Keynotes

Alexandre Castro-Caldas | Catherine Hobaiter | João Zilhão |

Klaus Zuberbühler | Luc Steels | Rafael Núñez |

Roslyn Frank | Tania Kuteva | Tetsuro Matsuzawa

Alexandre Castro-Caldas is Full Professor in Neurology and Director of the Institute of Health Sciences at the Portuguese Catholic University in Lisbon. He is the former Director of the Department of Neurology of the Santa Maria Hospital in Lisbon, as well as former President of the Portuguese Society of Neurology and the International Neuropsychological Society. Alexandre Castro-Caldas' main research interests include the neuro-cognitive foundations of language and mental health, Portuguese Sign Language, and education in neuropsychology. He is the author of more than 200 articles in neuropsychology as well as books and edited volumes on the brain, cognition, learning, aphasia, creativity, Alzheimer disease, and computer-assisted rehabilitation. In 2000, he was awarded the Bial Award in Biomedicine.

Catherine Hobaiter is Lecturer in Primate Behavior at the Origins of Mind group in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, at the University of St Andrews in St Andrews, Scotland. She has spent the past 14-years studying wild primates across Africa, in particular the chimpanzees of the Budongo Forest in Uganda. Through long-term field studies she explores what the behavior of great apes living in their natural environment tells us about their minds, and about the evolutionary origins of our own behavior. Her research interests include communication, in particular gestural communication, and social learning. She recently established the Great Ape Dictionary, an online site allowing scientists from around the world to access video archives of wild ape behavior, and citizen scientists to participant in online research. She is the co-director of the Bugoma Primate Conservation Project, and the Vice President of Communications for the International Primatological Society.

João Zilhão is ICREA Research Professor in Archaeology at the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Barcelona in Spain, and research fellow at UNIARQ, the Archaeological Center of the University of Lisbon. His main research interests include the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition, the fate of the Neanderthals, and the origins of art. In Portugal, he was appointed by the government to set up the Côa Valley Archaeological Park and he contributed to the site acquiring UNESCO World Heritage status; he directed the salvage excavation of the Early Upper Paleolithic child burial of the Lagar Velho rock shelter; and he created and directed the Instituto Português de Arqueologia (IPA), a department of the Ministry of Culture for the supervision of archaeological activity. He has also contributed to a more accurate dating of the cave art paintings in Northern Spain (World Heritage properties of El Castillo, Altamira and Tito Bustillo), and he has been involved in excavating the Romanian Peștera cu Oase cave that to date is the oldest settlement of modern humans in Europe.

Klaus Zuberbühler is Professor in Biology at the Department of Comparative Cognition in the Institute of Biology at the University Neuchâtel in Neuchâtel, Switzerland; and Professor at the School of Psychology and Neuroscience of the University of St Andrews, UK. He is Scientific Director of the Budongo Conservation Field Station in Uganda; Co-director of the Tai Monkey Project in the Ivory Coast; and Director of the Biology Master Course at the University of Neuchâtel. His main research interests include the evolution of primate intelligence, combinatorial capacities, object manipulation, and intentional communication. He is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, member of the International Primatological Society, fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Luc Steels is ICREA Research Professor in Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Evolutionary Biology at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. His main research interests include agent-based modeling of language emergence and evolution. With his team he has done a large series of experiments on the emergence of lexicons of perceptually grounded categories, in particular color, emergence of spatial terms and perspective, action terms, case grammar, agreement systems, and constituent structure. This work has resulted in a large number of publications (H-index = 69) and more than 15 edited volumes including the Talking Heads Experiment, Design Patterns and Computational Issues in Fluid Construction Grammar (the world’s most advanced computational platform for exploring constructional language processing), and Experiments in Cultural Language Evolution. He is the founding director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, co-founder of the European AI Association as well as co-founder and former president of the Belgian AI Association and the Evolutionary Linguistics Association.

Rafael Núñez is Professor at the Department of Cognitive Sciences of the University of California, San Diego. Born and raised in Chile, he obtained his doctoral degree in Switzerland, and completed his post-doctoral work at Stanford and UC Berkeley. He investigates the development and evolution of everyday and technical cognition —especially conceptual systems, symbolization, and abstraction— and their biologically enculturated underpinnings. His multidisciplinary approach uses methods such as psycholinguistic experiments, gesture studies, brain imaging, and field research with isolated indigenous groups. His 2001 best-selling book, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being, and co-authored with UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, presents a new theoretical framework for understanding the human bio-cultural nature of mathematics and its foundations. Rafael Núñez is on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Australian Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, an active faculty member of the Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA) devoted to promote transdisciplinary research into human origins, and fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin.

Roslyn M. Frank is Professor Emeritus in Spanish and Portuguese Linguistics at the University of Iowa, USA and Treasurer of SEAC, the European Society for Astronomy in Culture. Her research areas include cultural, cognitive, and historical linguistics as well as ethnography with a special emphasis on the Basque language and culture. She has also published extensively in the areas of ethnomathematics and ethnoastronomy. Over the past twenty years her publications have brought together ethnographic and linguistic evidence pointing to the existence of an archaic European belief, namely, that humans descended from bears, a belief retained by the Basques into the 20^th century and reflected in a panoply of similar European folk-beliefs, ritual performances and practices.

Tania Kuteva is Professor in English Linguistics at the Institute for English and American Studies in the English Linguistics Department at the Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, and a Professorial Research Associate of the Linguistics Department of SOAS, University of London, UK. Her main research interests include grammaticalization, language contact, discourse grammar, linguistic typology and the evolution of language. She is an Expert Assessor for the European Research Council (ERC) within the Framework Program for Research and Innovation (Horizon 2020), and Member of the Cognitive Linguistics Society, the German Society of Linguistics, the Association for Linguistic Typology, and the Linguistic Society of America.

Tetsuro Matsuzawa is Distinguished Professor at the Institute of Advanced Study at the Kyoto University in Japan and General Director of the Japan Monkey Centre in Inuyama, Aichi, Japan. His main research interests include chimpanzee intelligence both in the laboratory and in the wild. The laboratory work is known as the “Ai-project” and it has been conducted since 1976 at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University. He has also been studying tool use in wild chimpanzees at Bossou-Nimba, Guinea, West Africa, since 1986. Matsuzawa tries to synthesize the field and the lab work to understand the nature of chimpanzees. He published journal papers and books such as Primate origins of human cognition and behavior, Cognitive development in chimpanzees, The chimpanzees of Bossou and Nimba. Tetsuro Matsuzawa is the recipient of the Prince Chichibu Memorial Award for Science (1991), the Jane Goodall Award (2001), the Medal with Purple Ribbon (2004), and the Person of Cultural Merit award (2013).