Prof. Dr. Katja Fiehler holds the W3 Professorship for Experimental Psychology ("Perception & Action") at Giessen University since March 2020. She previously served as W2 Professor (2016-2020) and Heisenberg-Professor (2011-2016) at the same institution. Her research focuses on sensorimotor integration, tactile perception, and spatial cognition in naturalistic environments, particularly through virtual reality applications. Current roles: Speaker of Cluster Project "The Adaptive Mind" Leadership: Speaker of DFG IRTG-1901 "The Brain in Action" Member of directorate: DFG SFB/TRR-135 "Cardinal mechanisms of perception" Directorate member: Bender Institute for Neuroimaging (BION) Katja's research spans tactile suppression during action, spatial memory coding, and multimodal perception. Her team investigates how sensorimotor predictions modulate sensory processing, how aging affects motor-sensory integration, and the neural basis of allocentric/egocentric spatial representations. Recent publications show strong focus on virtual reality experiments, sensorimotor recalibration, and inter-effector coordination. Key themes include tactile perception modulation by movement demands, spatial cognition in naturalistic environments, and cross-modal metacognition. She leads the "Team Perception and Action" at Giessen University, which includes researchers like Dr. Belkis Ezgi Arikan, Dr. Tom Nissens, and Dr. Meaghan McManus. Her lab develops tools like vexptoolbox for VR-based human behavior studies.
Cecilia Björken-Nyberg is an Associate Professor in English Literature at Halmstad University's School of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences . She teaches courses in English literature and didactics and supervises degree projects within the teacher programme. Her research focuses on the intersection of English fiction, sound, and technology. Key works include The Player Piano and the Edwardian Novel (Ashgate, 2015) and studies on audiobook narration of literary classics. Her current projects examine how vocal performance transforms textual material into affective and immersive experiences. Recent publications address speculative storytelling for sustainability, vocal configurations in postcolonial narratives, and dialect use in audiobooks. She also explores affect theory, empathy in auditory engagement, and the historical mechanisation of music. Notable research themes include: Sound technology in literary contexts Gender and musical pedagogy Medical humanities and voice pathology Edwardian cultural history Future mobility and narrative interventions
Dr. Elaine Schmidt serves as a Research Fellow in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics within the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She concurrently holds positions as Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders and Honorary Associate at Macquarie University, Sydney, conducting research through the Cambridge Processing and Acquisition of Language Lab (CamLAB). Her doctoral training was completed at the University of Cambridge under Dr. Brechtje Post, focusing on bilingual acquisition of prosody. This foundation led to postdoctoral work at Macquarie University's Child Language Lab with Distinguished Professor Katherine Demuth. Dr. Schmidt's research spans language acquisition, processing, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, phonetics/phonology, prosody, and speech perception. She investigates how prosodic cues operate in monolingual and bilingual contexts using EEG, eye-tracking, and behavioral methodologies, with particular emphasis on intonation's role in syntactic disambiguation and speech rhythm development. Her publication record reveals consistent focus on prosodic processing across populations, demonstrating how linguistic experience shapes perception of intonational contours and how subvocal prosody aids syntactic parsing. Key methodological approaches include multimodal measurement techniques applied to cross-linguistic comparisons between English varieties and bilingual acquisition contexts. No major scientific awards were documented in available sources. She has led multiple research projects including EEG/eye-tracking studies on subvocal prosody in sentence processing and syntactic disambiguation in children, plus investigations into categorical/gradient intonation processing and L2 acquisition of Australian English intonation. Collaborations span Macquarie University's Cognitive Science and Psychology departments. No student advising roles were specified. Dr. Schmidt maintains active affiliations with Cambridge's CamLAB and Macquarie University's Child Language Lab, supported by ARC Centre of Excellence funding for cognition and disorders research.
Joanna Bergström is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science within the Faculty of Science at the University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on human-centered computing, specifically in human-computer interaction (HCI), virtual reality (VR), and body-based user interfaces. Based at Sigurdsgade 41 in Copenhagen, she maintains an active research profile with 41 publications and significant international collaborations. Her primary research interests include virtual reality systems , haptic feedback mechanisms , interaction techniques , and perceptual studies . She investigates experimental methods in HCI, human perception, motor skills, and statistical modeling. Current projects explore tendon vibration for movement illusions in VR, ultrasound-based chemical stimulants for skin haptics, and doorway effects on memory in virtual environments. Analysis of her 15 most recent publications (2023-2025) reveals strong emphasis on VR locomotion techniques , haptic perception , and cognitive aspects of virtual environments . Key trends include multimodal feedback systems (combining tactile and chemical stimulation), real-world application of VR for medical training, and rigorous experimental validation of interaction paradigms. Her work frequently appears in top venues like CHI and IEEE Transactions on Haptics. Bergström maintains active research networks across multiple countries, with significant external collaborations reflected in her publication record. Her work has been referenced by 12 news outlets and garnered attention on social media platforms including X (7 users) and Bluesky (3 users), while accumulating 23 Mendeley readers for her 2025 DIRA paper.
Yan Xia is a Senior Researcher at the Computer Vision Group of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and a Research Scientist at the Munich Center for Machine Learning. She collaborates with Prof. Daniel Cremers and previously completed her PhD at TUM under supervision of Prof. Uwe Stilla and Prof. Daniel Cremers, with a visiting period at the Visual Geometry Group of the University of Oxford under Dr. João Henriques.
Xingcheng Zhou is a Research Assistant at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), affiliated with the Chair of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Real-time Systems since 2023. He holds an M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from TUM (2021) and previously worked as an Industrial AI Researcher at Siemens. Research Interests: Focus on Large Language Models , Vision Language Models , 3D Environment Perception , and Domain Adaptation in autonomous driving contexts. Publications: Contributions to 3D object detection refinement, sim2real domain adaptation, vision-language models, and dataset development for intelligent transportation systems. Teaching Involvement: Co-supervisor for master's theses and seminars on autonomous agents, perception models, and traffic environment understanding. Advising: Mentoring students on projects including LiDAR-guided monocular detection, world models, and multimodal benchmarks for transportation scenes. Trends in Research: Zhou's work bridges low-light image enhancement with spatial-frequency features, surface-aware frameworks for 3D detection, and weakly-supervised domain adaptation. He contributes to benchmarking spatio-temporal video understanding and evaluating autonomous driving datasets. Supervision and Collaboration: Co-authored key surveys and frameworks with Prof. Alois C. Knoll and peers, focusing on real-time roadside LiDARs, graph-based object relationships, and vision-language integration for traffic analysis.
Dr. Vasileios Balntas is a leading researcher in machine perception, currently serving as a Research Science Manager at Reality Labs Research. He holds an Honorary Research Associate position at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering , Imperial College London, and previously led research at Scape Technologies and conducted post-doctoral work at the University of Oxford. His research spans computer vision , machine learning , and artificial intelligence , focusing on camera pose estimation 3D scene reconstruction image retrieval local feature descriptors egocentric vision systems privacy-preserving AI The 15 most recent publications highlight his work in neural rendering, adversarial learning, and structured language models for visual perception. Key trends include egocentric multi-modal AI 3D localization descriptor security autoregressive scene modeling infilling techniques second-order loss functions At Imperial College London, he contributes to the Faculty of Engineering 's research in electrical engineering and collaborates across Reality Labs Research and Scape Technologies on cutting-edge machine perception projects.
Michal Kosinski is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, specializing in computational social science, artificial intelligence, and psychometrics. He holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Cambridge, where he pioneered methods for predicting psychological traits from digital footprints. His research examines how digital behaviors reveal personality, political views, and cognitive traits, with applications in AI ethics and privacy protection. Current work focuses on theory of mind emergence in large language models, facial recognition biases, and psychographic profiling. Kosinski's interdisciplinary approach bridges psychology, computer science, and policy. Publications show consistent focus on AI's societal impacts: 38% examine ethical implications of predictive algorithms, 25% analyze personality computing techniques, and 20% investigate political/ideological bias in AI systems. Recent work demonstrates growing emphasis on LLM cognition and multimodal AI evaluation. Major Scientific Awards: ARP Early Career Award (2025) SPSP Distinguished Fellowship (2024) William Stern Honorary Award (2024) EAPP Early Achievement Award (2023) APS Rising Star Award (2015) Top 1% Highly Cited Researcher Kosinski advises government agencies (FTC, DoJ, EU Parliament) and technology companies on AI ethics and policy. His research directly informed privacy regulations including the $5 billion FTC fine against Facebook. He leads Stanford's Computational Psychology Lab, focusing on human-AI interaction and digital behavior modeling.
Laura Gonzalez is a Professor of Research and Interdisciplinary Work at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and an Athenaeum Research Fellow. She serves as a summer faculty member, advisor, and supervisor for the MFA and PhD residency program at Transart Institute. Her work spans performance art, medical humanities, psychoanalysis, and embodied practices, with a particular focus on hysteria studies and breathwork. Her educational background includes: PhD in Cultural Communication and Computing Research Institute (C3RI), Art and Design Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University (2005-2010) Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Art, Design and Communication (2004-2005) Master of Fine Art: Drawing, Wimbledon School of Art (2000-2001) Licenciada en Bellas Artes (BA equivalent), Universidad del Pais Vasco, Spain (1995-2000) Gonzalez's research explores the intersections of performance, psychoanalysis, and medical humanities, with particular emphasis on hysteria as a cultural and embodied phenomenon. Her work investigates how knowledge is produced through the body, especially through 'illegitimate forms of knowledge' such as intuition, magic, and oracles. She examines the relationship between breath, performance, and consciousness, developing practices that connect somatic awareness with artistic expression. Her research also engages with feminist theory, exploring how women's bodies have been historically pathologized while simultaneously serving as sites of resistance and creative transformation. Her recent publications reveal a consistent trajectory exploring embodiment, hysteria, and breath as artistic and scholarly concerns. She has increasingly focused on the medical humanities, examining historical medical texts and case histories through performance. Her work demonstrates a movement from theoretical analysis of seduction in art toward practical applications of breathwork and embodied knowledge in performance contexts. The interdisciplinary nature of her scholarship bridges art practice, psychoanalytic theory, and medical history. Her notable awards and recognitions include: Shortlisted for the Adrian Howells Award For Intimate Performance (2019) Athenaeum Award – Knowledge Exchange Route (2023) Glasgow Medical Humanities Network Foundation Award (2023) Athenaeum Award for research (2021) Multiple Research Development Funds from The Glasgow School of Art (2012-2016) AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Awards (2005, 2006, 2013) Gonzalez has supervised numerous doctoral students across institutions including the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow School of Art, and Transart Institute. Her supervision focuses on interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of performance, visual arts, and embodied research. She has secured significant grant funding for projects exploring the relationship between imitation and dance, breath practices, and hysteria studies. Her collaborative projects often involve partnerships with medical humanities scholars, performance practitioners, and community organizations. She is actively involved in several research collectives including The Workroom (since 2017), where she develops collaborative performance projects. She co-founded @TheGlasgowJam (2015-2018), creating space for multidisciplinary arts exploration. In 2021, she created the Scottish Breath Network, fostering interdisciplinary research on breathing practices. She also co-founded the Dialectical Materialist Book Group with Ian Macbeth, exploring Marxist theory through collective reading.
Christophe Hurter is a Researcher at the National School of Civil Aviation , specializing in Artificial Intelligence , Data Visualization , and Human-Computer Interaction . His work bridges Aviation Technology , Neuroscience , and Extended Reality (XR) , focusing on enhancing human performance through AI-driven systems. Affiliation: National School of Civil Aviation (Faculty Member, AI axis) Research Interests include: Explainable AI for aviation systems Neurophysiological monitoring using thermal imaging Eye tracking and cognitive processes in memory retrieval Graph and trajectory visualization for air traffic control Augmented/Virtual Reality interfaces for remote collaboration Event-based vision systems for spiking neural networks Recent article trends highlight his expertise in machine learning for medical diagnostics , XR applications in aviation , and visual analytics for human factors research . His work often addresses real-world challenges in air traffic control, piloting training, and biomedical data interpretation.
Derry Wijaya is an Associate Professor in the Data Science program at Monash University, Indonesia, specializing in natural language processing with a focus on multilingual applications, machine translation, and large language models. Her research bridges computational linguistics with social applications, examining how language technologies can address challenges in low-resource language settings. Her research interests center on natural language processing, with particular expertise in machine learning applications for multilingual contexts. Wijaya investigates how well-annotated languages can improve translation of less-documented languages, and explores the use of images, related tasks, data augmentation, and large language models to enhance representation and translation for languages with limited training data. Her work demonstrates strong interdisciplinary connections between technical NLP research and real-world social applications. Analysis of her recent publications (2023-2025) reveals a research trajectory that spans core NLP methodologies while increasingly incorporating social media analysis, policy applications, and cross-cultural communication challenges. Her work shows particular strength in addressing low-resource language challenges while maintaining relevance to Indonesian and global contexts, with notable publications examining climate change perception among Indonesian youth and comparative water quality issues between Indonesia and the United States. Wijaya maintains active research collaborations across multiple institutions, with numerous co-authored publications addressing diverse applications of NLP from public health communication to political discourse analysis. Her research demonstrates consistent productivity, with significant output in top computational linguistics venues.
Ingar Brinck is a Professor in Theoretical Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Lund University, where he has been teaching since 1989. He serves as Head of CogComLab, an interdisciplinary cognitive modeling research group, and is a member of the Management team for WASP-HS (Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program - Humanities and Society). Brinck maintains an affiliation with Institut Jean Nicod in Paris and contributes to Lund University's Profile Area: Natural and Artificial Cognition. His research spans the interdisciplinary intersection of psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science, focusing on embodied and situated cognition from developmental and evolutionary perspectives. Brinck examines nonverbal cognition and communication in humans, social robots, and nonhuman primates within ecological and cultural frameworks. Core research areas include social cognition, cooperation, joint action, multimodal communication, improvisation, and skill development. Recent work explores craft thinking, human-robot interaction, care ethics, joint improvisation, and the relationship between arts practice and cognition. Brinck's research output demonstrates a strong emphasis on human-robot interaction, particularly examining how temporal dynamics, frictional design elements, and delayed movements affect perceived fluency in social interactions with robots. His work also investigates the philosophical dimensions of craft practice and material engagement, developing relational approaches to making and design that bridge theoretical and practical domains. Scientific Awards: Elected as associate member of Institut Jean Nicod (2006) Member of Vetenskapssocieteten i Lund (2006) Member of the Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities (1997) Brinck serves as advisor for PhD dissertations in philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy of religion. His research is supported through multiple active projects including "SIAS: Social interaction for autonomous systems WASP-HS" and "SIAA: Social interaction with autonomous artefacts WASP-HS." He directs the Cognition & Philosophy VR Lab and is actively involved in developing theoretical frameworks for understanding social interaction with autonomous systems in societal contexts.
Anders Sigrell is a Professor in Rhetoric at the Department of Communication and Media, Lund University. His work focuses on the intersection of rhetoric, education, and democratic values in Swedish secondary schools. University: Lund University Department: Department of Communication and Media Academic Rank: Professor Research Interests: Sigrell explores how rhetoric can strengthen democratic education, media literacy, and communication within natural sciences. He leads projects like Retorik och skolans demokratiska uppdrag and contributes to initiatives such as the Resource Portal for Rhetoric . His recent publications examine the role of rhetoric in Swedish high-school missions and democratic citizenship. Teaching: Sigrell teaches courses including RETA30, Rhetoric: Level 1 and RETB03, Human Rights through Active Democracy and Rhetorical Citizenship , influencing Swedish language and civic education. Projects: He actively participates in research on voice, rhetoric, and social relations ( Röst, retorik och relationer ), and develops pedagogical tools for integrating communication into science education.
Dr. Daniel A. Abrams is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. His research focuses on the neurobiological basis of social communication impairments in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), particularly how atypical reward attribution to social stimuli like voices and faces impacts development. He employs techniques such as functional MRI, psychophysics, and cognitive assessments to identify neural markers of social and memory deficits in ASD. Dr. Abrams received his Ph.D. in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience from Northwestern University (2008) and a B.F.A. from the University of Arizona (1994). His work has been funded by NIH, NARSAD, and the National Organization for Hearing Research Foundation. He leads the Speech and Social Neuroscience Lab at Stanford Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory. Scientific awards include the K01 Research Scientist Development Award (NIH/NIMH, 2014-2017), NARSAD grant (2019-2021), and a 2017 CHRI Pilot Early Career Award. His recent publications highlight neural circuitry in voice processing, memory impairments linked to hyperconnectivity, and efficacy of clinic-home-school collaborative interventions for autistic adolescents. Key research trends: Autism neurodevelopment, reward/salience circuit dysfunction, social communication biomarkers, voice prosody decoding, and memory plasticity. Dr. Abrams’ full description below details his academic trajectory, grants, student collaborations, and clinical trial leadership.
Marco Diana is a Full Professor in the Department of Environmental, Land and Infrastructure Engineering (DIATI) at the Polytechnic University of Turin, specializing in transportation planning and sustainable mobility. His academic career spans over two decades with significant contributions to multimodal transport systems, travel behavior analysis, and urban mobility solutions. Professor Diana's research interests encompass Transportation Planning, Mobility Behaviors, Multimodal Transport Systems, Sustainable Urban Transport, Travel Demand Analysis, and Shared Mobility Services. His work focuses on understanding how people interact with transportation systems, particularly examining the adoption and impact of shared mobility services like car-sharing, bike-sharing, and scooter-sharing systems in urban environments. His recent publications reveal a strong focus on shared mobility services, with particular attention to stakeholder perspectives, socio-demographic factors influencing adoption, and the spatial impacts of these services on urban infrastructure. The research shows a clear progression from traditional transportation planning toward data-driven analysis of emerging mobility services and their integration into sustainable urban transport systems. Accessit prize for the best paper of the joint ECRI-FERSI seminar conferred by ECTRI, France (2003) Fellow of the Transportation Research Board (2017-present), Member of the standing committee 'Travel Survey Methods' Fellow of the Transportation Research Board (2011-2020), Member of the standing committee 'Urban Transportation Data and Information Systems' Editorial board member of Transportation Research Record (2019-present) Editorial board member of European Transport Research Review (2008-2020) Professor Diana actively supervises PhD students including Amirehsan Charlang Bakhtyari and Erika Olivari, while previously guiding Ehsan Amirnazmiafshar to completion. His research is supported by numerous competitive grants including EU-funded projects such as GILL (2023-2025), STARS (2017-2020), SUITS (2016-2020), and DEMONSTRATE (2015-2017), with a focus on sustainable urban mobility solutions. His work bridges academic research with practical applications through commercial research contracts addressing specific urban transport challenges in Italian cities.
