Fellows
Jacy Reese Anthis
University of Chicago
I’m a PhD student in sociology and statistics with broad interests, including social movement theory, organizational theory, food technology, moral psychology, philosophy of mind, causal inference, interpretable machine learning, and AI safety. I co-founded a small think tank researching moral circle expansion, Sentience Institute, and published a book in 2018 on The End of Animal Farming. I aim to maximize the aggregate utility of the long-term future for all sentient life. In my spare time, I enjoy taking care of my dogs, listening to audiobooks at 5x speed, and currently sleeping 4 hours a day! Feel free to reach out on Twitter or jacy@uchicago.edu.
· I'm eager to learn the latest and greatest in animal behavior research and theory, especially its implications for designing safe, powerful AI systems.
· I've worked with most social science methods (e.g., online experiments, historical case studies) and many machine learning methods (e.g., topic models, deep neural networks). I can also contribute unbridled enthusiasm!
Two projects I'd be thrilled to work on:
The Behavioral Study of Large Language Models: As Jacob alluded to, LLMs such as BERT, GPT-3, and DALL-E 2 feel like steam engines without thermodynamics. It is very difficult and important to peer into the inner parametric structure of these models to understand what we've built. Fortunately, animal behaviorists and social scientists like those at DISI have extensive experience learning about minds without anatomic access (e.g., psychoanalysis)! I envision this as a theoretical paper (analogous to "Lessons from Political Philosophy") submitted to computer science proceedings (since they can be short) tackling topics such as the "duck test" and perhaps using theory of mind as a comparative example.
What Would a Society of Digital Minds Look Like?: We can reasonably speculate about certain features of alien civilizations (e.g., the "dark forest"). There are many good reasons to expect the future of Earth-originating life to be digital. Can we also reasonably speculate about digital societies? What would voting theory look like when one-vote-per-person is no longer viable because digital people can copy/paste themselves arbitrarily? What would sociology look like when the locus of agency is no longer the unique, cutaneously enclosed individual? Would causal and evidential decision theory break down when agents have access to each other's source code? We could publish this as a blog post or white paper on Sentience Institute's website, and perhaps a storyteller could join us to visualize these imaginaries.
Constance Bainbridge
UCLA
Personal website
I'm a Communication PhD student initially studying evolutionary perspectives on vocal signaling (such as group vocalizations), but adding on and pivoting more to the study of self-communication - the influence of modalities, framings, and psychological distances/construal-levels on our thinking, and how we become both signaler and receiver in our own intrapersonal "dyads." I come from a music performance background (classical & electric violin, beat production/audio engineering, vocals, synth - Mei Ohara), but ended up seduced by the vast possibilities of psychological study. I've worked on research studying visual memorability of scenes and infographics, creation of a novel spatial auditory illusion, and music psychology from evolutionary and developmental perspectives.
· I'm excited to absorb inspiration from every direction at DISI, and look forward to scaling up visions on big ideas and "hard" problems like consciousness through the power of interdisciplinary collaborative efforts.
· I have varying degrees of experience with front-end web development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, etc.), stats and visualizations in R, audio and visual stimuli creation (Adobe Suite, Reason, basic 3D modeling in Blender). I've also conducted research on adult and infant populations. I've done some development work on Pushkin and am pretty familiar with JsPsych - both tools I highly recommend if you want to delve into online psychological research!
· I'm eager to learn about the many veins that connect our eclectic perspectives, and what missing links we may be capable of discovering through programs such as DISI.
· I'm interested in empowering online populations to participate in the data they can contribute virtually, and hope to design a research app oriented on exploring one's own self-communication (such as through streams of consciousness, creative compositional exploration, and dream journaling). This could, for example, take the form of generating comparative word clouds across self-communication media as users participate across "studies" and features of the app. Ideally, such an app would include tools and resources to better understand how to interpret data and scientific findings through their own personal contributions.
Cesar Barreras
UCLA
Working at the intersection of lingusitic, biological, and genomic anthropologies I seek to understand the role of cultural internventions as health outcomes in Indigenous diasporic peoples. Interested in examining language ideologies, ideological assemblages, epigenetics, social networks, trauma, and allostasis. :
· I look forward to learning and further developing (knowledge and relationships) with my peers
· Collaborative Project: Our understanding of the brain shapes our understanding of how social networks form, develop, mature, and are utilized (socialized) by their members. How are social networks more specifically their intelligence(s) cognized and (if so) heuristically processed? How are these social networks cognitions affected by agency, intentionality, environment, situation, and circumstance?
Favour Borokini
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Shereen Chang
Postdoc, University of Guelph
Facebook / Twitter / Email
I'm a philosopher of science of animal cognition. I’m interested in diagnosing distortions in our understanding of cognition and developing a theoretical framework to provide a systematic way to investigate cognition without bias.
At DISI, I'm really excited to meet colleagues from different disciplines and find collaborators for present/future projects. My DISI project idea involves using machine learning to help us do comparative cognition in a way that's based on our best scientific knowledge.
I have special interest in parrot & avian cognition & I'm an avid birder.
Junyi Chu
PhD candidate, MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences
I'm a cognitive science PhD candidate with a background in child development. My research interests cover three themes: Problems, Play, and Planning. My PhD work explores how problems scaffold thinking and planning in a range of domains, from how we evaluate conjectures for novel problems to how we create and pursue novel goals during play.
At DISI, I'm looking forward to meeting and exchanging ideas with creative thinkers from all disciplines. I love learning what problems people are puzzling over and seeing how these cross-disciplinary and often serendipitous exchanges might spark new ideas. Some topics I hope to learn about are: narratives, play in different species and environments, and imagination. I'm also very excited to see how storytellers investigate and expand our understanding of the human condition through their craft, and how scientists might use those tools in public communication.
George Deane
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Kenn Dela Cruz
University of Virginia
I am a doctoral student in Developmental Psychology and am interested in studying emotion through multiple levels of analyses: within the child (e.g., interplay between social cognitive and emotional processes), on the microsystem level (e.g., socialization of emotion through parent-child interactions), and on the macrosystem level (e.g., values around emotion across different cultural contexts). I am particularly interested in questions around how children come to understand their own emotions and those of others. I draw upon methodological techniques in psychological behavior, psychophysiology, computational modeling, and machine learning to understand how early emerging processes unfold and develop across early childhood. Before pursuing my doctoral degree, I received my B.A. in Psychology from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and M.A. in Developmental Psychology from San Francisco State University.
· I look forward to connecting with new colleagues within and outside my own academic discipline to enrich my own conceptual understanding and broaden my methodological toolbox to apply to my own work and future collaborations.
· I have expertise in developing and implementing a wide range of psychological tasks (e.g., behavioral measures, electroencephalogram tests, surveys & qualitative interviews) designed for individuals across the ages. I also have extensive experience interfacing with young children and their families from my previous roles as an Infant and Toddler Preschool Teacher at the Loyola Marymount University Children Center and the Mixed Methods Research Manager at the Northwestern University Two-Generation Research Initiative.
· Here at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, I am excited to learn about all the different ways that we can define, understand, and promote intelligences across living, artificial, and collective entities.
· I hope to engage in a collaborative project with other emerging scholars across the academic disciplines to challenge our own disciplinary assumptions as we explore questions aiming to understand the emotional experience.
Martin Dockendorff
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Ben Falandays
Brown University
I'm currently a post-doctoral researcher in the Virtual Environment Navigation lab at Brown University and a recent PhD graduate of the Cognitive and Information Sciences department University of California, Merced.
I describe my work as "cognitive semiotics"---semiotics refers to the study of signs, reference, and meaning, and I examine these issues using the toolkit of a cognitive scientist, which includes behavioral experiments with human participants, computer simulations of relevant mechanisms, and philosophical enquiry. I approach cognition as a complex system and seek to understand how dynamic processes at multiple levels work together in giving rise to the cognitive capacity for meaning.
The study of meaning can be:
a philosophical issue---i.e. how do perceptual or neural signals come to have meaning for an individual (the so-called "symbol-grounding problem")?
a cognitive issue---i.e. how does an individual process, interpret, and act upon a sign in a particular context?
a developmental issue---i.e. how do children acquire the ability to communicate and understand signs?
a social-interactive issue---i.e. how are meanings communicated between two or more individuals?
a cultural issue---i.e. how do signs such as words and gestures come to have the meaning(s) they do within a community, and how do these signs/meanings evolve?
an evolutionary issue---i.e. what is the biological machinery needed for complex, meaningful cognition, how did humans get it, and how do other species compare?
I believe that all of these questions are deeply related, and that it is important to study multiple levels of analysis (and their interactions) simultaneously. In order to do so, one must naturally use a variety of research methods (in addition to having many great collaborators!). My own work has proceeded along three main streams:
My experimental research with human participants primarily uses "pseudo-continuous" measures (where measurements are taken repeatedly at a high frequency) such as eye tracking, mouse cursor tracking, and motion tracking in virtual reality, in order to trace cognitive processes as they unfold over time during, for example, the processing of sentence, or the course of an entire conversation.
My computational work is primarily of two types: neural network models of individual cognitive processes, and agent-based simulations of cognitive agents interacting in groups/populations.
My philosophical work focuses on the ontological and theoretical foundations of cognitive science, with the goal of contributing to the development of a more unified theoretical framework---one that is capable of integrating multiple disciplines, levels of analysis, and the multitude of theoretical perspectives within cognitive science (4EA and dynamical-systems approaches; Bayesian, information-theoretic, and cognitivist approaches; and evolutionary-developmental and dual-inheritance approaches).
Adam Goldstein
Visiting Scientist at Tufts, Incoming Masters student at Oxford
I’m Adam, an entrepreneur-turned-researcher focusing on the ways cells make decisions and how those decisions can lead to cancer and other disease.
I began my career as a software engineer. Later I started the travel company Hipmunk, which I sold to SAP in 2016. After that I became a Visiting Partner at the startup accelerator Y Combinator.
I made a mid-career pivot to the life sciences a few years ago, focusing on evolution, psychology, computation, philosophy, financial incentives, and cancer. Lately I’ve been working as a Visiting Scientist at Michael Levin’s lab at Tufts (the home of xenobots and frog limb regeneration). I’ll be starting a Masters at Oxford this fall, studying with Denis Noble, Andrew Briggs, and Vladyslav Vyazovskiy.
My website has my writings on Anxiety Algorithms and a post-genetic view of evolution.
At DISI I’m looking forward to making great connections with interesting and caring people. I am interested in how we can improve the world quickly. I believe that theory work is under-appreciated, and that many problems would become almost trivial to solve if we had better theories.
I can contribute unusual perspectives, computational modeling skills, and frameworks from many different fields. I also have a lot of first-hand experience in business.
I'm interested in projects that look at how multi-cell behaviors correspond to multi-human behaviors, such as conflict (cells in our bodies fight wars like humans do) and information bubbles (I believe cancer is a disease of radicalization, not random bad luck).
Ryan Haecker
William Temple Foundation Research Fellow
Twitter: @RyanHaecker
I am a theologian, philosopher, and research fellow of the William Temple Foundation. My research explores the intersections of ancient Platonism, medieval scholasticism, and modern idealism for modern theology. I have received a PhD in Theology and Religious Studies from Peterhouse, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Divinity. I have previously studied history, philosophy, and theology at the University of Texas, the University of Würzburg, and the University of Nottingham. I have written an unpublished genealogy of the analogy of being (analogia entis), dialectic, and logic from Plato and Aristotle, through Aquinas and Ockham, to Hegel and Przywara. I have published over three dozen articles, and has presented over one hundred papers and talks at conferences around the world. My research interests extend to Trinitarian Ontology, Philosophy of Logic, Platonism, Patristics, German Idealism, Systematic and Historical Theology. I am currently editing a two-volume collection, ‘New Trinitarian Ontologies’ (Wipf and Stock 2023). I have previously presented at the 2019 Cambridge Festival of Ideas and elsehwere 'God in the Machine' on theological interpretations of artificial intelligence. In recent publications, I have worked to develop my doctoral research on theological interpretations of logic into a theological interpretation of the reason and intelligence of plants, computers, and cities.
My doctoral dissertation, ‘Restoring Reason: Theology of Logic in Origen of Alexandria’, written under the supervision of Rowan Williams, developed the first theological interpretation of logic or ‘theology of logic’ in the writings of the early Christian theologian Origen of Alexandria (fl. AD 185-253/4). In a recently published chapter, 'Origen's Speculative Angelology' (Inventer les anges de l'Antiquité à Byzance, 2022), I have explored how the divine Intellect (Nous) is reflected through the divine Word (Logos) by the created 'word-like' (logika) or 'rational beings' of spiritual intelligences. Like Plato, Plutarch, and later Proclus, Origen held that "all things are full of angels" (Homily on Ezekiel 1.7), including the stars, plants, and cities. (Scott 1991) The first 'intelligences' could thus be regarded as more-than-human, prior to human embodiment, and, as such, possessing the power to descend down the scale of nature (scala naturae) from 'super-human' powers to 'sub-human' organisms and artefacts. Interestingly, this view, shared by Christian and Platonists alike, implies that 'sub-human' intelligent spirits, such as animals, plants, and artefacts share an originary qualitative similitude to the first intelligent spirits and human intelligences. This similitude has, thereafter, come to be distinguished by their free choice of descend and ascend among the ranks and orders of non-human life and intelligence. As Goethe, Schelling , and the Romantic Idealists recognised, the life of visible nature appears as a mirror of reflection to discover the hidden traces of more-than-human intelligence, as it has come to be variously distributed across the domains of morphology of mineral, plant, and animal life. (Marder 2011, 2013) Recent studies in Science and Technology Studies have begun to suggest ways in which technical artefacts and digital objects can also be discovered to share in a distributed sense of intelligence, in which intelligent inputs are assembled, automated, and operationalized, beyond human comprehension, yet in such a way as to shape the sphere and activity of human intelligence.
I hope I may be given the oppurtunity to develop these insights further in collaboration with the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute. I wish to develop my doctoral research on theological interpretations of logic into a theological interpretation of the reason and intelligence of plants, computers, and cities. The analogy of being (analogia entis) is a way of speaking of a proportionate similitude between two or more senses of the same being. It has featured prominently in philosophy and theology since Plato and Aristotle. It has been studied, since Avicenna and Aquinas, as a transcendent cause of mathematics, logic, and grammar. Yet the difficulties of conceiving of a pure proportion also require the analogy of being to be studied in all the contested articulations in space, time history, ecology, and the politics of the city. The history of architecture, from the first Sumerian city of Eridu, to the Piraeus of Hippassus, to the Arcades of Paris, should be studied to recollect the traces of the conflicting regimes of analogy. We can with this excavation begin to recover a new philosophical critique of the theological uses of the theological grammar of analogy in shaping the complex spaces of urban, natural, and digital environments. I hope to learn how more-than-human intelligences can be discovered in the proportionate spaces of plants, computers, and cities. I am excited to learn from everyone, and eager to spark new collaborations.
Luca G. Hahn
PhD student at the Centre for Ecology and Conservation, University of Exeter (Cornwall, UK)
I am a PhD student in the Wild Cognition Research Group led by Prof. Alex Thornton at the University of Exeter in Cornwall, UK. Given that I have always been intrigued by animals and their minds, I consider myself extremely lucky to follow my "calling" by working with animals. As an open-minded and interdisciplinary researcher with training in evolutionary/behavioural ecology and comparative/experimental psychology I am particularly eager to study the behaviour and cognition of all kinds of animals (e.g. primates, corvids, salamanders) in the wild, both through observation and experiments. The majority of my research interests centre on questions regarding the "social intelligence hypothesis", or simply put, the "social mind", in light of cognitive, social, and cultural evolution. I am captivated by how animals navigate their social world, e.g. by learning from others, managing relationships, cooperating, communicating etc. During my PhD I investigate the benefits and costs of social relationships in wild jackdaws (member of the corvid family) in terms of variables such as health, stress, food, and cultural knowledge. In the future I would be keen to expand my research by working on humans. Ultimately, my research is driven by an intrinsic motivation and curiosity to understand cognition, but I also hope to apply some of the insights, especially to the animal rights debate as well as to wildlife conservation.
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
DISI is a unique opportunity to exchange ideas with people, and I look forward to learning from all other participants representing a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
My background is in evolutionary and behavioural ecology as well as comparative and experimental psychology. I study animal behaviour and cognition in the wild, using observational and experimental methods.
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
I am very eager to learn about how people from different academic backgrounds investigate the diverse intelligences we are surrounded by.
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
One question that has been occupying my mind is about potential feedback loops between the social system/social dynamics of a species and social learning/social transmission. For instance, a certain position in the social network might be advantageous for access to valuable information, while in turn being knowledgeable could increase an individual's reputation and social affiliation.
Wiebke (Toussaint) Hutiri
PhD at Delft University of Technology
I am an engineer and computer scientist by training, but am most fascinated by the interaction between technology and society, and the feedback loops between the two that emerge in the artificial worlds we create.
I speak of the artificial as a concept that stands in opposition to the natural - the world intentionally created by humans, as opposed to the world shaped by natural ecosystems. I'm especially interested in questions of technology design, which is normative, must result in a useful artefact, and is shaped by process and negotiation. From this lense I explore the socio-technical gaps between the world we imagine and the world we create with technology.
My PhD focuses on trustworthy AI, where I am looking at ways of co-designing for privacy, security and inclusion. I primarily study speech systems and how developers’ design choices and design processes can lead to disparate AI performance (bias) for people based on their demographic attributes. I'm also working on machine learning evaluation and benchmarks for voice-based systems.
I hope to take great ideas from DISI and bring them to the design of AI systems. I'm particularly curious how research in heuristics, decision-making, search and discovery in artificial environments, and connections between sensory systems and emotions can inform the way I think about my work.
Two of my best traits are that I'm really good at making things happen, and at building bridges between different people and knowledge bases.
Khadija Iddrisu
Msc Machine Intelligence
I am studying towards a Master's in Machine Intelligence at the African Masters of Machine Intelligence Program which is being sponsored by Google and Facebook.
I am also a co-organizer at the Women in Machine Learning and Data Science, Accra Chapter. I love promoting the participation of women and beginners in AI and thus, I am part of a team that creates machine learning content on Instagram: @AlphaML
Prior to my current program, my master's research was focused on streamlining the diagnosis of brain diseases using artificial intelligence. The main topic was "Deep Learning Architectures For Brain Vessel Segmentation". I became very passionate about pursuing further research involving Intelliegence and thus my application to DISI.
I believe that DISI will provide me the platform to collaborate with experts in different fields of Intelligence to better understand how to program them.
My main expertise is in Mathematics and Programming and I believe that I can work on any project that requires bringing creative ideas of intelligence to life.
I am very enthusiastic to understand how different forms of intelligence relate to human intelligence and how we can incorporate that into machines to achieve Artificial General Intelligence
Amalia Ionescu
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Nora Isacoff
Columbia University
I’m an interdisciplinary cognitive scientist, psychologist of language, and educator. I earned my BA in linguistics from University College London, my PhD in Cognitive Psychology/Cognitive Science from Rutgers University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in literacy education policy from New York University.
Much of my research has centered on lexical and conceptual representation and development- that is, how we mentally represent the meanings of words and how that relates to other aspects of cognition such as categorization, executive functioning, and linguistic competence/performance.
During my postdoc, I investigated similar questions from an applied perspective; gained extensive training and experience in working with children and adolescents with dyslexia, ADHD, and mental health challenges; and co-wrote a book called Data and Teaching, which uses ethnographic portraits of individual classrooms, teachers, and schools to probe what data can and can't tell us about literacy learning.
Current projects include co-writing an article with a jazz pianist about the pragmatics of musical improvisation; a set of studies hosted across multiple institutions investigating epistemological issues in the teaching of psychology and students' beliefs about the nature of evidence; a general audience book about semiotics across domains; and co-editing an interdisciplinary collection about the TV show Severance. At Columbia, I teach seminars in "Language and Mind" and "Consciousness and Cognitive Science" as well as lectures in cognition, and I supervise independent studies through the Crimson Research Institute
Outside of work, I study voice and sing in/manage choirs; build Jewish queer community; and marvel at my dog's clear diverse intelligences.
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI? I am most looking forward to the opportunity to learn from the other fellows and storytellers. Put 60 passionate, curious, collaboration-loving scholars and artists in the same space for 3 weeks, and magic is sure to happen. I am also looking forward to the cognitive focus and spaciousness that immersion fosters.
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project? My expertise is in cognition, cognitive development, and psycholinguistics. I look forward to contributing depth and breadth of knowledge and frameworks for rigorous thinking about these areas. My teaching and mentoring experience also guide my collaboration style: a balance of warmth and clarity, exploration and structure, awe and irreverence.
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI? I am most eager to learn from the storytellers! How do you make science compelling to the general public? How do you pitch an esoteric idea?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue. Two possibilities:
I'd like to investigate how people evaluate evidence: what kinds of inferences they're willing to make, the role of intuition, and when they're willing to change their minds. I am especially interested in inferences about competence vs. performance. Relatedly, I am interested in ways that System 1 and System 2 thinking bolster each other.
Separately, I'm interested in exploring neurodivergence/neurodiversity, particularly comparing medical/social models of disability, grappling with whether neurodivergence should be seen as categorical or not, and evaluating the analogy between neurotype and sexuality/gender.
Roope Oskari Kaaronen
University of Helsinki, Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science
I’m a postdoctoral researcher based in Helsinki, Finland.
My research interests span far and wide, but they all revolve around the ecology of human behaviour.
First, along with my research group, we are studying how human societies have adapted to environmental change in the past, and aim to draw analogies to present-day challenges in climate adaptation. Today, ecological and climate systems are changing faster than ever before in human history – what can we learn from past successes and failures to enhance contemporary adaptive capacities? Our focus is mainly in the Arctic (northern Fennoscandia), working closely with reindeer herders in Saami communities.
Second, a more personal research interest of mine is the study of heuristics, or rules of thumb. I am interested in the cognitive tools and everyday rationalities that cultures have evolved to solve problems and make decisions. Before more elaborate formal knowledge and notation were available, traditions around the world resorted to simpler heuristics to solve problems. My interest is in figuring out what these heuristics might have been, and how they contributed to the emergence of complex societies. This line of work has involved the study of, for example, Finnish mushroom foraging societies and the heuristics they have developed to ensure safe foraging. More recently, I have also developed an interest in literal rules of thumb, studying the ways by which cultures around the world have used body-based units of measure (thumb-width, cubit, fathom, etc.) to construct elaborate and ergonomic technologies (such as kayaks).
Third, I have studied the cultural evolution of sustainable behaviours. I have developed agent-based models to assess how urban design can hasten collective sustainable behaviour change (such as the adoption of bicycling), and more recently written a book chapter on how the science of cultural evolution can guide us towards a more sustainable future.
More generally, I have an interest in most things related to cognitive science, cultural evolution, ecology, design, and complex systems. I also write a fair bit of popular science. You'll find my website at roopekaaronen.com and I'm on Twitter @roopekaaronen.
In my free time, I enjoy sea kayaking, sports, playing music (guitar), foraging (mushrooms especially!), and photography. My most recent 'lockdown hobby' is woodworking, and I am currently carving kayak paddles based on body measures (in Greenlandic Inuit tradition). I hope to build a kayak soon.
I don't have any specific projects in mind, but if any of the themes above (heuristics; climate adaptation; collective behaviour) interest you, let me know! I'm mostly looking forward to making new creative connections and meeting all you interesting people.
Akila Kadambi
University of California, Los Angeles
I recently completed my PhD in Cognitive Psychology at UCLA. Now, I'm a postdoctoral researcher in Psychiatry and Biobehavioral sciences at UCLA. Here, I primarily use systems neuroscience approaches to study self-other representations at different levels of processing -- from sensorimotor to socio-cognitive.
During my PhD, I investigated the early representation of the self as conveyed by dot-motion human actions. Our research built upon findings that humans can identify their own actions at greater rates than visually familiar others, and importantly, introduced mechanistic explanations for how this ability is not merely due to perceptual idiosyncracies of the stimulus, but further attributed to underlying sensorimotor processes involved during action planning.
Now, I aim to build upon my prior work as a post-doc, as well as to intersect novel areas of research related to the self, and its inextricable connection with others. I hope to reach a greater theoretical understanding as to how the brain represents the concept of a "self", a concept of "others", and their interconnection.
This leads to my project goals at DISI, where I would like to pitch a project related to a theoretical review of the self-other connection, drawing from not only neuroscience, but various other disciplines.
At DISI, I look forward to meeting excited and curious people from diverse backgrounds. This is a fantastic experience, and I'm grateful to be here!
Hope Kean
hopekean.com
Mayank Kejriwal
University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute / Industrial & Systems Engineering
I hold joint appointments as a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and a Research Team Leader in the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. My research is in applied AI and computational social science. I am especially passionate about the growing area of AI for social good. My work has been published in Nature Machine Intelligence, PLOS Digital Health, Applied Network Science, Journal of Computational Social Science, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, and several others. I have delivered invited tutorials on, or demonstrated my work in, multiple top AI and computational social science conferences, such as KDD, NeurIPS and AAAI. I have also (co-)authored three books, the most recent of which is an MIT Press textbook on knowledge graphs. In general, I take a broad interest in anything that has to do with graphs, including online social systems, knowledge graphs, financial networks, and so on.
My current interests are in two moonshot ideas in AI: first, how do we design and build the equivalent of adult commonsense reasoning and knowledge into AI so that it can better understand naturalistic human interactions, desires and goals? Second, how do we design and test AI that can handle unexpected, novel events and surprises in the real world?
I hope to soak up a lot of good trans-disciplinary ideas from my fellow attendees, including both fellows (especially in other fields of research) and storytellers, and contribute my own expertise in AI to one or more projects.
Heather King
Recent graduate of the London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE), MSc Political Theory, Department of Government
I graduated from the LSE in 2021, where I wrote my thesis on the representation of animal agency within the dominant discourse of written academic 'History'. More specifically, I problematised the idea that the historical discourse is neutral and apolitical: a "bottomless sack" (Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2000) within which any event or agent can be represented. To do so, I utilised social anthropologist Alfred Gell's 1998 framework of primary and secondary agency to indicate that primary animal agency runs counter to the inherent anthropocentric logic of the historical discourse and thus forms an aporia. I am looking to build upon such work at PhD level in the near future.
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
Learning from all the incredible fellows, storytellers, and faculty. Expanding my own understanding and perspectives via human connection and conversation about all kinds of minds, theories, philosophies, and feelings.
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
My expertise lies within political theory and philosophy. However I have also had formal training in political science, history, philosophy of science, and international relations. I believe I have a lot to contribute to DISI projects - especially concerning critical theory and questions of morality.
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
I'm very excited to learn more about animal histories and representations across different discourses and medias. Additionally, I'm excited to see how traditionally disparate academic disciplines can coalesce, fostering collaboration and the examination of our non-human counterparts and our interactions involving them.
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
I would love to work on anything related to 'collaborative emotions' and human-animal relationships within philosophical and fictional literature, cinema, and other visual art forms. I am also intrigued by the concept of anthropomorphism and to what extent it can be differentiated from cross-species empathy.
Sarah Koopman
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Theresa Law
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience - King's College London
I'm a PhD candidate at King's College London, where I'm researching neurodiversity in online education — basically how different brains learn differently in an online environment. I also run Ness Labs, a blog where I write about creativity, learning, metacognition, and mental health. Outside of those topics, I'm interested in philosophy of mind, altered states of consciousness, and plant intelligence. In a previous life, I worked at Google on digital health products. I'm quite active on Twitter if anyone wants to connect there.
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI? Connecting with curious minds across different disciplines, maybe even making new friends :)
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project? My expertise is the psychology and neuroscience of learning. I've also done several systematic reviews so can help with evaluating existing evidence around a research question.
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI? I'm fascinated with fungi/plant cognition but don't know much outside of popular science books, so I'd love to learn more from experts in the field.
· Describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue. Anything exploring the nature of consciousness across plants, fungi, animals and computers would be interesting. I'd also like to create a map of neurodiversity based on perception of cognitive function and dysfunction throughout time and across cultures.
Harin Lee
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Saein Lee
Ewha Womans University, Korea / University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Keywords: social learning, social network, curiosity, peer learning, primates , humans
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Ecology and the Evolution of social behavior and Cognition in primates. My research focuses on the development of foraging and social behavior of immature primates, social learning mechanisms, and how the strength of social networks in primates can change due to different context, environment, group composition. My research covers monkey to ape, Hamadryas baboons (Papio hamadryas), White-handed gibbons (Hylobates lar), Yellow-cheeked gibbons (Nomascus gabriellae), and Javan gibbons (Hylobates moloch).
First, I found that Hamadrays baboons get social information from group members with higher ranks when there are novel foods. This research led to my academic interest in how primates deal with a social relationship with others to get social information in such context. Then, I also found that social relationship is vital for captive animal welfare by determining the negative impact of social isolation on behavior of a pair of mixed gibbon species (white-handed gibbon and yellow-cheeked gibbon). After that, I’m investigating social learning in a feeding context and social network analysis in wild Javan gibbons. So far, it seems that immature gibbons socially learn from their mothers in early infancy but spent more time with other offspring and father after weaning. In addition, the centrality of immatures is strong in wild Javan gibbons. This result indicates that a stable social network is essential in a socially monogamous ape, just like humans, in that immatures can socially learn such competent behaviors from other group members. However, there is an academic limitation that previous social learning research only focused on great apes.
Therefore, to overcome academic limitations and stretch the boundary of social learning and social network research in primates, I found it necessary to investigate social learning mechanisms in gibbons and link it to humans.
Ø Since I’m keen to stretch the boundary of the evolution of social learning and social network research in primates, including humans, I’m looking forward to conducting collaborative work with other research fellows in Anthropology, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Sociology. I am primarily eager to learn the new approach on the evolution of social learning and methodology of social network in humans and share my research expertise with DISI research fellows. I also can share my specialty on science communication and education with years of experience as FAMELAB finalist from 2014 with fellows. My objective through the collaborative project is to understand the evolutionary link between non-human primates and humans in social learning and social network by applying different approaches from other fields, and to construct our own social network with DISI fellows.
I suggest a collaborative project with Anthropology, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Sociology. Since my research work is based on behavioral observation so far, I’m looking forward to applying such technologies from Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for research settings and analyzing the result of social behavior patterns. Here, I propose three different projects briefly.
1)Shift social connections in the network by presenting robotic primate individuals. As robotic spy monkey did before, there might be a significant change in the social network when that robot presents different behavior than others.
2)Cross-species comparative studies on social learning in foraging and social behavior. We can provide cognitive tasks by using machine learning or such technology and determine what leads to the difference in each species.
3)How the strength, the centrality, social connections shift in humans by investigating gestures, the clue of emotional expression, and languages. I’m more interested in children’s social behavior and child-focused social network.
Personal side research project: Comparative studies on curiosity in humans and non-human primates / 'Trust game' and social network analysis in primates
Quentin Louis
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Emma McEwen
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Faelan Mourmourakis
Macquarie University, Neuroethology Lab
I am a first year PhD student in the Department of Natural Sciences at Macquarie University, Sydney Australia. My research focuses on insect behaviour and cognition - predominantly focusing on comparative neurobiology between different species of eusocial bees such as the European honey bee (Apis mellifera), Australian native bees (Tetragonula carbonaria, Austroplebeia australis) and the buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris).
My comparative research further explores the evolution of brain anatomy by quantification of neurons in the bee brain, through the isotropic fractionator (otherwise known as the brain soup method). Through the exploration of complex learning and the philosophy of animal cognition, I hope to answer what makes a bee so intelligent?
I am interested additionally in animal homosexuality research and am currently investigating protentional bias in the modern research space. Primarily looking to how research into homosexuality differs between humans and non-human animals.
Twitter | Website
I am looking forward to connecting with other cognitive scientists that I otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity to, living so far away in Australia. I am eager to learn from more experienced researchers. I hope that in networking and making connections with other researchers and storytellers it will help in shaping my current academic learning and improve my research.
Aramis Munoz-Valverde
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Sonia Murthy
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Mutale Julius Institute of Tropical Forest Conservation (ITFC) Field Station
My work with Bwindi Gorilla research project involves daily gorilla monitoring, collection of social behavior and feeding ecology on Bwindi habituated mountain gorillas for Dr. Martha Robbins of Max Planck Institute. Currently I collect photogrammetric data to determine the growth and development wild habituated mountain gorilla groups of Bwindi Impenetrable National park.
I am mostly interested in exploring how increased habituation and ecotourism of mountains gorillas may affect their behavioral change of primates but also their long-term conservation.
I am also interested in making connections and chatting with other fellows through exchanging ideas that would help in writing grant winning proposals for long term research and conservation of primates
Akshay Nagarajan
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Ozioma Paul
University of Manchester
Ozioma is pursuing a Ph.D. in Business and Management with a focus on optimisation and decision sciences at the Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. Her research focus is on using technology (specifically artificial intelligence) to improve school bus travel for SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) pupils in England. She works part time at the University of Oxford as a Systems and Data Analyst at the Government Outcomes Lab (GO Lab). Prior to this, she holds a master’s degree in Information Technology from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor’s in computer science from the University of Lagos.
In between studying, Ozioma has worked in three global professional services firms, KPMG, Deloitte, and Ernst & Young across several industries and teams, using technology to optimise and improve systems. Her roles have spanned across research assistant, technical support for both hardware and software, technology consultant, and more recently, short stints as a data analyst at an African FinTech, Asaak and the World Bank Group.
She is very interested in data and working with it to create value, transform lives and improve businesses around the world particularly through data anlytics. Also, she is passionate about storytelling because it is an extremely powerful tool. One way she tells stories is by drawing insights from datasets. There is a story every dataset tells and she loves figuring out what that is, and how that knowlegde can be used for optimization. Another way she loves to tell stories is by teaching, blogging, vlogging and podcast-ing where she shares lesssons gleaned from her journey of life.
You may check out some of my past data projects here: https://bit.ly/3qm4sfK and some of my stories on my blog here: https://diaryofalagosgirl.wordpress.com/
Connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ozioma-paul/
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
At DISI 2022, I am mostly looking forward to connecting the amazing academics and practitioners in this cohort. I am also seeking to understand better diverse intelligences and what people are doing around this, with the hope that I can get some inspiration towards algorithmic designs for my PhD and other projects.
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
My expertise is in computer programming, especially for data science and visualizations, and machine learning. I also have experience in literature reviews and academic writing
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
I am very interested in the programming theme, and how the diverse intelligences observed through nature can be used to influence development of solutions
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
I do not have any project in mind at the moment but I am happy to collaborate on any project within any other themes at DISI this year (especially the programming theme)
David Pritchard
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Leanne Proops
University of Portsmouth, UK.
I'm a psychologist and ethologist at the Centre for Comparative and Evolutionary Psychology. I have broad interests in the evolution and function of social and affective cognition, (multi-modal) communication and animal welfare (from a one welfare perspective). Most recently I’ve been looking at how individual differences in responses to emotional signals relate to social functioning in horses and at the recognition of agency and aliveness in animals. I’m also interested in animal ethics, human-animal/robot interactions and the role nature plays in human wellbeing.
You can find more info here and also connect on Twitter.
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
I’m most looking forward to spending a full three weeks focussed on thinking about and learning new things about my favourite subject - diverse intelligences! It seems like a real privilege and luxury. Looking forward hearing about the new perspectives, questions and research interests that I’ve never thought about and expanding my horizons.
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
My expertise is in comparative psychology, animal behaviour and welfare. I’ve had lots of practice in devising controlled, ecologically valid experiments, field experiments and observing behaviour to gain insights into animal minds. I’ve also done some work on social networks and analysis of facial expressions. More recently I’ve added humans to my list of study species, using survey and qualitative methods in developmental and cross-cultural research. Also really interested in animal ethics and sentience and would be very happy to contribute to a project around this.
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
Eager to learn more from disciplines I’m not very familiar with – AI, philosophy, history… Also keen to learn from the storytellers and step out of the rigid scientific way of thinking for a while.
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences).
I’m interested in the new field of evolutionary thanatology that looks at animal and human responses to, and understanding of, death from an evolutionary perspective. I’d like to explore questions around this and perhaps run a survey of beliefs and anecdotes around “grief-like” behaviours in animals.
Also really looking forward to contributing to someone else’s project!
Gabriel Ramos-Fernandez
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Sofiia Rappe
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Emilie Rapport Munro
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Courtney Sexton
The George Washington University
I am a PhD Candidate at The George Washington University in Washington, DC, where I am a member of the CASHP Primate Genomics Lab. My current scientific research is focused on human-animal interactions and welfare, and how non-human animals, especially dogs, can inform what we know about the evolution of human communication and social relationships. More on my thesis study of the genetics of canine physical and behavioral phenotypes related to facial communication can be found at howdogstalk.org.
Prior to returning to research, I spent many years as a science communicator, writer, and storyteller. I have continued to write both about science and nature, and on other topics that circle around themes of connectivity, and what it does or doesn’t mean to be human (...and a lot about dogs). I am also the co-founder of The Inner Loop, a nonprofit literary arts organization based in DC.
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI? My immediate academic community is disparate. I’m excited to be among a cohort of creative scholars and thinkers who are exploring similar concepts and questions from diverse perspectives.
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project? My academic journey has been inherently interdisciplinary and necessitates collaboration. I’m a big-picture thinker skilled at pulling threads into a cohesive whole/ communicating complex concepts to be relatable. My research background is primarily a combination of evolutionary anthropology, cognitive psychology, and animal behavior. I have some minimal skills in R -- and by that I mean, I can open it.
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI? EVERYTHING.
· Describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue. I am open to hearing everyone's ideas! One thing I've been thinking about is: How could we bring together research methods from biological anthropology, psychology, ethics, animal behavior, and neuroscience (and/or others!) to explore the question of “what is personhood and should humans recognize it in other animals?”.
Madison Singell
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Kristyn Sommer
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Sarah Sweezy
University of Montana
I am a doctoral student at the University of Montana studying developmental psychology. I am specifically interested in the social cognition of children’s tendency to anthropomorphize and ascribe mental states to non-human others. My research interests focus on how children attribute human-like characteristics and capabilities, such as emotions and intentions, to social robots. I am currently examining how behavioral synchrony, or partaking in synchronous action with other agents, may be used as a cue for social attributions or mentalizing. More generally, I am interested in many aspects of social cognition and moral reasoning regarding personified technologies.
At DISI, I am excited to learn how other disciplines are approaching and assessing current frameworks and questions regarding diverse intelligences. I believe this experience will serve as a stepping stone to diversifying how I think about the questions I am exploring as a researcher.
The ability to dialogue and collaborate across disciplines is a unique experience that is not always accessible for graduate students, so I am particularly eager for the opportunities to collaborate outside of my educational background.
Joshua Tan
University of Oxford / Stanford University
I am the executive director of the Metagovernance Project. I’m also a practitioner fellow at Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Lab and a doctoral student in computer science at Oxford, studying under Samson Abramsky and Bob Coecke. Previously, I completed my master’s in pure math at the Courant Institute at NYU, where my research involved applications of geometry and topology to artificial intelligence. For my thesis, I’ve been exploring different ways of applying category theory and sheaf theory to computational learning theory. I also conduct more applied research on collective intelligence and the governance of online communities. My interests include category theory, computational learning theory, sheaf theory, robotics, collective intelligence, and art history.
Here's a DISI proposal:
Build a map between collective intelligence and artificial intelligence. Since the 1990s, we have seen a growing number of practical algorithms in AI that work by organizing the efforts of many agents to a collective end, from ensemble methods that combine the inputs of many classifiers to differentiable games that match machines against each other and against themselves. In recent years, research in machine learning has gravitated toward such techniques due to their spectacular performance in unsupervised image and natural language tasks. A crucial feature of these methods is the way in which agents interact, and the degree to which that interaction is tailored through the careful composition of loss functions. Many of these algorithms are reminiscent of extant institutional patterns in economics and the social sciences. However, there has been little work to articulate or build on that connection, though there have been calls for an "artificial social engineering" for differentiable games as recently as 2019. In this project, I would like to develop that connection by cycling the idea of an *institution* from social science into machine learning, and then back again from machine learning into social science.
Maria Cristina Tello Ramos
Postdoc at the University of St Andrews.
I am interested in how animals use different types of information to solve everyday problems such as foraging from hundreds of flowers or building a complex structure out of dry grass. I have mainly worked with wild birds but on a new project, I get to compare birds and bees.
I am looking forward to discussing cognition in other systems as well as new techniques being used to understand how others experience the world and how their social context affects the types of information animals use and how information flows between individuals in a social context.
I am an expert in animal cognition and can discuss it for hours. I am good at coming up with experimental designs that will actually work with wild animals.
I am increasingly interested in understanding how information flowing from one individual to another affects both individual and group behaviour. It is clear now that information in itself, how is perceived, either individually or socially, and how and when is transmitted between animals, is key to understanding differences in behaviour and cognition. In the future, I wish to include these questions in my research. I look forward to discussing how we can better discern between what animals learned individually and what they learn by following others. I wish to compare notes on how this approach can be adapted to different taxa or indeed different agents.
The earliest known human weaving dates to about 5000 B.C. Birds, of course, have been using plant materials to weave, knot, and intertwine materials into a receptacle that can literally hold their fitness, for much longer than humans have been weaving baskets. Can we compare how human weavers learn from each other to how birds learn how to manipulate materials? Does the transmission of information follow similar paths across species?
Jack Terwilliger
Cognitive Science PhD student at UC San Diego
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Naomi Vaida
Affiliation
I study the cognitive and social foundations of storytelling. More about my research approach here.
My goal at DISI is to learn from diverse fields about the nature of human mental representation. CS. Math. Philosphy. All the things. Especially those less commonly understood in psychology.
Vishwanath Varma
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Matti Wilks
The University of Edinburgh
I am a Lecturer (Assistant Prof) in the Department of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. I completed my PhD in Australia and postdocs in the United States. I started out researching overimitation and in-group biases in children, coming from a background in comparative and evolutionary psychology. More recently, I have shifted to focus explicitly on moral questions, such as who we do and don't consider worthy of moral concern (moral circle expansion), what motivates unusually altruistic individuals, and why we prefer natural things. I use social and developmental approaches to answer these questions. You can check out my website here: https://www.mattiwilks.com/
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
I am excited to learn from the fellows and other participants, challenge how I think about research questions, and (hopefully) broaden the scope of my own work.
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
I have expertise in the fields of moral, developmental, and social psychology. I also have some experience conducting cross-cultural and cross-species research.
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
Different methods that people use to answer questions, and different ways of conceptualizing research questions.
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
I am interested in exploring how we can use knowledge in psychology (and other empirical fields) to inform and build on the philosophical questions being asked in the AI ethics space.
Tevin Williams
Affiliation
You can edit your profile here. Please add a short bio, followed by answers to the following DISI-specific questions:
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Brandon Yip
Australian National University
I'm a doctoral student in Philosophy at the Australian National University. I work on moral psychology, meta-ethics and dabble a little in epistemology.
My main interest is in the philosophy of emotion. I’m interested primarily in normative questions: why are our emotions valuable? And when is it fitting to be angry, sad, shamed, disgusted and so on?
But to answer this I am engaged in answering more descriptive questions: what are emotions and what is their role in our mental economy? What developmental processes led to the kinds of emotions that we see in adults? I’ve argued that emotions are really a form of perception . They are our means of access to the value in the world and they aim at helping us to properly respond to these values. Perspective taking, being immersed in culture and our reason giving practices, I think, are what transform animal and infant emotions into the norm and value-laden perceptions that adult humans have.
I am also interested in rehabilitating some of our more negative emotions such as shame and disgust - both emotions, I think, are invaluable parts of our moral lives.
You can find my work here: https://philpeople.org/profiles/brandon-yip
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
I’m excited to learn about cultural psychology and evolution and cognitive development and just the various ways our minds are developed and shaped. But I’m also super keen to learn about areas that I know very little about such as artificial and animal intelligence!
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
I am (or like to think that I am) an empirically informed philosopher, but most of my work is conceptual. So I mainly bring a lot of heart, a sharp mind, and familiarity with the philosophical terrain.
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
Here are two areas that I’d love to think more about with others from an empirical background.
(1) Adult emotion is norm laden in a way that infant emotion is not. For example, infants and dogs can get aggressive, but for humans part of the experience of anger includes the feeling that one is right or has reason to be angry. (This seems true even in deviant situations e.g. when you stub your toe and look around for someone to blame) Normative self-regulation and perspective taking strike me as a crucial part of this developmental process. I’d like to find out more if this claim is true.
(2) Disgust is often dismissed as a simple inflexible heuristic, but it seems that it is often attuned in a surprising way to the intricacies of our operative norms. Elsewhere I argue that moral disgust is a means of protecting our operative normative structure from corrosion. Disgust is thus useful not only for the conservative right, but for those who are attuned to the deep fragility present in our social structure - including and especially those deeply concerned with issues of social justice who recognises that certain acts (e.g. condoning sexual harassment) threaten to unravel important norms. I’d like to test the implications of this claim. Starting, perhaps with revisiting the old claim that conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals.
Mason Youngblood
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. My background is in animal behavior and evolutionary biology, but these days I primarily study cultural evolution. Currently, my main research focus is understanding how cognitive biases and population structure shape the spread of behaviors and beliefs (e.g. music, birdsong, conspiracy theories). This work usually involves applying simulations and machine learning to big longitudinal datasets to try to make inferences. On the side I'm also passionate about experimental electronic music production, and I'm trying to find ways to integrate it into my research as a science communication tool. Please feel free to reach out via email, Twitter, or my website!
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
I am most excited about developing friendships and collaborations that will hopefully extend long past DISI.
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
I have expertise in the fields of cultural evolution and animal behavior. I have experience using a wide array of computational methods (agent-based modeling, social network analysis, Bayesian inference, machine learning, etc.), as well as wrangling big datasets, and would love to contribute these to projects.
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
I am most eager to learn about the work of the storytellers, who have already had a big impact on me!
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences).
I would love to pursue a big data project on how population size and connectivity influence cultural "speciation", or the rate of cultural divergence after a population splits, using contemporary music as a research model.
Oryan Zacks
Tel Aviv University
I'm a PhD student at the Cohn Institute for The History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. I study cognition and consciousness from an evolutionary perspective, relating current philosophical questions to findings in neuroscience and animal behavior studies. The focus of my research is the evolution of imagination and its relationship to episodic memory. This includes comparing the brains of different animals and trying to build a more coherent picture of the relationship between an animal's brain, its behavior, and its subjective experience of the world. This research can contribute to a better understanding of the human mind and may provide insight into the internal worlds of other animals.
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
The thing I'm most looking forward to is just meeting smart, creative, passionate people and making new friends! I'm looking forward to making personal connections around shared interests, common goals, weird anecdotes, quirky personalities or just hanging out.
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
I have a pretty good understanding of evolutionary principles and can help in really thinking through how to use them to advance a cognitive or computational study (which is more nuanced than one might think!). this includes assessing homology vs. analogy, thinking about ancestral traits and examining adaptational pressures.
I have experience reviewing a wide literature of animal behavioral studies, comparing and contrasting experimental methods, and getting a sense of the phylogenetic distribution of certain behaviors and cognitive abilities (assuming such studies were published).
I have a solid background in neuroscience, currently focusing on brain evolution and comparative neuroanatomy. In other words, how are animal brains similar or different and how is that related to the evolutionary divergence of species. In addition to identifying the different brain parts, I've also done some work on connectivity, neural dynamics, and computational models of specific neural circuits.
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
I'm excited to hear how people from different fields conceptualize the study of intelligence, and how they are applying ideas of diversity in intelligence. Are they using different experimental methods to cover different facets of intelligence? Are they trying to integrate all of them into a single idea of general intelligence? Is there interest in the relationships between the different facets, or are they intentionally kept separate?
Martin Zettersten
Princeton University
I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Princeton Baby Lab. I study language - how we learn it and what we do with it. Some current lines of work focus on curiosity-driven statistical learning mechanisms that support language development and how language learning shapes cognition and communication. You can find out more about my work at my website: https://mzettersten.github.io/.
I also work on building collaborative team science projects that help address key questions in infant development. Some recent work includes Peekbank, an open database of infant eye-tracking data, and ManyBabies, cross-lab collaborations testing key empirical questions in infant cognition.
· What are you most looking forward to at DISI?
I'm excited to think broadly about “big” questions in the development of cognition with researchers from many different disciplines and perspectives. I'm also excited to interact with other fellows with backgrounds in storytelling to brainstorm ways to understand and communicate about childhood and learning.
· What is your expertise? What could you contribute to a project?
My main expertise is in experimental cognitive science, working with infants, children, and adults. I also have experience in team science endeavors such as coordinating cross-lab collaborative work and building large-scale databases. In my research, I also work with various machine learning techniques and large language models, and can contribute statistical and data wrangling expertise.
· What are you most eager to learn about at DISI?
I'm mostly keen to learn more about how other fields and disciplines conceptualize and study core learning and information-seeking mechanisms. How do different fields conceptualize constructs like curiosity and "active learning" and to what extent do we find similar mechanisms across species?
· Now that you are here, describe one collaborative project you’d like to pursue (1-2 sentences)
I'm interested in exploring why children collect things. What drives children to collect some things but not others? And what might the consequences of this focus on particular objects or domains be for learning?