Organizers

Prof. Dr. Merle Fairhurst (TU Dresden)

Merle is a cognitive neuroscientist with strong interdisciplinary ties that facilitate crosstalk with philosophers. She studies the interaction between sensory signals that allow us to make sense of the world around us and to successfully interact with others.

Her projects range from trying to understand what makes touch special to identifying factors that make interacting in a group different to interacting in pairs. As a classical singer, she is passionate about the special cases of sensory perception in music and art.

And, as a mother of five, she strongly believes in promoting women in academia.

Prof. Matthew McGinity (TU Dresden)

Matthew McGinity is a computer scientist working in the field of immersive media. Prior to joining the University of Würzburg, he worked at the ZKM, the European Space Agency and the iCinema Centre of Interactive Cinema Research at UNSW, Sydney. Since 2008 he has been a member of the Marseille-based artist collective LFKs, collaborating on a number of large-scale immersive artworks across the fields of theatre, cinema and virtual reality, music and live performance. His current research interests concern the perception of images, the perceptual foundations of immersive media and the aesthetics of immersion. In particular, he is interested in virtual reality as a means for experimental phenomenology, with which one might examine not just the nature of our everyday being in the world, but also ‘alien’ modes of being in the world.

Dr. Gijs Huisman (TU Delft)

Gijs Huisman is Assistant Professor of Embodied Interaction at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology. His main research interest is in how our sense of touch plays a role in technology-mediated social interactions. His research involves studying social and affective qualities of haptic technologies, multi-sensory interactions, and technology mediated social communication from a 4E cognition perspective.

Dr. Camille Sallaberry (TU Dresden)

Camille is a social roboticist with a strong interest in the complexification of (social) interaction happening during human-robot and human-mediated communication. His research focuses on asymmetric access to social information in mediated communication, specifically applied to avatar robots as mediators and to the sense of touch. Camille also participated in a transdisciplinary project to design and develop innovative, co-created robotic solutions for which he promoted human-robot teaming and semi-autonomous capabilities as well as a further development of people’s robotics knowledge.

Yasemin Abra (TU Dresden)

Yasemin has a BSc in biology and an MSc in neuro-cognitive psychology from LMU Munich. Her acting experience has allowed her to implement practices in theatre to her research, where she used the Mirror Game exercise to investigate coordination dynamics as a function of expertise and interpersonal similarity. Encouraged by the creative collaboration of disciplines, she aims to position her research at the intersection of arts and science: art pursued with the rigor and discipline of a scientist, and science practiced with the openness to inspiration and the explorative spirit of an artist.