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University of Newcastle    \    Aalto University    \    University of Bremen    \    Kobe University    \    AGH University    \    University of California Los Angeles    \    Case Western Reserve University    \    University of Colorado    \    Cornell University    \    Vanderbilt University


Prof. Mehul Bhatt \ University of Bremen
Human-Centred Cognitive Assistance, Department of Computer Science, University of Bremen. GERMANY

Mehul Bhatt is Professor within the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at the University of Bremen, Germany; and Stiftungs Professor at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI Bremen). He leads the Human-Centred Cognitive Assistance Lab at the University of Bremen, Germany (HCC Lab. http://hcc.uni-bremen.de/), and is Director and co-founder of the research and consulting group DesignSpace (www.design-space.org). Mehul obtained a bachelors in economics (India), masters in information technology (Australia), and a PhD in computer science (Australia). He has been a recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, a German Academic Exchange Service award (DAAD), and an Australian Post-graduate Award.
Mehul's research encompasses the areas of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and human-computer interaction. Of particular focus are basic topics on spatial cognition and computation, visual perception, knowledge representation and reasoning, multimodality and interaction studies, design cognition and computation, and communications & media studies. Mehul's currently ongoing research initiatives particularly reach out with methods and technologies from ``cognition and artificial intelligence'' for integrated analytical & empirical behavioural research in psychology, social sciences, and arts & humanities. Basic research projects translate to applications in architecture design, geoinformatics, cognitive vision & robotics, medical informatics, and media design.
Mehul has edited or reviewed for journals such as: Spatial Cognition and Computation, Cognitive Systems, Artificial Intelligence (AIJ), Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence (JETAI), Human-Centred Computing and Information Sciences, Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, Automation in Construction, Design Studies. Mehul co-chaired for the fourth International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Cognition (AIC), the DFG-NSF symposium on Spatial Cognition for Architecture Design (SCAD 2011, USA); and the DFG sponsored 27th Qualitative Reasoning Workshop (QR-2013, Germany). Mehul has initiated and co-steered initiatives such as: Workshop series on Spatio-Temporal Dynamics (STeDy); Space, Time, and Ambient Intelligence (STAMI); SHAPES 1.0 - 3.0: The Shape of Things; and the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) SIG on `Design Semantics'. Most recently launched initiatives include: CoDesign 2017: The Bremen Summer of Cognition and Design; and HCC 2016: The International School on Human-Centred Computing.
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Prof. James Cutting \ Cornell University
Susan Linn Sage Professor of Psychology Cornell University UNITED STATES

James E. Cutting is professor of psychology at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1980. Before Cornell he taught at Wesleyan and Yale Universities, having gotten his Ph. D. at Yale in 1973 and his B. A. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1969. In addition to his academic work, in the 1970s he was a professional modern dancer, and at the University of North Carolina he was in many theatrical productions. He has worked in industry at the one-time Atari Sunnyvale Research Laboratory. He was a Fellow of several divisions of the American Psychological Association, including the division of Psychology and the Arts; and is a Charter Fellow of the American Psychological Society, and a member of the College Art Association and the Society for the Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image.
He has two published books and over a hundred scientific articles. He was editor of Psychological Science (2003-2006) has served as editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (1989-1993) and as associate or consulting editor for several others.
In 1993 he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. With it he studied the representation of depth and of space in the art of Paris and surrounding cities in Europe. This fostered active collaborations with researchers in Europe. Over the past two decades he has been actively engaged in research on various aspects of visual perception, exploring the nature of the information used, particularly as it is arrayed in natural motions such as those of, and seen by, a pedestrian walking through a cluttered environment. Since much of his research is focused on everyday perception, since this research uses computer graphics, and since the computer images are irrevocably pictures, he has also been deeply interested in the relation between pictures (as two dimensional objects) and the three-dimensional natural world. Coupled with his interest in motion, this has led him to cinema. Aside from enjoying simply “flicking out,” his academic interest in cinema is as a tool to understand the constraints under which the human visual system evolved. He argues that the vast cultural significance of cinema, and its considerably different structure from what is seen during, say, a stroll through the real world provides insights into the underpinnings of our visual perception. Since we did not evolve to look at cinema, and since it arguably “evolved” to fit what we can digest easily, its structure can suggest what our visual systems did, and did not, evolve to see.
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Prof. Bipin Indurkhya \ Jagiellonian University, and AGH University
Professor of Computer Science / Cognitive Science, Jagiellonian University + AGH University, Krakow, POLAND

Bipin Indurkhya did his BE (Electronics) from REC, Bhopal (MP), ME (Electronics) from Philips International Institute of Technological Studies, Eindhoven (The Netherlands), and Ph.D. (Computer Science) from University of Massachusetts, Amherst (USA). He spent about twelve years teaching at various universities in the US, most of which was at Boston University. After that he was at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan for over eight years. In the last two years of this period, he was in the Mechanical Engineering Department, where he started a robotics lab and developed undergraduate and graduate courses in robotics, which were very popular. He was with IIIT-Hyderabad 2004-2011, where he started a Cognitive Science Lab, secured industry and government funding for various research projects, and started a PhD program in Cognitive Science. Since 2011, he has moved to Kraków (Poland), and is now a professor in the Cognitive Science Program in the Institute of Philosophy at the Jagiellonian University, in Kraków. He is also a visiting faculty at the Computer Science Department at AGH University. Besides, he has held visiting professorships and lectured at Northeastern University (Boston), Tufts University, University of Freiburg, University of Amsterdam, Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, University of Cagliari, Osnabrück University, and University at Buffalo among others. His current research activities include visual metaphors, computational creativity, multimodal affective computing (especially the role of haptic stimuli), application of cognitive science to design intuitive interfaces, cognitive robotics and developing IT and robotics tools for assisting cognition and communication for autistic and dyslexic children. He has also lectured about robotics to the school children in Poland, Japan and in India, and has conducted many hands-on robotics workshops for school children and college students.
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Prof. Daniel Levin \ Vanderbilt University
Professor of Psychology and Human Development Vanderbilt University UNITED STATES

Research in the Levin lab is focused on the interface between concepts and visual perception. To this end, we have been exploring the concepts associated with a variety of object categories, and the knowledge that drives visual selection during scene and event perception. Some of our research explores how knowledge and other basic cognitive constraints affect scene and event perception. For example, we are currently exploring how people perceive the sequence of natural visual events, and how they represent space while viewing films. In a related line of research, we are exploring adults' and childrens' concepts about agency, and testing how these concepts affect event perception, human-computer interaction, and learning from agent-based tutoring systems. This line of research represents an interdisciplinary collaboration with our lab, Meg Saylor's lab (Cognitive Development), and labs in engineering (Julie Adams and Gautam Biswas), and has recently been supported by a grant from the NSF. In another current project, we are collaborating with the McCandliss lab to explore how natural events shape reasoning about number and theory of mind. To do this, we have created a narrative film depicting these sorts of events and have collected fMRI data from children while they view this film. Currently, the lab includes Lewis Baker (grad student), and Chris Jaeger (graduate student). Grad student alumni include Bonnie Angelone, Melissa Beck, Jonathan Herberg, Stephen Killingsworth, Yukari Takarae, Alex Varakin, and Joe Wayand. I received by BA from Reed College in 1990, and my Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1997, then moved to a faculty position Kent State University. Starting in 2003, I have been here at Vanderbilt where I am Professor of Psychology in the Peabody's department of Psychology and Human Development.
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Dr. Juhyun Lee \ The University of Newcastle
Senior Lecturer: School of Architecture and Built Environment The University of Newcastle AUSTRALIA

Dr Lee has contributed to Architecture and Digital design with intensive professional practice since 1998. As an expert in the field of architectural and design computing, Dr Lee was invited to become a visiting academic at the University of Newcastle in February 2011 and appointed to a full time research position in October 2012. Dr Lee has made a significant contribution towards architectural and design research in three main areas: Design cognition, Planning and design analysis, and Design computing. His recent cognitive research, Design and Language, has a significant impact on breaking down the barriers to achieving efficient and sustainable interactions between people in design teams, particularly those in the Asia–Pacific region. He has led many research programs within the school and at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Built Environment Research (CIBER). The results have been presented and published at conferences of CAADFutures, ASA(ANZAScA), DRS, CAADRIA and DCC; in the Architectural Science Review, the International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation and the International Journal of Architectural Computing. Dr Lee acts as a reviewer for international journals and conferences such as the Nexus Network Journal: Architecture and Mathematics, Urban Studies, Journal of Information Technology in Construction, Sustainability in Energy and Buildings, ASA (ANZAScA), CAADRiA, ICT, and International Conference on Design Creativity (ICDC). He was Associate editor for a special edition of Architectural Science Review on Design Computing and has also served as reviewer for grants of the National Research Foundation of Korea, the Israel Science Foundation and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.
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Prof. Clayton Lewis \ University of Colorado
Professor of Computer Science / Fellow: Institute of Cognitive Science University of Colorado, Boulder UNITED STATES

Clayton Lewis is Professor of Computer Science and Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science. He is well known for his research on evaluation methods in user interface design. Two methods to which he and his colleagues have contributed, the thinking aloud method and the cognitive walkthrough, are in regular use in software development organizations around the world. He has also contributed to cognitive assistive technology, to programming language design, to educational technology, and to cognitive theory in causal attribution and learning. He was named University of Colorado President’s Teaching Scholar in 1989, a life title signifying the University’s highest award for teaching. Lewis earned a BA in mathematics from Princeton University, an MS from MIT, for interdisciplinary study in mathematics and linguistics, and a PhD from the University of Michigan in experimental psychology. He was elected to the ACM CHI Academy in 2009, recognizing his contributions to the field of human-computer interaction. In 2011 he was further recognized by the ACM CHI Social Impact Award, for his work on technology for people with cognitive, language, and learning disabilities.
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Prof. Francis Steen \ University of California
Professor of Communication Studies / Digital Humanities University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) UNITED STATES

How do we learn from mass media? I research how people use the multimodal information in mass media to form complex and integrated models of reality, using language, images, gesture, and emotion.
I direct the digital NewsScape Library of International Television News, a growing collection of 350,000 television news programs annotated by three billion words, part of the Communication Studies Archive, which extends back to the Watergate hearings. As an extension of this project, I co-direct the Red Hen Lab, an international network of scholars studying multimodal communication (see video introduction made by the University of Navarra in Spain), and the research team Joint Image-Text Parsing and Reasoning for Analyzing Social and Political News Events , which brings together researchers, graduate students, and undergraduates from Communication Studies, Statistics, and Computer Science from UCLA and UIUC under a grant from the National Science Foundation.
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Prof. Toshiharu Taura \ Kobe University
Professor: Department of Mechanical Engineering Kobe University JAPAN

Toshiharu Taura is the director of the Integrated Research Center and a professor of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Kobe University. He received his B.S., M.S., and Dr. Eng. Degrees from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1977, 1979, and 1991, respectively. After serving as a mechanical engineer at the Nippon Steel Corporation and as an associate professor at the University of Tokyo, Taura joined Kobe University in 1999. Focusing his research interest on engineering design, he went on to understand the general terms of design, paying particular attention to industrial design, art, technology, and cognitive science. He has been a key figure in the academic field of Design Creativity and has led several interdisciplinary discussions on this topic. In 2007, he founded the Design Creativity Special Interest Group as part of the Design Society and organized the First International Conference on Design Creativity in 2010 in Kobe, Japan. He launched the International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation in 2013 and serves as its editor-in-chief.

He is currently working on several research issues that focus on the creative thought process of both engineering and industrial design, including interdisciplinary aspects of design science. His research aim is to identify standard characteristics of design, i.e. answering the question “what is design?” from the viewpoint of creativity.
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Dr. Pia Tikka \ Aalto University
Research Fellow: School of Art, Design, Architecture Aalto University FINLAND

Dr. Pia Tikka, Adjunct Professor of New Narrative Media and a professional filmmaker, is the principal investigator of NeuroCine research project, and holds position as Director in Crucible Studio, Department of Media, Aalto University. Since 2003, in the field of new narrative media, she has led her research group of Enactive Cinema, and a founding member of the research project Enactive Media (2009-2011), Aalto University Finland. As the inventor of a biosensor-based interactive (enactive) media format, she has been awarded with Möbius Prix Nordic prize of interactive storytelling with her Enactive Cinema project Obsession (2005). The project premiered in the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki) 2005 and internationally in ISEA 2006 & Zero One (San Jose, CA). Pia Tikka has authored the book Enactive Cinema: Simulatorium Eisensteinense (2008). She is co-author of interactive film-game Third Woman, which has been shown in Thessaloniki Biennale (2009), Digital Art Weeks in the Great Hall Xian Academy of Fine Arts (2010), and Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, NY (2011). Pia Tikka is the CEO of production company Oblomovies, Finland. She has written and directed feature films the Daughters of Yemanjá (Brazil-Finland 1996), Sand Bride (Finland 1998), and the Maiden of Dusk (in development), and gained expertise as a creative team member in a range of international film productions. Currently enactive cinema team is developing an interactive humanlike virtual screen character, Enactive Avatar. See more in enactivecinema.net In the field of naturalistic neurosciences, she has acted as a core member of the directory group of neuroscience research project aivoAALTO at the Aalto University (2010-2014). Her research in neurocinematics is focusing on studying the neural basis of storytelling and creative imagination. She has contributed to the neuroeconomics as a member of the advisory board in NeuroService research project at the Laurea University of Applied Sciences, funded by Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation (2014–2015). She is a Fellow of Life in the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image. Currently, her research team NeuroCine applies neuroimaging methods to study the neural basis of narrative cognition. See publications at neorocine.net
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Prof. Mark Turner \ Case Western Reserve University
Professor of Cognitive Science: Case Western Reserve University, UNITED STATES

Mark Turner (born 1954) is a cognitive scientist, linguist, and author. He is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. He has won an Anneliese Maier Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2015) and a Grand Prix (Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises) from the French Academy (1996) for his work in these fields. Turner and Gilles Fauconnier founded the theory of conceptual blending, presented in textbooks and encyclopedias. Turner is also the director of the Cognitive Science Network (CSN) and co-director of the Distributed Little Red Hen Lab.
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