Current and Upcoming Visitors

Pedro Lopes is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Pedro focuses on integrating interfaces with the human body—exploring the interface paradigm that supersedes wearables. These include: muscle stimulation wearables that allow users to manipulate tools they have never seen before or that accelerate reaction time, or a device that leverages the smell to create an illusion of temperature. All these examples leverage computers to augment the user’s body, not just cognitively, but also physically (e.g., our wearable that accelerates one’s reaction time made it to the Guinness Book of World Records). Pedro’s work has received several academic awards, such as seven CHI/UIST Best Papers, the Sloan Fellowship and the NSF CAREER award, and captured the interest of the public (e.g., New York Times, exhibited at Ars Electronica, etc.; more: https://lab.plopes.org).

Hirokazu Shirado is an Assistant Professor of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. His research focuses on the role of social interactions and technology in the emergence of social order and in the collective confrontation of social dilemmas. He is particularly interested in studying hybrid systems of humans and machines, particularly how artificial intelligence can help people address the challenges of collective action. He has received the NSF CAREER Award and the ASA Outstanding Paper Award for his work.

Han Zhao is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is also an Amazon Visiting Academic at Amazon Stores Foundational AI. He earned his Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University. His research interest is centered around trustworthy machine learning, with a focus on algorithmic fairness, robust generalization under distribution shifts and multi-task learning. His long-term goal is to build trustworthy ML systems that are efficient, robust, fair, private, and interpretable. Personal website, Google scholar

Florian Yger is an associate professor at Université Paris-Dauphine since 2015, teaching Data Analysis and Machine Learning in the department MIDO. Within the LAMSADE, he is part of the team MILES which focuses on trustworthy Machine Learning and Explainable AI. From 2014 to 2015, he was a JSPS postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Sugiyama at Tokyo University. He received his PhD in Computer science from LITIS, Université de Rouen under the supervision of Alain Rakotomamonjy in 2013. He contributes to the problem of representation learning with a particular interest in the representation of structured data (graphs, covariance matrices,…) and the development of learning algorithm for non-Euclidean spaces. This work has many applications ranging from signal processing (EEG signals and Brain Computer Interface) and to image processing (Paintings for art style recognition). More recently, within MILES teams, he addresses the questions of trust, explainability and interpretability in machine learning models with a focus counterfactual reasoning on data. He recently started studying the interplay between computational social choice and machine learning in the context of voter’s opinion aggregation. He is a visiting researcher at RIKEN AIP, Japan since 2017, is a member of the Prairie (PaRis Artificial Intelligence Research InstitutE) where he holds a junior chair, and an Affiliate of the Theoretical Sciences Visiting Program (TSVP) at OIST.

Louise Hespel is an associate professor in the PBS laboratory (Polymers, Biopolymers, Surfaces Laboratory) at University of Rouen since 2017, more specifically teaching general chemistry, polymer chemistry and modification post-polymerization in the chemistry department. She is part of the team MPBM (Materials polymers Barrier and Membranes) which focuses on the elaboration of various polymeric membranes and the study of the diffusion mechanisms of molecules through membranes.
She received her PhD in macromolecular chemistry from INSA (National Institute of Applied Sciences) of Rouen, under the supervision of Pr. Laurence Lecamp in 2013. During her PhD, she synthesized new amphiphilic stimuli-sensitive copolymers from linseed oil and studied the copolymers capacity to form micelles in aqueous media at different conditions of pH and temperature. This work has many applications in drug delivery.
From 2014 to 2015, she was a JSPS postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Kataoka in University of Tokyo where she developed new micelles with pH-detachable PEG-corona. In 2016, she joined ENS (Paris, Ulm) to work with Dr. Emmanuelle Marie and Dr. Christophe Tribet to synthesize a polymer adlayer able to trigger the adhesion and the deadhesion of cells. In PBS laboratory, her research focuses on the modification of polymeric membranes in order to bring specific properties like stimuli-sensitive properties. 

Dr. Srikanth Ramaswamy, is a Marie Curie Fellow, a Lister Prize Fellow and an Assistant Professor in computational neuroscience at Newcastle University. He is also a Fulbright Scholar at MIT and a Theoretical Sciences Visiting Scholar at OIST. He directs the Neural Circuits Laboratory at Newcastle University. His research focuses on the role of neuromodulators in shaping cognition in biological neural networks and building biologically-informed neural network models. He is a founding scientist of the Blue Brain Project at Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne (EPFL). He earned his PhD at the EPFL in computational neuroscience, where he developed data-driven modelling frameworks for biologically detailed digital models of neural networks. As a scientist of colour, Dr. Ramaswamy is passionately committed to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion and is a founding member of the ALBA network, where he leads efforts to advance DEI in neuroscience, including launching the ALBA diversity podcast series in late 2020, highlighting the stories of emerging neuroscientists from underrepresented backgrounds.

Keiko Aoki is an independent researcher based in Tokyo. Her main research field is condensed matter physics, and her main tool for research is molecular/particle dynamics simulation.
Since anisotropically fluctuating systems, such as liquid crystals and soft matter could not be properly treated by conventional molecular dynamics (MD) methods, we have developed a set of simulation methods which are called stress control methods. Stress control MD methods guarantee the system to be under hydrostatic pressure (or other condition) even in non-equilibrium processes. Time evolution under constant surface tension can be investigated by one of the stress control methods as well. This is in contrast to conventional MD methods, where only ensemble average can be controlled. The method is effective to investigate self-organization of soft matter, as well as glassy metastable states. ORCID ID

[Tutorial] Stress control molecular dynamics simulation methods designed for simulating soft matter by Keiko Aoki

Nick Dorey received his PhD from Edinburgh University in 1991 and then held postdoctoral and junior faculty positions at Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of Washington and Swansea University. He has been a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge since 2007.  He is currently visiting OIST as a TSVP Visiting Scholar.

TSVP Talk: "What Can Quantum Field Theory Teach Us About Black Holes (And Vice Versa)?" by Nick Dorey

Anders Björn is a Professor of Mathematics at Linköping University, Sweden, where he also received his PhD in 1995. He was a postdoc at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has later spent longer research periods at Charles University in Prague, University of Cincinnati and the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Stockholm. His research is in analysis on metric spaces, mainly in collaboration with Jana Björn. In particular, he is interested in p-harmonic functions, partial differential equations and various minimization problems. He studies various solving methods and properties of the solutions, such as their interior and boundary regularity and growth estimates. This is research in pure mathematics and its aim is to provide rigorous fundamentals for and a better understanding of some problems, which could come from natural sciences and other fields. Analysis on metric spaces makes it possible to study such questions simultaneously in many different settings, for example on very rough sets and for highly nonhomogeneous media. It also brings new insight into which properties and assumptions are really essential for the theory and which are the main obstructions. A popular-scientific description of Anders's research is at this website.

Jana Björn is a Professor of Mathematics at Linköping University, Sweden, where she also received her PhD in 1996. She was a postdoc at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and then at Lund University. She has also spent longer research periods at Charles University in Prague, University of Cincinnati and the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Stockholm. Her research is in analysis on metric spaces, mainly in collaboration with Anders Björn. In particular, she is interested in p-harmonic functions, partial differential equations and various minimization problems. She studies various solving methods and properties of the solutions, such as their interior and boundary regularity and growth estimates. This is research in pure mathematics and its aim is to provide rigorous fundamentals for and a better understanding of some problems, which could come from natural sciences and other fields. Analysis on metric spaces makes it possible to study such questions simultaneously in many different settings, for example on very rough sets and for highly nonhomogeneous media. It also brings new insight into which properties and assumptions are really essential for the theory and which are the main obstructions. A popular-scientific description of Jana's research is at this website.

Daniel Chourrout has established the Sars International Centre for Marine Molecular Biology in 1997 and been its director until 2020. This institute is a Partner of EMBL, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory since 2023. His own research is focused on the evolution of chordate development, using tunicates as model systems. Before moving to Norway, Daniel Chourrout was heading the Laboratory of Fish Genetics at INRA (French Institute of Research for Agriculture). His training is in Genetics from the University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris.

EVSP Talk: "Life Is Like a Box of Chocolates: our experience with an alternative model organism" by Daniel Chourrout