INSTITUTE FACULTY






Austria  (Vienna University of Technology)   \    Italy  (University of Turin. ICAR-CNR)   \    Iceland  (University of Iceland)   \    Netherlands  (Max Planck Institute. Donders Institute)   \    Norway  (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)   \    Sweden  (Örebro University. University of Skövde.)   \    United Kingdom  (Imperial College London)   \    United States  (UC Berkeley.  University of Colorado at Boulder.  Stanford University, and Columbia University.)


Prof. Mehul Bhatt
Örebro University, SWEDEN   /   

Mehul Bhatt is Professor within the School of Science and Technology at Orebro University (Sweden). His basic research focusses on formal, cognitive, and computational foundations for AI technologies with a principal emphasis on knowledge representation, semantics, integration of commonsense reasoning & learning, explainability, and spatial representation and reasoning. Visuospatial cognition and computation has been an area of intense activity from the viewpoint of interdisciplinary research. His research in Spatial Cognition and AI particularly emphasises the study of human-behaviour (embodied multimodal interaction) in naturalistic settings as a principal means of AI technology driven human-centred cognitive assistance in planning, decision-making, design situations requiring an interplay of commonsense, creative, and specialist visuospatial thinking. Our lab has a track-record of in developing cognitive assistive technologies and cognitive interaction systems —with a special emphasis on AI-Driven Cognitive Interaction and Design Technologies— in application contexts where human-centred engineering and human-in-the-loop automation are critical, for instance: autonomous systems (i.e., high-level cognitive interpretation, interaction and control); AI-driven architecture and built environment design; communications and media design technologies (i.e., multimodal perception and synthesis, visuo-auditory media design)   /   (Research Statement  >  Artificial and Human Intelligence)

Mehul Bhatt steers CoDesign Lab (www.codesign-lab.org), an initiative aimed at addressing the confluence of Cognition, Artificial Intelligence, Interaction, and Design Science for the development of human-centred cognitive assistive technologies and interaction systems. Since 2014, he directs the research and consulting group DesignSpace and pursues ongoing research in Cognitive Vision and Spatial Reasoning.


Prof. Keith Downing
NTNU, NORWAY   /   

Keith's research is in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (ALife), with an additional focus on Computational Neuroscience. Keith works with Bio-Inspired approaches to Artificial Intelligence (AI), an area at the intersection of several fields: AI, Artificial Life (ALife), Computational Neuroscience, and Cognitive Science. His main interest is in the simulated evolution of neural networks, which, again, lies between two main research disciplines: Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). He is currently finishing up his first book, "Intelligence Emerging", to be published by MIT Press in 2015. Keith teaches several of NTNU's AI classes, with contributions varying from full responsibility to a few lectures each semester. These classes include: Introductory AI, AI Programming, and Subsymbolic AI Methods, along with less-frequent lectures in Machine Learning and AI Methods.


Prof. Thomas Eiter
Vienna University of Technology, AUSTRIA   /   

Thomas Eiter, born 1966, is a full professor in the Computer Science Department of Technische Universit ¨at Wien (since 1998), Austria, where he heads the KBS Group. Before (1996-1998), he was an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Giessen, Germany. Dr. Eiter’s research interests include knowledge representation, logic programming, knowledge-based agents, and complexity in AI. He is a coauthor of the book “Heterogeneous Agent Systems” that emerged from the multi-national IMPACT project on a platform for declarative agent programming. The results of IMPACT are published in several journals (Artificial Intelligence, e.g., JACM, ACM Trans. on Computational Logic, and IEEE Intelligent Systems). Dr. Eiter has more than hundred publications, a number of which appeared in top journals (including Artificial Intelligence, JACM, JCSS, TODS, TKDE...) and conferences (IJCAI, AAAI, PODS, KR,...), and was involved in several national and international research projects. He was on the program committee of many conferences including PODS, LICS, ICMAS, KR, and is general co-chair of the 2001 Joint International German/Austrian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI 2001), and the 2001 Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning (LPNMR’01). Furthermore, he is associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE).



Dr. Paul Hemeren
University of Skövde, SWEDEN   /   

Paul Hemeren is the Head of the School of Informatics at the University of Skövde. He received his PhD in cognitive science from Lund University in Sweden. His research topics include biological motion perception, attention and categorization. The primary research questions addressed in his research concern the role of human kinematics in predicting human intentions. Within the context of applied perception, he and his colleagues have studied the critical movement parameters of cyclists that observers use to predict the intention of cyclists in traffic. Another aspect of action and intention recognition concerns the communicative (social) nature of human gestures. Current research findings from his group have revealed the categorical distinctions that observers tend to make when viewing social and non-social human gestures presented as point-light displays. A further newly started application of these findings is within the area of human-robot interaction and the development of artificial systems that can recognize human actions and intentions using kinematic information. Dr. Hemeren has been a reviewer for Accident Analysis and Prevention, Journal of Safety Research, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems and Topics in Cognitive Science among others.


Prof. Árni Kristjánsson
University of Iceland, ICELAND   /   

My research focuses on various aspects of human visual perception, such as visual attention and eye movements, how representations of the visual world are formed, visual foraging, and the influence of perceptual history on perception in the present. I mainly use psychophysical methods to answer these questions, but members of my lab and I are also involved in eye-tracking studies, neuroimaging, neuropsychological work, cognitive development studies, and clinical psychology. I received my Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2002, and worked as Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL from 2002-2004. From 2004 I have had a position at the University of Iceland.


Prof. Clayton Lewis
University of Colorado - Boulder, UNITED STATES   /   

Clayton Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. Lewis served previously as Co-Director for Technology for the Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities, and Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science, at CU, and as technology advisor to the director of the National Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation Research, US Department of Education. Lewis' recent research explores the implications of the success of predictive models, such as Large Language Models, for theories of human cognition. Other recent work addresses the implications of the same technology for programming, including especially programming in educational settings. He has also investigated the potential of machine learning to contribute to the develoment of supports for people with cognitive disabilities, including artificial personal assistants.
Before joining the University of Colorado, Lewis was Manager of Human Factors at IBM’s Watson Research Center, where he was a member of the research staff from 1970 to 1973 and 1979 to 1984. He holds degrees from Princeton, MIT, and the University of Michigan. He has been honored by appointment to the ACM SIGCHI Academy, by the SIGCHI Social Impact Award, by the Strache Leadership Award (CSUN Assistive Technology Conference), and by the ACM SIGACCESS Outstanding Contribution Award.



Dr. Antonio Lieto
University of Turin and ICAR-CNR, ITALY   /   

Antonio Lieto is a senior, tenure-track, researcher in Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Turin (Italy) and at the ICAR-CNR Institute in Palermo (Italy). His main research topics include commonsense and non-monotonic reasoning, language and knowledge technologies, cognitive architectures for intelligent interactive agents (embodied and not). He has been Vice-President of the Italian Association of Cognitive Sciences (AISC, 2017-2022), the recipient of the “Outstanding BICA Research Award” (2018) from the Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architecture Society (USA), and is an ACM Distinguished Speaker on the topics of cognitively inspired AI and computational models of cognition. Since 2015 he is a member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Cognitive Robotics. He has authored the book “Cognitive Design for Artificial Minds” (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2021) and regularly serves as PC member of the major AI and Cognitive Science conferences (e.g. IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI, CogSci, AAMAS, ACL). Furthermore, he is currently Deputy Editor in Chief of JETAI (Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence (Taylor & Francis) and Associate Editor of Cognitive Systems Research (Elsevier).


Prof. Asli Özyürek
Max Planck Institute, and Donders Institute, NETHERLANDS   /   

Asli Ozyurek is the Director of Multimodal Language Department of Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. I am also a Professor at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior (Faculty of Social Sciences) and affiliated researcher at Center for Languages Studies at Radboud University. Asli Özyürek's research in general investigates the relations between cognition, language, communication and development. She is interested in embodied and situated approaches to language and in particular to what extent our knowledge and use of bodily actions interact with language, its processing and learning. Asli Özyürek investigates this question in two domains of human communicative behavior in which body and language are closely related: A) gestures that speakers use along with speech B) sign languages (established or emerging) She has received NWO- VIDI grant (5-year), ASPASIA Award and ERC Starting Grant (5-year) and hosted three Marie-Curie Individual Postdoctoral Fellowships. She is also an elected (2019) member of Academia Europea. Currently Asli Özyürek is the PI of a 5-year NWO-VICI Grant for a research proposal entitled "Giving cognition a hand: Linking spatial cognition to linguistic expression in native and late learners of sign language and bimodal bilinguals" (until 2021).


Prof. Alessandra Russo
Imperial College London, UNITED KINGDOM   /   

I am a Professor in Applied Computational Logic at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London, and academic member of the Distributed Software Engineering Section. I lead the Structured and Probabilistic Knowledge Engineering (SPIKE) research group and my research interests are in the the areas of in Computational Logic, Logic-based Symbolic Learning, Probabilistic and Distributed Inference, and their applications to Intelligent Adaptive Systems, Security, Network Management, Distributed Control Systems for Sensor Networks, and System Biology.



Prof. Barbara Tversky
Stanford University, and Columbia University, UNITED STATES   /   

Barbara Tversky studied cognitive psychology at the University of Michigan, where she focused on the then neglected topic of spatial memory and imagery. The work continued and expanded at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Stanford University to include categorization, memory, cognitive maps, spatial mental models, spatial language and memory, eyewitness testimony, biased visual and verbal memory, HCI, design, diagrammatic thinking, gesture, event perception and cognition, and creativity. She is currently Professor of Psychology at Columbia Teachers College and Professor Emerita of Psychology at Stanford. She has received awards for teaching and for a computer laboratory for teaching cognitive psychology, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Psychological Society, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Russell Sage Foundation, and was elected to the Society of Experimental Psychology. She has served on the governing boards of many professional organizations, on the editorial boards of many journals, and on the organizing committees of nearly 100 international interdisciplinary conferences. She has enjoyed collaborations with linguists, philosophers, computer scientists, neuroscientists, biologists, chemists, engineers, architects, designers, and artists.


Prof. David Whitney
UC Berkeley, UNITED STATES   /   

My lab investigates visual perception, attention, and visually guided action. Specific areas of interest include motion perception, perceptual localization, object and face recognition, scene perception, and visuomotor behavior. Using a variety of techniques, including psychophysics, functional neuroimaging, and transcranial magnetic stimulation, we study visual and visuomotor function, with the goal of understanding the perceptual, cognitive, and neural mechanisms that allow humans to perceive and interact with objects in a dynamic world.