International Advisory Board

Justine Cassell

Professor, School of Computer Science : Justine Cassell is SCS Dean’s Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). She is currently on leave from CMU to hold the founding international chair at PRAIRIE Paris Institute on Interdisciplinary Research in AI, and to hold the associated position of researcher at INRIA Paris. In January 2021, Cassell was named a member of the 21 person French governmental committee Conseil National du Numérique (CNNUM) – the Council on the Future of Digital in France.

Ted Gibson

Professor of Cognitive Science : Research in the Gibson Lab (“TedLab”) is aimed at investigating (1) why human languages look the way they do; (2) the relationship between culture and cognition, including language; and, most generally, (3) how people learn, represent and process language. We use a variety of methods, including behavioral experiments (e.g., reading and listening studies, many simple methods in working with remote populations, dual-task experiments, individual differences studies), statistical modeling and corpus analyses. In collaboration with other labs we also use functional MRI, event-related potentials (ERPs) and eye-tracking.

Anne-Lise Giraud

Professor : Although single neuron spiking has capital coding properties, collective neuronal behaviour as reflected in oscillatory activity signals the spatio-temporal integration of spiking activity. In this group, we explore how neural oscillations contribute to auditory processing with an emphasis on speech. Owing to its quasi-rhythmicity, speech interacts with cortical oscillatory activity in many specific ways, which provide interesting paradigms to explore the computations emerging from collective neuronal behavior. We investigate the multiple roles of neural oscillations in speech processing, in particular in speech parsing, speech coding, code transformation and directional multiplexing.

Peter Hagoort

Professor : Peter Hagoort is director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (since November 2006), and the founding director of the Donders Institute, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (DCCN, 1999), a cognitive neuroscience research centre at the Radboud University Nijmegen. In addition, he is professor in cognitive neuroscience at the Radboud University Nijmegen. His own research interests relate to the domain of the human language faculty and how it is instantiated in the brain. In his research he applies neuroimaging techniques such as ERP, MEG, PET and fMRI to investigate the language system and its impairments as in aphasia, dyslexia and autism.

Mark Johnson

Professor of Language Sciences : Mark Johnson is a Professor of Language Science (CORE) in the Department of Computing at Macquarie University. He is also the Chief AI Scientist, Oracle Digital Assistant at Oracle Corporation, where he develops chatbots and digital assistants. The Oracle Digital Assistant division develops novel deep learning models to power the next generation of Conversational AI using semantic parsing. Mark Johnson has worked on a wide range of topics in computational linguistics, but his main area of research is natural language understanding, especially syntactic parsing and semantic analysis, and their applications to text and speech processing.

Sonja Kotz

Dr. Prof. Sonja Kotz holds a chair in Neuropsychology and Translational Cognitive Neuroscience at the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience (FPN), Department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology (NP&PP) at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Her research topics include multimodal processing and (re-)learning, with a particular focus on temporal, rhythmic, and emotional stimulus properties and contexts, or the search for neuromodulatory therapies in persons with Parkinson’s disease, subcortical stroke, tinnitus, and first incidence psychosis.

Shari Speer

Shari Speer is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics whose primary research area is Psycholinguistics. She received a PhD in Human Experimental Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1988. Her research concerns the relationship between language production and comprehension, with a particular focus on contributions from intonation and prosodic structure. The work employs insights from linguistic theory and empirical contributions from eye movement monitoring, spontaneous and lab speech productions, and traditional reaction-time paradigms to develop models of language processing, with a focus on the time-course of underlying cognitive mechanisms.

Stanislas Dehaene

Stanislas Dehaene, normalien, a intégré l’Inserm en 1989 comme chargé de recherche. Directeur de recherche Inserm de 1997 à 2005, il est aujourd’hui titulaire de la chaire de psychologie cognitive expérimentale au Collège de France. Stanislas Dehaene est par ailleurs, depuis 2002, directeur de l’unité de Neuroimagerie Cognitive (Inserm-Cea) au Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot à Orsay. Membre de l’Académie des sciences depuis 2005 il est également conseiller éditorial de plusieurs revues et notamment de la revue PLOS Biology et de la revue Neuroimage, membre du Comité de pilotage du programme Neurosciences de l’ANR et du Conseil de l’International Association For The Study Of Attention And Performance.

Paul Smolensky

My research focuses on integrating symbolic and neural network computation for modeling reasoning and, especially, grammar in the human mind/brain. The work is formal and computational, with emerging applications to neuroscience and applied natural language processing. My research has primarily addressed issues of representation and processing rather than learning. Principal contributions are to linguistic theory, the theory of vectorial neural network computation, and the philosophical foundations of cognitive science.