Fellow-in-Residence 2020-2021

Presentation

Salim El Rouayheb is an associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at Rutgers University. From 2013 to 2017, he was an assistant professor at the ECE Department at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago. He was a research scholar at the Electrical Engineering Department at Princeton University (2012-2013) and a postdoc at the EECS department at the University of California, Berkeley (2010-2011). He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station, in 2009. In 2019, he was the Rutgers University Walter Tyson Junior Faculty Chair. He received the Google Faculty Award in 2018 and the NSF CAREER award in 2016. His research interests lie in the area of information theoretic security and privacy of data in networks and distributed systems.

Research Project

Information-Theoretic Security for Distributed Learning Algorithms in Internet of Things.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as a new paradigm connecting an exponentially increasing number of devices, with vast applications such as healthcare, smart cities and self-driving vehicles . IoT applications typically require data processing through computationally intensive distributed learning algorithms with stringent reliability and  security constraints. In many scenarios, these algorithms cannot be run locally on the computationally-limited IoT-devices and are  outsourced to the cloud (or fog). This leaves the IoT   vulnerable for security attacks  that can jeopardize the data  and/or disconnect it from the cloud, rendering it ineffective and  causing tremendous damage.

This project aims to study Secure Coded Computations as a novel solution to mitigate the computational bottleneck by allowing IoT devices to help each other in their computations, with possible help from the cloud if available. Our key tool is the theory of error-correcting codes that are designed for secure computations and that will improve the performance of distributed algorithms through "smart" data redundancy schemes. The work will focus two major challenges specific to  IoT applications and edge computing: (i) moving computations (or part of it) to be done locally on the IoT-devices may render the network even more vulnerable to security attacks given the low capability (computation, memory, etc.) of these devices; and (ii) IoT networks are highly heterogeneous and dynamic in nature. The research agenda will focus on  information theoretic security to develop low complexity algorithms that can be implemented on the IoT devices. In addition, the focus will be on adaptive schemes that can respond to the changing environment and resources in IoT applications.

Presentation 

photoPhilippe Le Corre is a Research Associate at the Harvard Kennedy School, affiliated with both the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. In addition, he is an Associate in Research with the John K. Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University and a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. He was previously a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution and also served as an Adviser to the French Minister of Defense and as a Senior Policy Analyst on Northeast Asia in the French Ministry of Defense. He has taught at Sciences Po Paris, Inalco and Johns-Hopkins University. His research focuses on China’s global rise with a special interest in Chinese investment and influence in Europe and Eurasia. His last book is China’s Offensive in Europe (Brookings Institution Press, 2016). His work has also appeared in Asia-Europe Journal, Carnegie Working Papers’ series, China Economic Quarterly, Perspectives Chinoises, Etudes Revue de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques and in a recent edited volume, Rethinking the Silk Road (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2018).

Research project

While the Sino-American relationship continues to deteriorate, including on the trade front, Europe has become an economic playing field for China. Chinese Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) in Europe in the last decade may amount to over €300 billion. Following the 2008 financial crisis, China’s presence in Southern Europe has increased, especially with substantial investments in the fields of transport, energy and port infrastructures. It has not just been an opportunistic move, it also matches China’s strategy which includes a growing influence at the periphery of Europe, both inside and outside the European Union. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, this research project will examine China’s presence in Southern Europe, look at specific case studies and study how Europe has been responding to China’s assertive rise.

Activities

14 May 2020 - 2:00PM : e-Masterclass, in collaboration with CY|AS and ESSEC, on China and Europe: What Stakes in 2020

It will be live on Youtube and available to everyone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJdCRLC0JqI&feature=youtu.be

Interview

Presentation

Research Project

DEEP FACE : Analysis of the Rhetoric of Artificial Facial Images in Present-Day Digital Communication

As a vast literature indicates, the face is the most versatile interface of human interaction: most known societies simply could not function without faces. Through them, human beings manifest and perceive cognitions, emotions, and acting intentions, being able, thus, to coordinate with each other. The centrality of the face is such that it is often attributed to non-human entities too, like animals, plants, objects, or even landscapes and, in certain circumstances, countries and cultural heritage. Symmetrically, defacing people literally means denying their faces, debasing their humanity. Since the face is central in human behavior, facial images that are considered as produced by a non-human agency receive a special aura throughout history and cultures, as if they were endowed with extraordinary powers. So as to test this hypothesis, the project cross-fertilizes several methodologies and concentrates on artificial faces created by neural networks and to the reactions of people to such images. The project will elaborate a methodological plan to test the impact of the production of artificial facial images on the present-day reception of the meaning of the face. An experimental setting will be devised so as to expose subjects to such images and gather their reactions in terms of emotions, cognitions, and interactive behaviors.

Events:

IDHN Seminar: April 30, 2021 - 10:30 am

     "Deep fake, deep face" - link 

     Online seminar on Zoom

Presentation

photoEwa A. Łukaszykwasformerly professor of Mediterranean studies at the University of Warsaw and guest researcher at Leiden University. Member of the Neophilological Commission of the Polish Academy of Learning and Polish Oriental Society. She is specialised in comparative literature and history of ideas at the crossroad of Romance Europe and the Islamic world; she has also a considerable research experience in Lusophone studies. She is author of seven books and over 200 papers and chapters, editor of several collective volumes in comparative literature. She has recently published an extensive monograph on Portuguese literature, Mgławica Pessoa (The Nebulosa Pessoa, 2019), and a collection of essays Humanistyka, która nadchodzi. W poszukiwaniu kondycji transkulturowej (The Coming Humanities: In Search of Transcultural Condition, 2018). Her research focuses on medieval and early-modern heterodox religious ideas and utopias such as the search for the pre-lapsarian Adamic language. She also studies the presence of those legacies in the contemporary literature of Europe and the Mediterranean region.

Research Project

The objective of the project is to study the literature of the present-day Euro-Mediterranean zone, exploring its potential directed against rigid cultural codifications and oppressive cultural legacies resulting in conflictive identifications. The texts forming the working corpus, i.e. essays and novels of Abdelwahab Meddeb, Fatema Mernissi, Fouad Laroui, Kamel Daoud, Bensalem Himmich, Malek Chebel and others, have in common the exploration of a transgressive and liberating legacy, that of Sufism and transreligious Mediterranean mysticism. I will study the ways how this legacy is evoked and developed by the contemporary Francophone writers. They translate mystical vocabularies  as well as sacred and profane textual references into a secularised vision of political and private liberation. Mysticism becomes a new kind of quest, transgressing and disrupting the cultural frontiers in search of individual freedom and authenticity. As a result, a peculiar, enriching form of trans-denominational spirituality emerges as a novel legacy. The project will help to understand this fascinating, yet hermetic sector of contemporary Francophone literature through its confrontation with Arabic pre-modern texts and traditions. Also, the project puts in the limelight the continuity of individualistic struggle against the limitations inherent to cultural condition of man, i.e. human inscription in culture contemplated both in its positive aspect, as a repository of transmitted values, and in the negative one, as a source of oppression.

Presentation

photoBenoit Pausader is professor of mathematics at Brown University (RI, USA). After studying at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, he graduated with a PhD from the University of Cergy-Pontoise in 2008 and after a postdoctoral period at Brown and Courant, he was charge de recherche at CNRS and then Assistant Professor at Princeton University (NJ, USA). His research focuses on dispersive equations and their applications in physics. His main focus has shifted from fourth order equations (during his PhD), to the influence of geometry on the behavior of solutions to problems from plasma physics and water waves, and he now concentrates on kinetic equations.

Research project

Dispersive equations model the transport of light in an optical cable or the modulations of waves in the ocean. They are ubiquitous and universal, yet hard to precisely pin down since they describe ``enveloppe’’ or moving waves (e.g. although a wave in the ocean can travel kilometers, very little water is actually displaced). An intriguing question for these equations is whether they naturally lead to the creation of small scale variations (what is sometimes called ``weak turbulence’’). Benoit Pausader tries to understand this, especially in the model case of a cylinder.

Kinetic equations model the collective behavior of many identical particles which interact through their interactions. They naturally occur in plasma physics (think of a gas of electrons and ions) or in astrophysics (e.g. the distribution of stars in a galaxy) and have been widely studied, yet some basic questions remain open about their long-time behavior. Benoit Pausader looks for cases when this asymptotic behavior can be described in terms of a simpler ``scattering dynamics’’. It turns out that there are many different scenarios and developing a general theory is still out of reach.

Dispersive and kinetic equations share a lot of similarities and, by combining the tools and methods Benoit hopes to gain a better understanding of both.

Presentation 

photoGuilherme Sampaio received his PhD in History from the European University Institute (2016). His thesis examined the translation, diffusion, and reception of the economist John Maynard Keynes’s writings in France (1920s-50s). Working from an intellectual history standpoint, his research interests cover the societal impact of economic ideas in France, through their influence into policymaking and public debates. Previously he also worked on the political theory and praxis of nineteenth-century Portuguese Republicanism. He is currently transforming his thesis into a book manuscript under contract with Routldge while expanding his research focus towards the early ideational history of European integration

Research project

John Maynard Keynes remains the best-known economist of modern times while given its historical penchant for economic interventionism, to this day France is regularly deemed a Keynesian country. Yet historians have paradoxically long agreed that until his death in 1946, Keynes was largely ignored by Frenchmen, while soon afterwards his ideas became dominant in the ‘Trente glorieuses’. Based on a novel analysis of how Keynes’s thought was diffused in France from the 1920s to the 1950s, I demonstrate instead that his writings were always thoroughly discussed but that contrasting understandings of monetary policy meant they never came to dominate French policymaking and academia.

Accordingly, during the Fellowship I will write an academic monograph derived from my doctoral thesis, to be published by  Routledge. Entitled ‘Keynes and French Economic Policy’, it will be the first scholarly book examining the French reception of Keynes. The first five chapters examine the reception of Keynes’s ideas from the Versailles Treaty to the outbreak of World War II, while the final two scrutinise the repercussion of his economic thought from Vichy France to the arrival of General De Gaulle to power. Further taking advantage of my stay at the IAS, the book will include new archival research.

Presentation

photoAlfonsina Scarinzi is a lecturer of media, language, human cognition and technologically mediated interactions. She teaches courses at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Germany) and holds a PhD in Cognitive Studies with a focus on German language from the University of Göttingen. During her doctoral studies she was awarded both a DAAD STIBET and a DFG conference grant. She was a PostDoc fellow at UTC – Université de Technologie de Compiègne (France) and a visiting research fellow at the University of Exeter (UK), at UCLIC London (UK) and within the EU Consortium SIEMPRE at the University of Genova (Italy). She is the initiator and principal investigator of the multidisciplinary project “Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind”. The inaugural conference of her project was sponsored by Fritz Thyssen Foundation and EUCOG III (network of excellence for the development of artificial intelligence). The first scholarly volume in the field of aesthetics and enactive cognition was issued from this conference. In 2019, she started a series of workshops with the title “Meaningful Relations”. The topic of the first meeting was the iCub robot and the ERC Project “Whisper” by Alessandra Sciutti (iit – istituto italiano di tecnologia di Genova – Italy). Robot consciousness, human trust in robots, and the sensorimotor coupling between a human agent and a social robot in the constitution of an aesthetic experience is the topic of her main research and the topic of her next monograph.

Research Project

Robots – so called social robots – are becoming more and more relevant in education and social interactions in general. Scenarios in which robots play the role of a teacher can be considered to be a realistic future development of the human interaction with the machine. In my research, I consider a scenario in which a social robot teaches a human partner that has no experience in the interaction with a robot new sensorimotor skills. The main focus of my work is on how the human agent perceives the robot in such a relevant role and the role movements have in the interaction between human learner and robot teacher. How pleasurable is such an interaction for the human learner? Does the human agent tend to manifest a positive pleasurable feeling of the interaction itself when the movements of the social robot in the teaching process become familiar or when the human learner realizes that the learning of new sensorimotor skills is successful? The aim is to suggest criteria for showing how interaction changes when the human learner accepts and enjoys the robot teacher. Moreover, together with the group of the BONHEURS Lab, with the support of the platform Techsolab and in collaboration with Pr. Alain Jaillet and with Pr. Vassilis Komis, invited professor at the UNESCO chair at Cergy-Pontoise, I will focus on the cognitive-emotional role of sensorimotor skills in environments for collaborative learning activities.

Research Topic: Move your body! Action in Perception and Shared Meaning Constitution in Human-Robot-Interaction

Call for submission or participation: 

https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/20103/move-your-body-action-in-perception-and-shared-meaning-constitution-in-human-robot-interaction

Submission Deadlines:

01/05/2021: Abstract

29/08/2021: Manuscript

Presentation

photoDr. Leandro Soter de Mariz e Miranda graduated in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). In 2007 he obtained his PhD at the same University working on the organic synthesis of natural products under the supervision of Dr. Mário Vasconcellos. After receiving his PhD Dr. de Mariz e Miranda worked at the Research and Development laboratories at a nucleoside specialized pharmochemical industry in Brazil on the development and scaling up new synthetic routes for the synthesis of fluorinated nucleosides. By the year of 2011 he joined the chemistry institute at  the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro  as an associate  professor of the Organic Chemistry Department. His research interest at the Biocatalysis and Organic Synthesis Laboratory at UFRJ includes the synthesis of new nucleosides sacafolds, continuous-flow chemistry and Biocatalysis. He is author of more than 80 papers and is scientific peer reviewer of high impact international journals.

For his scientifique work he is an affiliate member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Research Project

Nucleosides, as thier phosphate derivatives, the nucleotides, are a class of molecules that are important in many cellular processes such as storage, transcription and tranlation of genetic information. The development of analogues able to interfere in those processes allowed, over the last decades, the development of molecules that are now  approved drugs for the treatament of some kinds of cancer and viruses. However, among all those nucleoside  analogues approved as antivirals, only one is able to inhibit the viral RNA-dependent RNA-polymerase (RdRp) present in virus containing  RNA genome, more specifically the RdRp from the hepatitis C virus. Other important diseases promoted by RNA containing viruses such as Dengue, Zika and the new SARS-CoV-2 are still without any approved treatment. The proposed project, includes the synthesis of new ribonucleoside structures based on 1,2,3-Triazoyl-C-Ribosides in order to obtain new molecules with potential as lead compounds against cancer and/or emerging RNA-viruses. Additionally the project will allow the reciprocal internalization of the expertise developed independently by the research groups involved.