Stephen Briggs is heading the Department of “Earth Observation” (EO) Science, Applications & Future Technologies of ESA at ESRIN (Frascati), where he is responsible for the exploitation of ESA EO missions (for science, public sector, including GMES, and commercial applications), future technologies programme, studies relating to future missions, interface between ESA’s EO missions with user communities (including consultation, managing requirements and providing scientific advice to the Agency), and ensuring Scientific support and providing application expertise in the development and exploitation phase of all missions and programmes.

Barbara J. Ryan is Secretariat Director of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) an international, intergovernmental organization dedicated to integrating Earth observations to enable government, private sector and science leaders to make better informed decisions across nine Societal Benefit Areas including agriculture, biodiversity, climate, ecosystems, energy, disasters, health, water and weather. Prior to GEO, she served as Director of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Space Programme and Associate Director for Geography at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

Tomas Molina is an associate professor at the University of Barcelona. He has a degree in Physical Sciences and Journalism. He is currently the Head of Catalonia Television Meteorology and Vice-Chairman of the International Association of Broadcast Meteorology, IABM, with observer status in the World Meteorological Organization United Nations System.

Jörg Hahn is the System Engineering Manager for the European satellite navigation system Galileo (European Space Agency). He is also investigating future needs of the society in location based service features.He is supporting the EC on technical and managerial matters. Jörg is a member of the Scientific Committee of the European Frequency and Time Forum (EFTF ) and of the GPS World Advisory Board. Together with colleagues he gives Galileo Tutorials occasionally, e.g. for NavTech GPS.

Daniele Quercia is a social media researcher at Yahoo Labs in Barcelona. He is interested in the relationship between online and offline worlds and his work has been focusing in the areas of data mining, computational social science, and urban informatics. He was Horizon senior researcher at The Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge and, before that, Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During his PhD at UC London, he was a Microsoft Research PhD Scholar and his thesis was nominated for BCS Best British PhD dissertation in Computer Science.

Carlos Fortuna es un joven “artesano” en un constante estado de aprendizaje. Está especializado en ayudar a personas proporcionándoles herramientas que reflejan sus valores y les motivan a conseguir sus objetivos de una forma relevante a través del ilusionismo.

Denis Delestrac made his debut in non-fiction filmmaking in 2001 and signed a number of hits including IMAX blockbuster “Mystery of the Nile” and “Pax Americana and the Weaponization of Space”, his first feature documentary. His latest feature documentary, “Sand Wars” is an epic eco-thriller that takes the audience around the globe to unveil a new gold rush and a disturbing fact: we are running out of sand!

Tomas Diez is a Venezuela born Urbanist specialized in digital fabrication and its implications on the future cities models. He is permanent faculty at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), and one of the initiators of the Fab Lab Barcelona project, which he currently directs. Co-founder of the Smart Citizen project and StudioP52 both in Barcelona. Works as a close collaborator with the Fab Foundation and the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms in the development of the Fab Lab Network worldwide. He is currently the main consultant for the Barcelona city council for the development of the “Ateneus de Fabricació (Fab Labs)” in the city.

Luis Razo is a business and social entrepreneur raised in Orange County, California. He studied psychometrics at Harvard University and for the past 25 years has been thinking and working on the intersection between business, philosophy and social science. He is the Executive Director of a leading Euopean knowledge management consulting firm and founder of the International Voluntary Tax Fund, a non-profit organization whose mission is to stimulate dialogue among business, political and academic leaders about the next phase in the evolution of democracy.

Didac Ferrer-Balas (Barcelona, 1974) se graduó como ingeniero industrial y de materiales en 1997. Obtuvo un doctorado en ciencias de los materiales en el año 2001 de la Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña (UPC). Desde el año 2000 ha estado trabajando en la sostenibilidad de la UPC, ocupando diferentes puestos. En 2011, co-fundó la Cooperativa Tarpuna Iniciativas Sostenibles sin ánimo de lucro. Allí, él ha estado involucrado en el proyecto Hort Social (concedido por La Caixa-IESE en 2012) e inventó el Infinitloop (otorgado por la Generalitat de Catalunya para la Eco Design) en 2013.

Ivan Caballero es un emprendedor social de Barcelona. En los últimos 10 años, Ivan ha puesto en marcha diferentes empresas de innovación tecnológica. Ivan tiene un título en Administración de Empresas, un postgrado en Negocios Internacionales y dos masters en marketing internacional en algunas de las mejores escuelas de negocios europeas.

Adrian David Cheok is founder and director of the Mixed Reality Lab, Singapore. He has been working on research covering mixed reality, human-computer interfaces, wearable computers and ubiquitous computing, fuzzy systems, embedded systems, power electronics.

Carles Ribot worked over 10 years in different marketing and advertising agencies, he is now founder and director of Mister Fogg.

Nuria Oliver has a Ph.D. with Honors in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Perception from the Media Lab at the MIT. At her current position – Scientific Director at Telefónica R&D, Barcelona – she is researching in the field of multimedia data analysis, mobile and ubiquitous computing, big-data analysis with a human-centric perspective and recommender systems.

Professor of Interaction Design and director of UCLIC at UCL. Her research interests are in the areas of ubiquitous computing, interaction design and human-computer interaction.

Marcela (Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a researcher in Robotics, who gives lectures about Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

Marta Soriano created ECOART in 1996 and in year 2000 she founded the association ECOART-DIDACTIC with the purpose of make the society more aware of environmental problems, through art, education and architecture.

Julian Savulescu is an australian philosopher and bioethicist. He is Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Sir Louis Matheson Distinguished Visiting Professor at Monash University, and Head of the Melbourne–Oxford Stem Cell Collaboration, which is devoted to examining the ethical implications ofcloning and embryonic stem cell research.

Paul Verschure is professor with the Catalan Institute of Advanced Studies (ICREA) and director of the Center of Autonomous Systems and Neurorobotics and the laboratory of Synthetic Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, Spain.

Patrick Haggard is professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. He has received various awards and honours for his work, including recent Research Fellowships from the Royal Society, Leverhulme Trust and Economic and Social Science Research Council. His research interests include the neural control of human action, the conscious experience of voluntary action, and the neural and psychological aspects of body representation.

Thomas Metzinger is a German philosopher. As of 2000 he holds the position of director of the theoretical philosophy group at the department of philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and is an Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and on the advisory board of the Giordano Bruno Foundation.

Luis Castellanos (PhD in Philosophy) investigates and discovers language and development of a theory about language beginning with neuroscience and ending with ethics.
Investigates the positive linguistic expressions and their impact in the evolution of language. Expert in the efficiency of creative processes, studies the emotional dimension of words and their influence in decision making. Works in the area of predictive analysis of the human behavior.

Consciousness emerged as a solution to the massive parallel processing required in response to this pervasive intentionality. It provided the serialization and virtualization of experience required to manage massive parallel processing. This leaves one question: How would a robot help us to address the hard problem of conscious experience? In short, a robot based approach allows us to exactly control and analyze all experiences of the machine as in its developmental and learning trajectory it masters its environment. This implies that in principle all future states of the machine can be decoded in terms of the registration of its past: the first person subjective perspective rendered into a third person view. In addition, like us, robots of the future will have to be conscious in order to be able to exist in a world that is pervaded by intentionality.

Bio: Dr. Paul F.M.J. Verschure (1962) is a research professor with the Catalan Institute of Advanced Studies (ICREA) and director of the Center of Autonomous Systems and Neurorobotics and the laboratory of Synthetic Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, Spain. He received both his Ma. and PhD in psychology and pursued his research at different leading institutes: the Neurosciences Institute and The Salk Institute, both in San Diego, the University of Amsterdam, University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-ETH, where he was a founding member of the Institute of Neuroinformatics. Paul´s scientific aim is to find a unified theory of mind, brain and body through the use of synthetic methods and to apply this theory to the development of novel technologies and quality of life enhancing applications. This theory is called Distributed Adaptive Control that has been generalized to a range of invertebrate and vertebrate neuronal systems and tested on a range of robotic systems. The DAC theory has given rise to a novel neuroprosthetic device and has laid the foundation for a unique and highly effective virtual reality based approach towards neurorehabilitation called the Rehabilitation Gaming System.

The need of linking different levels is easy to understand with the case of two species of little mouse-like rodents called voles with different sexual behavior. While the males of one species are monogamous and behave similar to an “ideal husband” (prairie vole), their closely related cousins (montane voles) are promiscuous and behave more like a “Casanova”, skipping out on his mate as soon as the females are pregnant. What is remarkable is that this striking difference in behaviour has been traced to a single gene encoding a single neurotransmitter receptor. We have seen that if we put the gene from the praire vole into the montane vole, we can transform the behaviour of the montane vole from “Casanova” like to the “ideal husband” like.

Experiments like this help us to understand complex behaviors on the level of the underlying molecules; however, it is crucial not just to identify the underlying molecules: we need to fully understand the neural code. Michael Hausser explains the first steps and organisms that have been used so far for cracking it. When achieved, we will be able to treat disease, manipulate movements or restore vision, but also create sensations, recall memories or sway decisions.

Bio: Dr. Michael Häusser is working in the field of understanding synaptic integration and dendritic function. He has made important advances in revealing how the integrative properties of single neurons, and in particular of their dendrites, contribute to regulating information flow and memory storage in neural networks; and his group has also been instrumental in developing new approaches for recording from single neurons and small networks of neurons in vitro and in vivo using a combination of optical and electrophysiological approaches.

How can we predict behaviors studying previous behaviors? Nowadays you can receive your genome by email and many companies claim they can predict your future. It has been proved that whole genome sequencing so far has failed to predict the risk of most common disease. Currently it is useless from a medical point of view and it is a real problem form a genetic perspective: a direct correlation is not possible. Technological novelty is always a threat to personal liberties, so democracy and innovation must go hand by hand.

Neuroscience is now changing at a mind blowing pace. This is happening because sophisticated new devices (like smart phones) can follow individuals in real time and generate an amazing amount of data. With this wealth of data we will soon be able to model, analyze and compare behaviors as if they were simple phenotypes like weigh or height. This is as much data, even more, as genomics is currently generating, but if managed properly, this predictive power could be turned into the most powerful and less invasive diagnostic tool mankind has ever had in its reach.

More information about the presentation here.

Bio: Cedric Notredame is a molecular biologist by training. He holds a PhD in Bioinformatics from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (Heidelberg and Cambridge). Since 2007 he has been on leave form CNRS and is currently working as a senior group leader at the Center for Genomics Regulation in Barcelona. Cedric specializes in the development of string comparison algorithms and is best known for the T-Coffee package, a widely used software for the multiple comparison of genomic sequences. Cedric is also very committed in making science accessible to all and his best-selling title “Bioinformatics for Dummies” has sold more than 34.000 copies world-wide.

We should bear in mind that vision has nothing to do with images, but with processing information. We actually have a problem because we want to understand reality, but we never have access to it. The brain constructs reality in a creative process in which the whole is always more than the sum of its parts. Also, it is very “expensive” from a metabolic point of view.

Theoretically, we would need 129,6 kg of sugar/day to feed our 1012 neurons! That is how expensive the neuro tissue actually is, but obviously we do not need so much sugar per day. Our brain is extremely well designed to work in a very economical fashion to safe energy and time. How can it do that? Basically following three strategies: losing accuracy; enhancing adaptation (caring only about things that change); and analyzing situations relatively, not in absolute terms.
Reality is not something we perceive. Reality exists in our head and it is like a movie, like a stream of concepts. The role of perception is to position ourselves at a particular moment and place in the movie. Only those things that already exist in our head can be seen.

Bio: Luis M. Martinez heads the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience at the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante, which is part of the Spanish National Research Council. His long-term scientific goals are to understand how the brain constructs the visual perception of the world, why in doing so different brains use such different strategies and what is the biological meaning of art that justifies its appearance at all times, places and cultures.

What goes on in a poets mind when writing a poem? The human brain is very complex and it works with a lot of different information at the same time, in parallel; while machines are linear. They can only work step by step but very fast, and they can store a massive amount of information. Could we build a machine that worked like a poet’s brain? Some promising attempts have already been developed, like the WASP Poetry Generation System, a rule-based system that generates automatically verses in Spanish.

If we understood how brains work when using language, we could improve communication in our world, both by having machines help people to communicate, and, more recently, by helping people and machines to communicate with one another.

Bio: Pablo Gervas has been working as a researcher in artificial intelligence for the past 22 years, in the fields of natural language processing, computational creativity and computational narratology. His first degree was in Physics and he got a PhD in Computing from Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London. Over all these years his main interest has been to understand how people use language to communicate and store information, and to find ways of applying parts of that understanding to the improvement of communication in our world, both by having machines help people to communicate, and, more recently, by helping people and machines to communicate with one another. He currently works as associate professor at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where he leads a research group on Natural Interaction based on Language. In the area of creative text generation, he has worked on automatically generating metaphors, formal poetry, fairy tales and short stories.

By analyzing behavior, neuronal firing and gene networks, researchers aim to find the neural and genetic factors that underlie individual differences in stress reactivity. Various studies with laboratory animals have shown how traumatic situations influence different individuals and the regions of the brain and genes involved with diverse reactions. The amygdala region of the brain has been proved to be a very important zone related to traumatic experiences.

Currently we know the brain has an enormous plasticity capacity and the regions related to traumatic disorders, so, we could treat patients with traumatic experiences by modifying specific brain circuits. Our first challenge is to understand how these brain circuits are formed and then, we will be able to modify them.

Bio: Andrew Holmes is Chief at the Laboratory of Behavioral and Genomic Neuroscience, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health where he researches the neural and genetic factors that underlie individual differences in stress reactivity and risk of abusing alcohol. His work employs multiple techniques, incorporating analysis of behavior, neuronal firing and gene networks, to provide convergent lines of evidence. He has authored 150 scientific articles (H index=40) and serves as Editor for 6 journals.

La música es cocreación continua. En la música existen tres formas de co-creación:
1. Con partituras: está todo muy organizado. Partitura para el piano, para el bajo, para la batería y para el saxo. La ventaja es el control, me aseguro que tocan algo que yo he escrito tal y como yo quiero. Sin estar juntos se puede preparar, ensayar, pero necesito gente que sepa leer las partituras. La desventaja es que es más limitado, hay muchas instrucciones y deja poco espacio para la improvisación y la creación.
2. Cifrado: no hay notas, hay unos cifrados que orientan, pero da mucho espacio para que los músicos pongan de su parte. Como el que escribe no sabe tocar el resto de instrumentos, aquí cada instrumentista pone lo mejor de él según sus conocimientos y habilidades. Dentro de un esquema inicial se establece un marco más amplio para la cocreación.
3. El tono: el tono es Fa, por ejemplo. Se reduce la información que doy a los músicos. Hemos pasado de tener cuatro partituras, a tener un cifrado y a decir una sola palabra: Fa. Da mucha más libertad. Es totalmente improvisado. Es difícil valorarlo pero pasan muchas más cosas. Los músicos no deben tener miedo, deben dejarse ir, crear espontáneamente. Es muy importante que se escuchen mucho entre ellos.