"Emotions & machines"
Dr. Thomas Cochrane, Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University Geneva  CHF 2'200.-

The National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) for the Affective Sciences is a research network financed by the Swiss government and administered through the Swiss National Science Foundation and based at the University of Geneva. Many phenomena, ranging from individual cognitive processing to social and collective behavior, cannot be understood without taking into account affective determinants.
Moreover, affective phenomena are complex episodes in human behavior and experience, thoroughly integrated into a social and cultural context, that require study from different research perspectives.
The NCCR in Affective Sciences brings together disciplines which study the biological, psychological, and social dimensions of affect. The different scientific projects aim to provide a better understanding of affective phenomena (e.g., emotions, motivations, moods, stress, wellbeing) from various research perspectives and multiple levels of analysis. With its scientists stemming from various backgrounds such as psychology, philosophy, economics, political science, law, criminology, psychiatry, neuroscience, education, sociology, literature, history, and religious and social anthropology, the NCCR places a particular emphasis on the interdisciplinary and integrative collaboration between these different domains of research.
The Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, is organising a one day interdisciplinary conference on Emotions and Machines. Talks will be on the possibility of emotional artificial agents, the use of technology to measure human emotions, and the benefits and hazards of emotion related technology generally. "As machines get to be more and more like men, men will come to be more like machines" this will be discussed on August 21st, 2009. The cogito foundation finances the foreign speakers.
http://www.affective-sciences.org/event/2308

"Tagung Blicklandschaften ZH"
Professor Christophe Girot, Institute of Landscape Architecture, ETH Zurich  CHF 8'000.-

Over the past nine years, students of landscape architecture at the chair of Prof. Christophe Girot have conducted video studies in and around the city of Zurich.

Blicklandschaften is the title of the exhibition where these videos will be on view at the Polyterrasse of the ETH Zürich. The exhibition opens on May 14, 2010.
A symposium and a publication are planned in conjunction with the exhibition.
Since the year 2000, the chair of Prof. Girot has done research into the medium of video to lend new impulses to contemporary landscape design.
The video studies are devoted to heterogeneous and ambivalent sites on the outskirts of the city, ordinarily considered unattractive. On closer inspection or (in our case) "closer filming," surprising qualities come to light that conventional static analysis and instruments of design are not likely to track down. The cogito foundation finances the foreign speakers.
http://www.girot.arch.ethz.ch/output-events-general/blicklandschaften.htm

"TEXTURES", 6th European Meeting of the SLSA / 1st Conference of the SLSAeu
Dr. Manuela Rossini, European Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSAeu) CHF 6'000.-

The international Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA) welcomes colleagues in the sciences, engineering, technology, computer science, medicine, the social sciences, the humanities, the arts, and independent scholars and artists. The Society meets annually in the USA (Autumn) and, since 2000, biennially in a European country (Spring). Previous European Meetings took place in Brussels (2000), Aarhus (2002), Paris (2004), Amsterdam (2006) and Berlin (2008). Founded in 2008, the European sister organisation SLSAeu will hold its first conference in Riga (Latvia) from June 15-19, 2010.
Dedicated to the theme of TEXTURES and organised by the international academic-artistic network electronic text and textiles (e-t+t), participants are invited to explore fabrics, structures, surfaces, and interfaces in a world that has been transformed to a large extent through technoscience and networked media. This transformed world is highly textured, partly through verbal and non-verbal "texts" but also by mixtures of human-made and given environments whose complexity offers resistance to symbolic readings. Keynote lectures, roundtables and paper sessions as well as a bioart workshop and exhibitions will focus on the following issues: materiality and textuality, networks and sustainability, tissue cultures, architextures, art as research.
The cogito foundation supports the following keynote speakers Catherine Malabou, France;  Daina Taimina, USA; Joanna Zylinska (UK).

www.e-text-textiles.lv/SLSAeu2010/home.htm

"The neurocognitive basis of congenital and posthypnotic synaesthesia"
Devin Blair Terhune, Oxford University CHF 142'620.- (2 years)

Synaesthesia is an unusual neurological condition characterized by anomalous correspondences between and within sensory modalities (e.g., "coloured hearing"). Recent work has demonstrated that the behavioral features of synaesthesia can be induced in highly suggestible non-synaesthetes using posthypnotic suggestion ("virtual" synaesthesia). This grant will support a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Dr. Roi Cohen Kadosh. This project aims to follow up on this early study by attempting to track the necessary and sufficient brain systems for congenital and virtual synaesthesia. The first experiment will examine the cortical activation patterns associated with congenital and virtual synaesthesia, whereas the second will allow us to investigate whether and to what extent both forms of synaesthesia are dependent upon multisensory integration. In conjunction, we believe these studies will provide a formidable investigation of the neurocognitive basis of virtual synaesthesia and will provide valuable information with regard to how it is similar to, or different from, congenital synaesthesia.