Members

The following researchers are involved in the PAICS group:

Faculty and Teaching

	Maggie Boden (Research Professor of Cognitive Science) Office: Pevensey III 5C3 Webpage: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/profile476 Research: Computational accounts of mind – especially creativity, purpose, freedom, personality, and psychopathology. History of cognitive science. Her next book, CREATIVITY AND ART: THREE ROADS TO SURPRISE is due out in 2010 from Oxford University Press.
	Ron Chrisley (Reader in Philosophy, director of COGS) Office: Pevensey III 5C15 Webpage: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/profile476 Research: Artificial mentality, especially artificial intelligence, artificial emotion and artificial consciousness (“machine consciousness”). Non-conceptual representation and experience (e.g., animal and infant cognition). Philosophy of computation. Philosophy of mind.
	Rob Clowes (Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy of Cognitive Science) Office: Pevensey III 5C8 Webpage: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/profile23608 Research: The nature of subjectivity, the role of language in cognition and the self. I am also working on the continuities and discontinuities between what is now called “embodied cognitive science” and other / more traditional approaches to mind, especially how these frameworks understand the the social embedding of the human mind. I am working intensely at the moment on artificial consciousness. Broadly I work on how much cognitive science can tell us about what it is to be human. Recently I have become especially interested in philosophical psychiatry and how this may deepen our understanding of subjectivity.
	Steve Torrance (Professor, visiting research fellow) Office: Webpage: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/profile17306 Research: Enactive approaches to mind; artificial consciousness; artificial ethics; ethical implications of scientific and computational investigations of consciousness; the thought of Spinoza.
	Blay Whitby (Lecturer in Computer Science and AI) Office: Chichester III 3R343 Webpage: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/profile9122 Research: The social and ethical implications of computing and AI form the core of my research interests. I’m keen to encourage people in computing and AI to take a more professional and responsible attitude to their work and/or research. An important part of this involves developing applications for new technologies such as multimedia and virtual reality which are socially beneficial. I’m also interested in both the technical and philosophical questions raised by applications of AI in the area of morality.

Research students

	Tom Beament (DPhil student) Office: Pevensey III 5C12
	Mike Beaton (DPhil student) Office: Pevensey III 5C16 Webpage: http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/mjsb20 Research: Philosophy of consciousness, conceptual and non-conceptual content, first and third person access to mental events, plus experimental work in visual psychophysics.

Simon Bowes (DPhil student, PAICS lab manager) Office: Pevensey III 5C12 Research: cognitive kinds, mental causation, irreductionism and emergentism. The problem of free will.

Tom Froese (DPhil student) Office: CCNR Webpage: http://froese.wordpress.com Research: My general interests are related to various issues concerning the phenomena of life and mind. I think the main challenge for future research in this area is to harmonize our biological understanding of the organism as an autonomous system, as well as our phenomenological insights into the subjectivty of our lived body, into one coherent framework of knowing and living.

Duncan Kuhns (DPhil student) Office: Pevensey III 5C12 Research: organism and mind extended in space and time.

	Paul Loader (DPhil student, E-I seminar organizer) Office: Pevensey III 5C12 Webpage: http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/pl27 Research: Marxian themes in cognitive science. Wittgensteinian critiques of cognitive science. The extended mind. Philosophy of parapsychology.
	Roberto Martino (DPhil student)
	Joel Parthemore (DPhil student) Office: Pevensey III 5C16 Webpage: http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/jep25/ Research: I am interested in conceptual knowledge both as structured representation and as non-representational ability (competence), the limitations of conceptual knowledge, and the relationship of conceptual mental content to non-conceptual content. My particular area of concern is enactive theories of concepts that stress the continuity of the agent with the agent’s environment. I am currently a visiting research student at the University of Lund, Sweden, at the invitation of Peter Gärdenfors, whose conceptual spaces theory of concepts is a major inspiration to my thesis. I am intending to submit in Summer 2010.

Stan Rosenthal (DPhil student) Office: Research:The use of scaffolding, augmentation, and artefactually extended embodiment in visual art. How the visual artist engages and develops creativity, and learns the sensorimotor skills, language and para-language necessary for the process of art. How the ageing artist might utilize, minimize or overcome the effects of disabilities and pathologies.

Alexander Zographakis (DPhil student) Office: Pevensey III 5C16 Research: My research interests lie at the intersection of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, and Art. I am currently working on perception, particularly on enactive theories (James Gibson, Alva Noe) and their implications on aesthetic theories (analytic and continental).

Visitors and Affiliates

	Igor Aleksander (professor; visiting research fellow) Office: 5C11 Webpage: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/profile149909 Research: Machine consciousness.
	Marzieh Asgari-Targhi (affiliate member) Webpage: http://www.ncess.ac.uk/about/people/Marzieh/ Research: Causal reasoning in Artificial Intelligence, the practical applications of philosophical theories of causality in education, medicine and social sciences. Cognitive development of causal reasoning in infants and young children.
	Chris Davia (affiliate member) Webpage: http://www.psy.cmu.edu:16080/~davia/mbc Research: catalysis; consciousness as a process that is self-similar across scale.
	Hanne De Jaegher (affiliate member) Office: Pevensey III 5A40 Webpage: http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/hdj20 Research: rhythm as the basis of embodied intersubjectivity.
	Anna Dumitriu (Artist in Residence CCNR, visiting research fellow) Webpage:http://web.mac.com/annadumitriu/SOA/Blog/Blog.html Research: Machine consciousness, ethics, transdisciplinary art practice.
	Marek McGann (affiliate member) Webpage: http://www.marekmcgann.com Research: conceptions (particularly enactive and dynamic conceptions) of purpose and goal-directedness; enactive approaches to meaning and consciousness.
	Tony Morse (affiliate member) Office: University of Plymouth Webpage: http://www2.his.se/icea/anthony/ Research: cognitive modelling; developmental robotics; statistical learning; and cortical microciruits.
	Pasha Parpia (DPhil student, visiting research fellow) Office: Pevensey III 5C20 Webpage: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/profile2045 Research: My research mainly informs the philosophy of mind. I derive my results significantly from the study of neuronal plasticity. The realms that inform my study are neurophysiology, anatomy, foetal, infant and child development, sensory deprivation studies, computer modelling of brain function and theories of attention and memory. I also retain an interest in anthropology and biological time.
	Aaron Sloman (professor; visiting senior research fellow) Office: 5C11 Webpage: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ Research: philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophical implications of Artificial Intelligence, architectures for human minds and other minds, the architecture of a visual system, analysis of attention, motivation, emotions and related affective states; the uses of computers in education, the design of friendly programming environments and languages, design of a powerful toolkit to support exploration of agent architectures.
	Mog Stapleton (affiliate member) Webpage: http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/postgraduate/students/phd/mogstapleton.html Research: My main research interests are embodied cognition, enactivism, the neuroscience of emotion and mood, the phenomenology of emotion and mood, and Developmental Systems Theory. My PhD dissertation centres around trying to understand the relation between emotion and cognition, and exploring what will give us a satisfactory scientific and philosophical explanation of these. I intend to submit sometime in the academic year 2010/2011.