Organizing Committee
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Jose L Contreras-Vidal (Chair) |
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Andrew Davis Planning Dean, College of the Arts Andrew Davis is Interim Dean of the College of the Arts and Director of the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston. He previously served eight years as Director of Graduate Studies in the Moores School and one year as Associate Dean of the Honors College. He was appointed to the University of Houston faculty in 2003. A music theorist by training, he has written and lectured widely on instrumental music of the Romantic period, and on late-19th and early-20th-century opera. His first book, Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini¹s Late Style, was published in 2010; his second book, Sonata Fragments: Romantic Narrative in Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms, will be published in 2016. He is a strong advocate for an arts and a liberal-arts education, international educational opportunities for students, and strengthening the engagement between the University, its neighborhood, and its city. |
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J.D. Talasek Director of Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) |
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Juliet L. King Juliet L. King, MA, ATR-BC, LPC is assistant professor and director of the graduate art therapy program at Herron School of Art and Design and adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at the IU School of Medicine. Ms. King has spent over 15 years as a clinician, administrator and professor of art therapy education. Professor King’s leadership has spearheaded the development of over 30 clinical internship programs in the city of Indianapolis and she has a vested interest in integrative care for veterans and their families. Her current research includes exploring the integration of creativity, art therapy and neuroscience, with a focus on neuroanatomical correlates of the unconscious. Recently she edited and published a textbook: Art Therapy, Trauma and Neuroscience: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives. |
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Jose M. Azorin Director of the Brain-Machine Interface Systems Lab and Associate Professor of the Systems Engineering and Automation Department at Miguel Hernández University of Elche (Spain); Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Systems Council José M. Azorín is the Director of the Brain-Machine Interface Systems Lab and Associate Professor of the Systems Engineering and Automation Department at Miguel Hernández University of Elche (Spain). He holds a M.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Alicante (1997, Spain) and a Ph.D. in Robotics (Award for the Best Thesis of the Department) by the UMH (2003, Spain). He has been a visiting researcher in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London (United Kingdom) and at INRIA (National Research Center of Computer Science and Automation) - Sophia Antipolis (France). His current research interests are Brain-Machine Interfaces, Neuro-robotics and Rehabilitation Robotics. Over the last years, his research has been funded by prestigious grants from the European Union and other Spanish government agencies. He has been the PI of more than 10 research projects, and his research has resulted in more than 150 technical papers and 3 patents. Currently, he is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Systems Council. |
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Dario Robleto Dario Robleto is a conceptual artist based in Houston, Texas. He has had numerous solo exhibitions since 1997, most recently at the Menil Collection, Houston, TX (2014) and the Baltimore Museum of Art (2014). Robleto has been a visiting artist and lecturer at many universities and institutions including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, and the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD. In 2013 he served as the California College of the Arts Viola Frey Distinguished Visiting Professor, Oakland, CA. He has been a research fellow and resident at institutions such as Rice University (2013-14) and the Smithsonian Museum of American History (2011). In 2015 he joined a distinguished team of scientists as the artistic consultant to the “Breakthrough Initiatives”—which, when completed, will be the most comprehensive search ever attempted at finding scientific evidence of life in the Universe. He is currently serving as an Artist-in-Residence in Neuroaesthetics at the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering and at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, CA. He was recently appointed as the 2016 Texas State Artist Laureate. Robleto employs a variety of media in his artworks, creating intricately handcrafted objects that reflect his passionate exploration of music, popular culture, science, war and American history. Dario is currently an Artist-in-Residence in Neuroaesthetics at the Cullen College of Engineering at the University of Houston. |
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Rejean Plamondon Dr. Plamondon is Full Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Polytechnique Montréal, Canada. His research focuses on Pattern recognition, Signature verification and handwriting recognition, Human movement modeling, Neuroscience, and Theoretical Physics. |
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Angelo Marcelli Angelo Marcelli is Professor of the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione ed Elettrica e Matematica applicata, Universita' degli Studi di Salerno (Italy), where he is the Dean of the School of Engineering. Dr. Marcelli's research focuses on neurocomputational models of motor learning and handwriting analysis in neuromuscular diseases. |
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Claudio De Stefano Dr. De Stefano is at the University of Cassino and Southern Latium. His research interests include human motor behavior, evolutionary computing and machine learning for writer identification. |