology, cognitive science, and social science. But I'm something of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to scientific expertise, having worked on comparative cognition, formal models of cultural change, and more recently, on the history of anthropology and the metaphysics of cultural individuation. So I can speak across a range of literatures, and at least some of the time, identify points of common concern, and bring the tools of philosophy of science to bear.

3) I'm particularly interested in projects aiming to understand and classify diversity—particularly diversity in cognition, social organization, and if I'm lucky, culture— as well as those considering the ethical and political dimensions of such classifications.

4) I have live interests and project ideas in a range of fields, including archaeological systematics and cultural taxonomy, database ontologies and "Big History", the history of cultural evolutionary ideas, and the links between Indigenous activist and entrenched ontologies of culture. In general, I would be very interested in projects linking classification, ethics and politics, and contemporary science on culture.

Adrianna Chorąży

Pedagogical University of Cracow

I am a literary scholar and cultural anthropologist. I am currently in my first year of PhD in humanities (literary studies) at Pedagogical University in Cracow. I finished my bachelor and master degrees on Jagiellonian University, where I was studying Inter-faculty Individual Studies in the Humanities (mostly comparative literature). My PHD project focuses on the study of literary prose, reportage and (popular)science literature in terms of the images of animals presented in them. The subjective depictions of animals are particularly interesting (animals are not more allegories, symbols or metaphors, and are not subject to anthropomorphization) and (possibly the most radical) narrative that gives voice to animals.

· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?

I can’t wait for meeting new people and new ideas. I am really excited for working with the international scientific community. I am sure that I will learn a lot of new stuff.

· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?

Bearing in mind my education, I have a large literary workshop. In my work, I research literature in accordance with posthumanist and animalocentric theories. In my work, I also research scientific and popular science discourses on animals, so I also have some knowledge of ethology. I am interested in how we talk about radically Other.

· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?

I am interested in creating interdisciplinary projects in which we try to understand (rejecting anthropocentric categories) the difference as deeply as possible.

· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)

I would like to explore the role of narrative in shaping experience by examining its impact on the reader. I wonder if the level of care for human and nonhuman animals, the degree of commitment (activism) and the recipient's internal moral code change under the influence of narrative (including animals).

Alejandra Ciria

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

In 2019, I obtained my Ph.D. in experimental psychology, and currently, I am a full-time associate professor in the area of Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences at the School of Psychology. My research interests focus on the study of perceptual, predictive, and attentional mechanisms under the embodied cognition framework. The study of prediction error detection and the processes for its minimization in biological and artificial agents is of special interest.

1) What I am most looking forward to DISI is meeting new people sharing very close research interests, learning and discussing with them new perspectives and different points of view about the diversity of intelligences in biological and artificial systems.

2) Due to my expertise in experimental psychology and cognitive robotics, I could contribute to designing experiments as well as bringing up together ideas from different disciplines to state hypotheses that could be tested in both biological and artificial systems.

3) I am most eager to learn more about biological sciences to dive deeper into the study of meaning-creating mechanisms embedded in living systems.

4) I would like to collaborate on a project related to the study of meaning-creation mechanisms for the recognition, monitoring, and decision-making of what is functionally relevant for living systems. Does the creation of meaning across different levels of organization can be categorized by a common set of principles?

Fay Clark

University of Bristol

I am an animal cognition and welfare scientist working with exotic animals in zoos and sanctuaries. I specialize in ‘cognitive enrichment’, meaning experimental cognitive tasks designed to promote positive affective states (good feelings). I combine my broad training in zoology, psychology and biological anthropology to ask: how do animals feel when they do what they can do? I have been collaborating with computer scientists to place automatic logging technologies and AI in my apparatuses, to collect more objective data and avoid human interference. I am currently a visiting research associate in psychological science at the University of Bristol (UK).

1) DISI is the dream intellectual retreat; I am looking forward to the guilt-free time and space to listen, think and create!

2) My expertise is in animal welfare and cognition, and I have specialised in working with primates and marine mammals. I could contribute to projects on animal affective state (feelings, emotions), and projects which take place outside of ‘traditional’ laboratory settings (i.e., on unusual species, with small sample sizes, lack of experimental control, public presence).

3) I am particularly interested to learn from participants who undertake similar research on much larger-scale animal/human systems, and anyone who uses tangible tasks to enhance human well-being. I’d also like to learn more about the AI I’ve recently been using in my apparatuses.

4) I would like to collaborate on a project connecting animal intelligence to emotional expression. What expressions do animals spontaneously perform when they are fully engaged, losing interest, challenged beyond competence, or in the moment they solve a task?

Brenda de Groot

Comparative Psychology & Affective Neuroscience lab,
Leiden University

I am a primatologist, artist and sentientist with a life-long fascination for animals and their minds. I graduated from the MSc Primate Conservation at Oxford Brookes University and currently pursue a PhD in which I study the (question of) aesthetic and other affective experiences of nonhuman primates.

While being passionate about research, there is also this artistic side to me. I spent most of my childhood with a pencil in hand, and drawing has grown to be a means of communicating - especially those experiences that are hard to put into words. It is my ambition to fuse my art practice (illustration, sculpture and writing) with academic work, either by using it as a research tool, or to communicate knowledge to greater society.

My personal mission is to change the dominant anthropocentric worldview into a sentiocentric one.

a) What I am most looking forward to at DISI is to connect with all these inspiring and likeminded people! I am also thrilled to work cross-disciplinary, and keen to discover the insights and results of it.

b) My formal expertise is in primatology, psychology and art, but after spending an ungodly amount of time on my passion (read: obsession) project - formulating a philosophy that grants moral consideration to all sentient beings - my imposter syndrome allowed me to add ‘animal ethics’ to the list. I would gladly contribute any of these expertises to a collaborative project.

c) I am eager to learn how I can pursue truly interdisciplinary research, combining art and science, science and ethics, and/or ethics and art.

d) Idea 1: I would like to develop a new, cross-disciplinary method to study animal consciousness, so to gain a better understanding of the inner lives of other sentient beings. I gave the method the working title ‘animal ethnography’, as it fuses ethology with ethnography and graphical data collection. Animal ethnography embraces interspecies communication, anecdotes and case studies, and allows for novel means of qualitative data collection such as illustrations and video. Idea 2: As art has the power to touch people on an emotional level, I would also love to research whether we can use art to spark compassion for non-human animals.

Marius Dorobantu

Postdoc, Theology & Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

I am a theologian working at the crossroads of religion and science. Big questions are my bread and butter. Last year I completed my PhD in theological anthropology (Univ. of Strasbourg), exploring what a scenario of human-level AI might mean for the theological notion of human distinctiveness. The project I'm currently working on, which is actually within the Diverse Intelligences umbrella, is entitled Understanding Spiritual Intelligence: Computational, Psychological and Theological Approaches.

1) What I am looking forward to the most is spending time with ridiculously smart people. The DISI environment is not only fun, but also the ideal breeding ground for new ideas.

2) Due to my expertise in theology and religion I could bring fresh, out of the box, perspectives to projects dealing with foundational questions. I also have a fair knowledge of philosophy of mind and of AI.

3) Instead of a particular topic, I'm more interested in the ideas that emerge out of brainstormings and Q&A sessions with the invited faculty.

4) I can envisage a potentially fruitful collaboration between astrobiologists, philosophers and theologians in extending the scope of what the SETI program is looking for (which currently is heavily biased in searching for human or animal-like type of aliens). Other types of imagination, such as the religious one, could complement our understanding of intelligence and enrich the range of things we look for with SETI.

Julia Espinosa (she/her)

Department of Psychology, University of Toronto

I am an experimental psychologist, investigating how dogs think and learn about the world. In my research I combine insights from comparative cognition, developmental psychology, and cognitive science to ask questions about how non-humans make causal inferences, learn from social partners, and understand their physical environment. I'm currently wrapping up my PhD and looking for a postdoctoral fellowship that will allow me to continue studying cognition and affect in diverse species.

Sofia Forss

Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich

What are you most looking forward to at DISI?

As it’s been sometime since I attended lectures myself, I am very much looking forward to learn new things and increase my knowledge on where we stand in the science of intelligences today. Also, I am super excited to engage with other scientists outside my own field.

· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?

I did my PhD on cultural intelligence in orangutans. Since then, I have studied social and individual learning, innovation abilities and mostly novelty responses and curiosity in apes and more recently also in monkeys and meerkats. I gladly share my expertise on how information processing works in animal minds.

· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?

How comparable intelligences are across animal, human and AI minds and how we can study information processing in comparable fashion across system in the future.

· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)

I would like to discover if curiosity driven learning is as crucial for non-human animals, as it is for human development and construction of intelligence, and moreover how we can use AI to build predictive and comparable models.

Cristina-Ioana Galusca

CNRS Universite Grenoble Alpes

Alum

Mariel Goddu

Harvard University

What are you most looking forward to at DISI?

I'm looking forward to having my mind tickled and changed by new perspectives--especially from comparativists and computationalists. I've been thinking a lot recently about the relation between intelligence and life, and what we may gain by taking seriously the idea that "cognition" is a biological phenomenon... I.e., beyond notions of natural selection and optimality that form the bases of a lot of evolutionary psyschology and evolution-inspired computational approaches to mind.

What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?

I'm a developmental psychologist cross-training in a computational cognitive development lab. So I'm in the process of learning a bunch about machine learning and the whole computational cognitive science outlook/project/set of theoretical commitments.

My dissertation research investigated how young children (2-5 years) recognize, generate, and capitalize on their knowledge of causal relations to generate novel possibilities/causal outcomes and solutions to problems they have never faced. I'm very interested in the Gibsonian notion of "affordances"--elusive and metaphysically slippery as they are. My current empirical work explores the development of play and imagination in early childhood.

I can contribute to a project: Kid knowledge & know-how (e.g., in study design); perspectives from philosophy of mind/biology; probably a lot of cute kid and animal videos/memes ("for research purposes")

What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?

I know very little about "swarm" or "collective" intelligence, and I'm really excited to learn more about that.

Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)

Imagine someone holds up a shoebox and says, “Guess what’s inside.” Unless you have a reason to think you’re being tricked, you infer that *something* (i.e., light enough to lift, with a volume less than or equal to that of a shoebox) is inside. But, your prediction is relatively ill-defined and underspecified. (Contrast this with a case where someone pushes the same box to a table’s edge and says, “Guess what will happen when I let go.”)

How can we characterize (conceptually, computationally, informationally) the fuzziness, or uncertainty, of mental representations in prediction?

David Harrison

University of Cambridge

I have recently finished my second year as a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Cambridge. In my research, I focus on questions concerning: naturalising agency; the role of cognition and subjectivity in evolution; the evolutionary origins of subjectivity; and broader philosophy of science questions involving the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. In effect, how should we understand the agentic and active capacities of organisms within a scientific (i.e., materialistic) framework? To explore potential paths and sandboxes through and in which we can study the evolution of agency and minds, I pull from research in basal cognition (specifically, aneural or unicellular forms of cognition seen in slime moulds and bacteria, respectively) and soft robotics, which is an exciting area of research wherein 'ingredients' of cognition can be put to the test in the design of intrinsically active, feeling machines.

1) I'm looking forward to the diverse seminars both in and outside my AOI, and the promotion of novel, exciting research projects to be explored throughout the summer institute. I'm also eager to see how projects can span the humanities and the natural sciences to promote a more holistic and integrated understanding of cognition, mind, and intelligence.

2) My research expertise falls mostly within philosophy of science and mind, and a significant portion of my time consists in looking at basal cognition research to understand 'minimal models' of cognition, what this tells us about its wide distribution, and how principles thereof scale up in multicellular (animal) bodies. Given this, I think I could promote and encourage broader appreciation for the (I believe) more distributed nature of cognition and its relation to the homeostatic and regulative processes that are emblematic of life.

3) I'm interested in learning about how the disciplines of biology, psychology, and cognitive science (among others) can contribute to smart, safe, and effective 'mind design' in the domain of artificial intelligence and robotics.

4) A project I'm particularly interested in pursuing is crossing between the fields of basal cognition and soft robotics, exploring principles of the former and how they could be implemented and recreated in diverse media in the latter. In particular, soft robotics allows us to explore how cognitive capacities (such as goal-directedness and taxic/trophic behaviour) relate to the materiality of living systems and their physiological regulation.

Ho Man Him (Raymond)

Maastricht University, The Netherlands

This is Raymond, an incoming Masters student reading Forensic Psychology at Maastricht University. He has an Experimental Psychology BA from Oxford (hence that awful photo on the left), and has experience working with students of special education needs. Generally, he is interested in how humans interpret the social world, especially through psychopaths and cats, if he isn't too busy referring to himself in the third person.

His background is largely in clinical, developmental, and social psychology, but I wouldn't consider him as having 'expertise' in any of these fields. He does spend a significant portion of his time understanding the intersection between these three sub-disciplines, as well as trying to connect theories within artificial intelligence/machine learning, evolutionary biology, and non-human cognition to understand how humans, (especially psychopaths) understand the social world affectively. He is really excited about the prospect to learn from and be inspired by fellow interdisciplinary thinkers. He is also desperate to make #MrGorbachevTearDownThisWallofDisciplinaryThinking trend and to see pictures of any of your cats (for 'research purposes').

Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue

One thing I've noticed from traditional ToM tasks is that they are largely biased to verbal children, and non-verbal kids do seem to exhibit some form of awareness of mental states even though they score terribly in traditional ToM tasks. I then realized that the idea of measuring ToM started from anthropologists who studied chimpanzees, and I would love to see whether a non-verbal ToM task could be developed for both mentally challenged humans, as well as non-human animals as well by removing language as a barrier. At the same time, I would be curious whether ToM could be specified in a computational model such that we could involve fellows from all three categories in converging our research input, insight, and data into a testable model for simulation.

Sweta Kaman

Department of Cognitive Science, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India

I am a second-year doctoral student in Cognitive Science at IIT Jodhpur, India, intending to address the core questions about intelligence – its nature, how it is manifested in the brain, and how it could be implemented in machines.

I completed my graduation and post-graduation in Computer Science & Engineering. My current research focuses on Adult Cognitive Development and Healthy Ageing intending to understand the process of ageing using human behavior and gestures.

I am eager to learn from and get inspired by all the other researchers and storytellers at DISI 2021! As I am in the initial stage of my doctoral degree, indulging in new collaborative projects with members of different disciplines will help me explore more, polish my knowledge, and help accomplish something ground-breaking for my thesis.

I am deeply interested in studying old age and would love to collaborate on a project associated with the process of ageing in humans, non-verbal communication, flexible cognitive control, cross-cultural studies, social-emotional development in aging adult, developing data-driven models, exploring relationship among different types/forms of intelligences using various research methods and experiments.

rafa kern

Stanford University

My name is rafa, pronounced “hafa,” with a soft H like in human, short for Rafael, with the name of God elided in the standard Brazilian nickname. I am a Brazilian Jew who studies how spiritual/religious practices shape minds, by which I mean the stuff we use to navigate the world, and how they help us become wiser, or better at navigating said world. More specifically, I am about to head to Jerusalem to begin my dissertation research on how the stories Jewish-identified emerging adults encounter during a year of intensive text study in Israel shape the stories, images, and metaphors those learners (myself included!) live by.

1) I am most looking forward to meeting the other DISI fellows and storytellers. Alas, it won’t be over vegan haggis and beers this year, but I trust we’ll have a good time anyway.

2) I am decidedly transdiscipinary, so my biggest offering to a project is the ability to navigate and translate across disciplines. I am happiest collecting and analyzing qualitative data — interviews, ethnographic observations, and written record — but I am also comfortable with the computational and quantitative methods used in the social sciences. I also think very systemically, so seeing big-picture connections is something I bring to any project. I also bring lots of experience with

3) I’m especially interested in learning about ways to think about ways that minds are individual and also collective, embodied and distributed, and what that means for human and artificial minds.

4) I would love to think with others about what wisdom is and how it can be taught/cultivated.

V. Bleu Knight (she/her)

Active Inference Lab

2018 & 2020 Alum

I am an independent research consultant in New Mexico, and I have worked as a contractor in complex systems research since finishing my PhD in Neuroscience in 2017. For the last year, I have been working with the Active Inference Lab (www.activeinference.org) and Complexity Weekend (www.complexityweekend.com). My current research is focused on information management, collective intelligence, and emergence, with a sprinkle of cultural evolution and, of course, active inference. I am particularly interested in scale-free processes, integrating information across scales, and defining (or abolishing) boundaries. You can learn more about me at my (probably outdated) website: www.bleuknight.com

I am looking forward to expanding my collaboration boundary, hopefully including people with skills and perspectives that are unique to the culture that I have come to know and love at DISI.

I am open to undertaking all kinds of projects- related to my current research or not. I am interested in exploring the ways that creativity and curiosity are connected to intelligence. I’d also like to nurture my recent fascination with applied category theory and indulge in philosophical discourse.

I am experienced with agent based modeling, network science, predictive analytics, image analysis, bioinformatics, and some NLP.

Urte Laukaityte

UC Berkeley

I am about to start my 6th year in the philosophy PhD programme at UC Berkeley. Before this, I got my MSc in cognitive science from the University of Edinburgh and a BA in linguistics from the University of Cambridge. Interdisciplinary thinking is very much my cup of tea.

I am currently working mainly within philosophy of psychiatry, aiming to formulate a broadly mechanistic account pertaining to phenomena like psychogenic conditions, placebo/nocebo, culture-bound syndromes, transient mental illness, mass hysteria, hypnosis, and suchlike. The ultimate goal is to offer a novel testable hypothesis with the potential to contribute to moving psychiatric classificatory and diagnostic practices towards precision medicine. A good deal of my thinking draws from empirical research within the so-called predictive processing/active inference framework, which has recently produced stimulating new ways of conceptualising cognition more broadly and mental illness more specifically. In addition, I am readily excitable about issues in computational neuroscience, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology as well as the history and philosophy of medicine.

I am curious about a broad array of subjects covered by DISI so I will just float one example of a project I would be keen on getting involved in. Animal madness has been generating some fascinating scholarly research recently but it is still not a topic that has been explored in great detail. I have been considering to what extent (person-level or subpersonal) beliefs might play a causal role within psychopathology and animal cognition research could shed some light on the question.

As a result of fairly wide-ranging interests, I am slowly venturing into the world of published writing for a general audience, mostly covering various historical curiosities, such as Mesmerism and the Modern Clinical Trial in the PDR. To popularise the topic further, Vox created a fun video about it as well. I am writing a piece on an early 20th century Irish psychiatric hospital for History Today at the moment and I have numerous other stories I would like to get out there in the near future. Anything I can do to cultivate the quality of curiosity beyond the confines of academia is something I find intrinsically valuable.

Cheng Liu

Emory University

I am a rising third-year doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at Emory University. My research interests span the fields of Old World prehistory, hunter-gatherer societies, lithic analysis, and cultural evolution. For my dissertation project, I am trying to identify the differences between demic diffusion, cultural diffusion, and convergence as seen in the generation of highly similar stone artifacts at the assemblage level through computational modeling and experimental archaeology.

· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?

I anticipate DISI to be an ideal place for professional development and networking building, but more importantly, I hope to find peer scholars who share research interests and could potentially develop collaborative research projects together in the future through this amazing opportunity.

· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?

I am a paleolithic archaeologist by training. That being said, if anyone is interested in the empirical evidence of hominin cognitive evolution, I am more than happy to talk about it. In addition, I also have some experience in agent-based modeling.

· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?

I look forward to hearing from those who are interested in the epistemological issues of detecting and measuring cognitive aptitudes, especially psychologists/cognitive scientists.

· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)

Given the time constraint of collaborative projects, I would propose that a feasible research idea could be developing an agent-based model that explores the effects of mixed individual-level social learning strategies (SLS) on the population-level cultural pattern. Agent-based modeling is an ideal platform for interdisciplinary scholarship and dissemination due to its highly intuitive assumptions and interpretable results.

Nischal Mainali

Australian National University & Hebrew University of Jerusalem

I am a joint PhD student in Philosophy at the Australian National University and Computational Neuroscience at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I am interested in understanding mechanisms of biological and artificial intelligence and the philosophy of objects such as computation and representation that we might use to that end.

At DISI, I am looking forward to learning unfamiliar and unexpected ways of understanding the mind and finding a great atmosphere to share ideas. My expertise is formalizing and analysing models of different aspects of intelligence and I could likely contribute to the theoretical modelling of various phenomenons associated with intelligence. During the program, I am eager to learn and discover new connections between fields and novel avenues of questioning. One collaborative project that I'd like to pursue is to clarify the connection between notions such as computation and representation as they are used in philosophy, neuroscience and other fields.

Tesla Monson

Department of Anthropology, Western Washington University

I completed my PhD in Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley (2017) followed by a 1-year postdoc in the same department, and a 14 month postdoc at the Anthropology Institute, University of Zurich, before starting as an assistant professor of Anthropology at Western in 2019. My research predominately investigates the evolution of mammalian craniodental variation, with a focus on primates, using both extant and fossil materials. I am particularly interested in the evolution of humanness, what makes us 'human', and how we can investigate this transition in the fossil record.

1) At DISI, I am really looking forward to interacting with researchers from a wide-variety of disciplines and being able to ask big questions in a creative framework. In the end, it is the potential for intellectual stimulation and inspiration that has drawn me to DISI. I want to give myself the space to return to out-of-the-box thinking and move beyond the boundaries of my discipline to tackle the biggest questions in human evolution.

2) My expertise is in skeletal and dental morphology and the primate fossil record. My contributions to a project would likely focus on understanding and interpreting the fossil record and the evolution of large-scale patterns of morphological variation.

3) At DISI, I hope to learn more about how other researchers and disciplines think about cognition, understanding, learning, and communication, and the methods they use to quantify these concepts. I think a lot can be gained by approaching questions from a wide-angle.

4) One collaborative project I would like to pursue involves developing new proxies for brain growth and cognition that can be applied to the hominid fossil record. I would also be really interested to join forces with an artist/artists to develop a music/dance/other medium performance for science communication that explores the evolution of human cognition.

Aramis D. M. Valverde

University of California, Merced, Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences

I am a PhD student in Cognitive and Information Sciences at The University of California, Merced. My background is primarily in psychology and philosophy, however my reasearch almost always takes a heavily interdisciplinary or systemic approach.

I am mainly interested in the neural mechanisms responsible for representation, phenomenal consciousness, and time perception. However I also work on various other projects, ranging from the evolution of political systems to the systemic underpinnings of neuro-psychiatric illnesses.

I am currently focusing my efforts on characterizing and simulating the neural ensembles that instantiate representations and further delineating the propagational dynamics those ought to exhibit.

1. I'm very much looking forward to collaborating, conversing with, and learning from my wonderful colleagues!

2. I've developed a degree of expertise in the following subjects: The neural basis of cognition, neural-chemical mechanisms, neural architectures, the neural basis of representation, philosophy of mind, and systematicity and evolving systems.

More generally, I am quite proficient in theoretical modeling, general systems design, and experiment design.

Due to the interdisciplinary nature of my work, I am conversationally competent in computer modeling, biological systems, policy, linguistics, design, neural network models, psychiatric and neuro-psychiatric illnesses, and data analysis.

3. I am very excited to learn about animal cognition, as I hope to broaden my understanding of the vast range of possible information processing mechanisms and systems. I also wish to learn about the mechanisms that allow some animals to carry out very complex behaviors with no prior training.

4. I'd like to collaborate on a few projects, namely the characterization of human organizations as naturally evolving systems, a roadmap for the principled development of general A.I., and discussion of the possibly hallucinatory (meaning internally constructed and perceived) nature of experience.

Richard Ngo

University of Cambridge

I'm a PhD candidate in the philosophy of machine learning at Cambridge's History and Philosophy of Science Department. I was previously a research engineer at DeepMind, focusing on building reward functions aligned with human preferences, based on interactive human feedback. I've also spent time investigating potential risks from advanced AI systems.

I'm currently working on philosophical issues related to the development of general intelligence in machines, in particular the analogy between that and the evolution of human intelligence. As part of that, I've spent the last year looking into some of the debates surrounding adaptationist explanations in evolutionary biology. Right now I'm excited to learn more about cognitive science and how it might inform our understanding of deep learning.

One project that I'd be keen to look into during DISI is the extent to which current machine learning could be described as "behaviorist", and what alternatives there might be. Another potential project is an interdisciplinary investigation of Moravec's Paradox, which I consider a crucial lens through which to view recent advances in machine learning.

I'm excited to get to know everyone!

Lauren Oey

UC San Diego

I am a Ph.D. student in Psychology at UC San Diego. I am broadly interested in how agents use social information to make strategic decisions when communicating information to others. Specifically, my research seeks to better understand human deception through computational models and behavioral experiments.

1. I am excited to meet new people, get inspired by each other's ideas about the nature of intelligence, and hopefully develop some long-lasting transdisciplinary collaborations!

2. I am experienced in probabilistic modeling, using an assortment of machine learning tools for large-scale data analysis, and developing web-based behavioral games for adults and children. Additionally, I know a lot about social cognition, cognitive development, and psycholinguistics (from a past life).

3. I would love to learn more about collective cognition, cross-species social intelligence, and human-AI interaction.

4. My idea is quite applied---to develop an adversarial, narrative game that can educate people to be more socially intelligent and vigilant when it comes to detecting real-world misinformation, such as fake news (see also https://www.getbadnews.com/). Furthermore, people have diverse beliefs and experiences, so how might we be able to use adaptive AIs to optimize how much the player can learn about their own susceptible to various types of misinformation?

Danielle Perszyk

Google

I am a cognitive scientist that studies how humans link their minds together. My PhD work with Sandy Waxman at Northwestern focused on how the uniquely human link between language and cognition, initially broad enough to include nonhuman primate vocalizations, becomes tuned to infants' native language over their first year of life. At Google I work with an interdisciplinary team of researchers and engineers building models of perception that aim to increasingly capture how humans model the world. If I could contribute one thing to the collective knowledge pool, it would be an understanding of the evolutionary origins of our psychological drive to create art and a framework for thinking about art.

What am I most looking forward to at DIS?

I'm most looking forward to connecting with researchers from other disciplines who work on or are interested in the evolutionary origins of communication and how communicative strategies shape intelligence across species (and AIs.)

What is my expertise? What can I contribute to a project?

My expertise is in cognitive development, language development, and language evolution. I am also becoming increasingly adept at translating concepts from these domains to AI. I can contribute an understanding of the interactions between "nature" and "nurture" in the developing mind to projects that aim to "program intelligences."

What am I most eager to learn about at DISI?

I'm most eager to learn about recent conceptualizations within the evolution of communication, culture, and intelligence and how these evolutionary trajectories can inform building/programming models of intelligence.

A collaborative project I'd like to pursue.

I'd like to work on developing an interdisciplinary line of research that investigates the psychological motivations for linking our minds together (including art as a communicative strategy). I'd also like to apply a framework for these human motivations to programming intelligences (i.e., how do AI models change if we program in rewards that mimic the human drive to reconcile prediction errors between our own models of the world and our models of others' models?)

Maria Pykälä

University of Lausanne

I’m a first-year PhD student investigating cultural evolution at the University of Lausanne. I’m working on understanding the role of social networks (their structure, formation etc.) in shaping cumulative cultural evolution and collective cognition.

Further, I’m interested in collective intelligence, future of human evolution (what’s our next major transition?), and applications of cultural evolution to safeguard against existential risks.

Previously I did an MPhil in Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge, where I focused on human behavioural ecology and hunter-gatherer cooperation.

I want to learn more about collective intelligence from all perspectives. I’m also interested in how AI fits into our evolutionary trajectory, and what the future of human evolution and human-machine intelligence looks like.

I’d like to work on a project to enhance human collective intelligence by combining our understanding of human biases, cultural evolutionary dynamics and social learning mechanisms with machine intelligence.

Wiktor Rorot (he/him)

University of Warsaw

Alum

I am a PhD Student at University of Warsaw. I am interested predominantly in philosophy of mind, of cognitive science, and of biology. I also have a strong background in cognitive science.

My research interests span predominantly two areas. First, I'm interested in perception and consciousness, especially experience of space, from the perspective of 4E approaches to cognition and the free energy principle modeling framework. Second, I'm curious about scale-free approaches to biology (and cognition) and the relation between organization of life and cognition, aka the "life-mind continuity" thesis.

1) I am most looking forward to the stimulating atmosphere of DISI's activities, the scope and variety of discussions that will take place and learning about new things from faculty and fellow fellows.

2) My expertise is primarily in philosophy and methods of conceptual analysis, but I have also some background in computational modeling and at least basic understanding of various formal methods. This includes my expertise in the free energy principle, which I'm always happy to share.

3) I am most eager to learn about various topics in biology and complexity science.

4) The project I would be happy to run during DISI concerns the question of usefulness and applicability of concepts such as "communication", "computation", and "information processing" to describe processes happening at the level of simple (unicellular?) organisms. This project could take several different paths: from conceptual analysis, possibly enhanced by computer simulations, to more historically oriented study investigating the use of those terms in scientific publications throughout 20th century. The goal would be to understand better how these notions pick out certain features of the world while obfuscating others.

Maria Ryskina

Carnegie Mellon University

I am a PhD student at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. My background is in computer science and I work on machine learning models for computational linguistics and natural language processing. I am especially interested in computational modeling of creative language like novel word forms or non-standard spellings and how these idiosyncratic phenomena drive larger-scale language change. I am interested in studying this topic from several angles: psycholinguistic (how do people come up with new words and how do others infer their meaning?), social (what makes some non-standard linguistic items more likely to survive and disseminate over larger communities?) and application-focused (how can we encode such creative reasoning into our AI models and where would it be necessary?)

1) At DISI I'm looking forward to learning from the diverse community of researchers and getting inspired to come up with more interdisciplinary ideas of my own. My research interests lie at the intersection of computer science, linguistics and cognitive science and DISI seems like a perfect opportunity to get more exposure outside of my primary field!

2) My background is in computer science and machine learning, so I can help with statistical modeling and computational formalizations of cognitive phenomena, especially related to language. I've also learned a lot from linguists in my subfield and I have some knowledge relevant to human communication.

3) I am especially excited about learning about the human mind and brain from the point of view of cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience.

4) In general, I am interested in building computational models of aspects of human cognition or machine learning applications inspired by cognitive science theories. More specifically, I'd love to get more hands-on experience in designing psycholinguistic studies and collecting data from human subjects.

Alex Schnell

University of Cambridge

I am a Research Fellow of Darwin College and a Research Associate in the Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of Cambridge. My research interests centre around complex learning and memory mechanisms in animals and how these abilities have evolved across diverse taxa. My primary model species include cephalopods (octopus, cuttlefish, and squid) and corvids (members of the crow family) but I also have experience working with elephants, freshwater fish, and juvenile crocodiles. In addition to my interest in cognitive evolution, I also have an interest in sensory ecology, neuro-ethology, sentience, and welfare. My background is in marine biology, having gained a B.A. in Marine Science at the University of Sydney in 2007. I completed my Ph.D. on the behavioural ecology of giant cuttlefish at Macquarie University in 2015. Following that, I held several post-doctoral positions and was based at two leading cephalopod research facilities including the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, USA and the Centre de Recherches en Environnement Côtier in Normandy, France. I currently hold a Newton International Fellowship funded by the Royal Society.

What am I most looking forward to at DISI?

I am looking forward to meeting new people across diverse disciplines and feeling inspired by new science. I'm also looking forward to gaining perspective and viewing science through a different lens.

What is my expertise? What could I contribute to a project?

I am an expert in designing experiments to quantify complex learning and memory in non-verbal animals.

What am I most eager to learn about at DISI?

I am eager to learn about the applications of our understanding of the animal mind and brain from different points of views.

Describe one collaborative project I'd like to pursue?

I haven't settled on one particular idea but I hope to have a clearer idea during the course of the DISI 2021.

Tyrone Sgambati

UC Berkeley

I am a PhD student in Department of Psychology at UC Berkeley. My interests have always been broad, and as an undergraduate, I focused on philosophy of mind and emotion science. My primary research now, however, is geared towards developing approaches that promote collaboration and discussion across ideological boundaries. To this end, I've begun a research program exploring the relationship between an individual's intellectual humility (an awareness of their epistemic limitations) their homophily & the ideological diversity in their social network. I have secondary interests in the privacy of human experience and psychedelic science.

What am I most looking forward to at DISI?

I'm most looking forward to connecting with scholars from other disciplines with unique perspectives and new (to me) methodologies. I've missed philosophy.

What is my expertise and what can you contribute to a project?

I'm well-versed in the emotion-regulation, intellectual humility, and psychedelic science literatures. I can contribute knowledge on these subjects, extensive experience with human subjects design, and some statistical know-how. Most of all, I like to think my broad interests have made me a creative and generative collaborator.

Describe one collaborative project I'd like to pursue?

I would love to explore how traits (e.g., intellectual humility) travel through social networks. What moderates these relationships? How can we leverage network structures to create wide-reaching interventions?

Shoshana Simons

UC Berkeley

Dominic Sivitilli

University of Washington

I am a PhD candidate in Psychology and Astrobiology at the University of Washington. I study the distributed intelligence of the octopus and the role that their arms and suckers play in their perceptions, cognition, and decision making.

Without a skeleton, the octopus’ arms can bend in any direction anywhere along their length. To coordinate this vast flexibility and the complex chemotactile sensory system of the suckers, the octopus has outsourced a great deal of computation to a distributed neural network within the arms and suckers, which accounts for most of their nervous system. I am interested in the strategies the octopus uses to control the extreme flexibility of their limbs and how they experience the world through their distributed and complex sensory systems.

Having evolved cognitive complexity for over 500 million years in parallel to the vertebrate lineage, octopuses and other cephalopods serve as models for possible forms of intelligence beyond earth. By studying convergent characteristics in the forms of mind evolving on earth, we can begin to form expectations about what/who else is out there.

What am I most looking forward to at DISI?

Meeting a community of people who share my interest in exploring the variety of forms the mind can take.

What is my expertise? What could I contribute to a project?

Using CAD software, I design and 3D print tasks for the octopus to solve using its arms. I then track the arms and characterize the strategies that that they use to solve the task, revealing how the suckers coordinate to guide the arm’s behavior. This pipeline employs experimental design, CAD, 3D-printing, aquarium maintenance and life support, animal care, training, and handling, behavioral enrichment, programming, behavioral analysis, image analysis, scientific visualization, and scientific diving.

What am I most eager to learn about at DISI?

Non-animal forms of intelligence, such as in plants, fungi and microbes.

Describe one collaborative project I'd like to pursue?

Developing an interface to translate the behavior of one animal species into a form that could be interpreted by another.

Zbigniew Sluszkiewicz

Pedagogical University of Cracow

I am currently finishing my second year of Ph.D. studies at the Doctoral School of the Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland. My research project focuses on the concept of moral subjectivity from the perspective of cognitive sciences, emphasizing the inquiry into the moral properties of non-human beings. I approach the subject matter from the perspective of embodied cognition paradigm (4AE) in its pragmatic interpretations. My special interest is directed to the methodological problems related to the identification and conceptualization of the affective (emotional) systems involved in social actions, their cognitive, evaluative, and motivational role in the social contexts, and on the predictive processing theory as the prospectively unifying description of the mechanisms underlying cognition and action.

-What are you most looking forward to at DISI?

I would love to learn new ideas and broaden my perspective on cognition and varying forms of intelligence.

-What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?

My main field of expertise is the philosophy of morality, with additional studies in special education, psychology of crises, and diagnosis and therapy of Autism Spectrum Disorder. I am an experienced therapist specializing in working with people with slightly distinctive cognitive characteristics, namely with children and adolescents with Asperger's Syndrome and high-functioning ASD. I hope to contribute to the projects involving affective aspects of cognition, conceptualization, and ethical issues.

-What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?

I cannot wait to meet and learn from experts in every field of the cognitive research program, but especially from researchers of animal cognition, affective and social neuroscience, and predictive coding theory.

-Now that you are here describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)

There has been a longstanding disagreement regarding the existence of animal emotions. For example, depending on the assumed theory of consciousness, the capacity to experience emotional states is being granted or denied to non-human entities. I would love to participate in the project aimed at this issue.

Kayden Stockwell (he/him)

University of Virginia

· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?

I am excited to learn about the many different ways we can critically examine intelligences. With so many backgrounds and areas of expertise, I’m eager to learn from everyone and figure out how to combine all this knowledge and curiosity!

· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?

I am a second-year PhD student in developmental psychology (though much of my work fits more in the area of social psychology) researching autistic social interaction and the perceptions/stigmatization of autistic people. I am very connected to the autistic community, including non-speaking autistic people who use alternative and augmentative communication (AAC). I’m well versed in social models of disability, stigma measurement, and participatory research. I also have experience with adult and child eye-tracking and dyadic EEG hyperscanning.

· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?

I was particularly grabbed by the recognizing intelligences intro lecture as many of the challenges of assessing animal intelligences are also roadblocks in assessing neurodivergent intelligences. To be clear, I am not equating neurodivergent people with animals. But the constraints of neurotypical ego, privileging the behavior and learning of neurotypical people, and limiting our assessment tools to what works for neurotypical people has hugely influenced limited who we view as intelligent. I am interested to see what else comes out of the recognizing intelligences content and learning from Fellows with expertise in animal research. I am also interested in learning more about standpoint epistemology, cultural psychology, and computational modeling.

·A collaborative project you’d like to pursue?

Idea 1: I am interested in the roles of power and social identity in knowledge acquisition and knowledge production. Some voices are privileged in the production of knowledge and some are delegitimized. How does the knowledge produced about a community limit that community’s ability to participate in future knowledge production about themselves? Idea 2: I am interested in information transmission broadly. To prepare for my thesis, I've done a lot of reading on experimental studies using interactive transmission chain methods. What information survives when conveyed to multiple people? What aspects of information are attended to and how do we decide how much information to share in order to share an idea or concept? I would be interested in learning how to computationally model information transmission and/or working on experimental designs to implement when in-person data collection is possible.

·Currently reading?

War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence by Anne McGuire and Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness by M. Remi Yergeau.

Joshua Tan

University of Oxford

I am currently a doctoral student in computer science at Oxford and a fellow at Stanford's Digital Civil Society Lab. For my thesis, I’ve been exploring different ways of applying category theory and sheaf theory to machine learning (especially to GANs & differentiable games) and, more generally, to the study of complex adaptive systems, especially social systems. I also help run a research group called the Metagovernance Project, where we are building a governance layer for the internet.

What are you most looking forward to at DISI?

The people!

What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?

I'm an expert in category theory, theoretical machine learning, and online governance. I'm also fairly knowledgeable about the economics of AI. I am good at thinking abstractly, defining concepts, and connecting those concepts to experimentalists and practitioners. The thing I care about most is taking abstract concepts and models and finding ways of making them practical and useful.

What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?

What other people are working on; the different definitions of intelligence.

Describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)

Let's write a paper that maps between social and economic "algorithms" for decision-making (e.g. capitalism) and equivalent machine learning mechanisms. E-mail / Slack me!

Christiana Tsiourti

Messerli Reseacrh Institute; University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Medical University of Vienna

Troy Weekes

Florida Tech

I am a Ph.D. candidate in human-centered design with an emphasis on cognitive augmentation with artificial intelligence. My research focuses on teaming humans with intelligent agents that monitor their cognitive and affective states and generate neurofeedback-driven nudges to help human operators achieve high-performance outcomes.

1. At the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, I intend to better understand how the wide-ranging disciplines can impact my research on how humans interact with technology.
   

2. I design human-centered experiences and socio-technical systems. So, when on a project team, I contribute design thinking approaches to build rapid prototypes and help solve the right problem. I am proficient in full-stack web, mobile, and gaming technologies, and machine learning in Python, Java, and R.
   

3. My hope is that by immersing myself in the collaborative and diverse environment that DISI provides, I can learn new metaphors for the interactions between humans and artificial intelligence.
   

4. At DISI 2021, I would like to collaborate in order to perform a cognitive walkthrough of a neurotechnology prototype that is designed to train and augment human performance. The walkthrough would involve an objective analysis of the tool and will yield design improvements for future iterations.

Sarah Wu

Stanford University

I am a PhD student in Psychology at Stanford University with a background in math and computer science. I study the cognitive processes underlying social inference and judgment, and my current research focuses on the role of counterfactual reasoning in judgments of responsibility. I'm interested in formalizing these cognitive processes as computational models that can eventually be implemented in socially intelligent agents. At DISI, I'm excited to learn about the diversity of perspectives on cognition, particularly in the moral and non-human social domain but also more broadly from philosophy, anthropology, and other fields! I look forward to getting to know and work with such an engaging, interdisciplinary group of researchers.

Wen Zhou

Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University

I am a PhD candidate in Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University. My research focuses on how our understandings of animals' mental life may shape the conceptions and beliefs about humanity, and how humans evolve the cognitive capacity to ascribe and deny humanness. What I am looking forward to at DISI is meeting scholars from diverse disciplines who have common interests in intelligence, engaging in meaningful discussions and getting inspired. I am mostly interested in how humans make sense of other beings' mind, and would love to collaborate on a project looking into how external factors (i.e., culture, education, ideology, etc.) may shape the cognitive process.