Speakers

Douglas Vakoch

METI International

David Dunér

Professor of History of Science and Ideas at Lund University, Sweden

David Dunér, Ph.D., is Professor of History of Science and Ideas at Lund University, Sweden and researcher at the Centre of Cognitive Semiotics, Lund University. His historical research concerns the development of science, medicine, mathematics, and technology during the scientific revolution and onwards. Within Cognitive Semiotics he works on the bio-cultural co-evolution of cognition and language. His latest book isThe Natural Philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg: A Study in the Conceptual Metaphors of the Mechanistic World-View (2013). Dr. Dunér studies the history and philosophy of astrobiology, and he was guest editor of the special issue “The History and Philosophy of Astrobiology” of the journal Astrobiology (2012, 12:10).

His astrobiological research includes “astrocognition,” the study of cognition in space, detailed in his chapter “Astrocognition: Prolegomena to a Future Cognitive History of Exploration,” which appeared in Humans in Outer Space – Interdisciplinary Perspectives(2011). Dr. Dunér’s work on the semiotic and cognitive foundations of interstellar communication appeared in the volume Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (2011), and his work on interstellar intersubjectivity was included in the volume Extraterrestrial Altruism(2014). His most recent publication in astrobiology is a chapter on the prehistory of the L-factor in Drake’s equation, published in The Drake Equation (2015).


Anna Dornhaus

University of Arizona, USA

Dr. Anna Dornhaus is an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Her research, using empirical and theoretical approaches, focuses on the emergence of collective pattern from individual behavior, using social insect colonies (ants and bees) as model systems. She is particularly interested in the complex interactions that can produce adaptive, sophisticated, robust system-level behaviors with no unique ‘organizing’ unit driving them. Such ‘emergence’ is not only inherent in biology but in many structures relevant to our society, such as power grids, the internet, and in how diseases spread or organizations thrive or fail to do so. She holds graduate degrees (Ph.D. and ‘Diplom’ ~ M.Sc.) from the University of Würzburg, Germany, and worked at the University of Bristol, UK as postdoctoral researcher. She has published more than 90 peer-reviewed articles, and mentored over 100 undergraduate researchers and more than 20 graduate students and postdocs. Her public lectures have gained a total of over 50,000 views on YouTube, and the most recent one explores what evolution on Earth may tell us about the evolution of complex life on other planets.


Geoffrey Miller

University of New Mexico, USA

Geoffrey Miller is an evolutionary psychologist best known for his books The Mating Mind (2001), Mating Intelligence (2008), Spent (2009), and Mate (2015).He has a B.A. in Biology and Psychology from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford University, and he is a tenured professor at University of New Mexico. He has 116 academic publications (cited 8,000+ times), addressing sexual selection, mate choice, signaling theory, fitness indicators, intelligence, creativity, language, art, music, humor, emotions, personality, psychopathology, and behavior genetics. He has given 175 talks in 15 countries, reviewed papers for 50+ journals, and also worked at NYU Stern Business School, UCLA, and the London School of Economics. His research has been featured in Nature, Science, The New York Times, The Washington Post, New Scientist, and The Economist, on NPR and BBC radio, and in documentaries on CNN, PBS, Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel, and BBC. His podcast series The Mating Grounds has logged more than 3 million downloads. He has been a passionate science fiction reader since childhood, and loves the Iain M. Banks Culture series. He’s co-authored 17 previous papers with Peter Todd.


Peter M. Todd

Indiana University, USA

Peter M. Todd is Provost Professor at Indiana University in the Cognitive Science Program, the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and the Center for Complex Systems and Networks Research. He grew up in Silicon Valley, received a Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University, developed artificial life models during a postdoc at the Rowland Institute for Science, and in 1995 moved to Germany to help found the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition (ABC), based at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. The Center's work on decision making was captured in the books Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (OUP, 1999) and Ecological Rationality: Intelligence in the World (OUP, 2012). Todd moved to Indiana University in 2005 where his research focuses on the evolved cognitive mechanisms that people and other animals use to make decisions about adaptively important resources—including mates, information, and food—in space and time. His most recent book is Cognitive Search: Evolution, Algorithms, and the Brain (Todd, Hills, and Robbins, eds.; MIT Press, 2012). He is currently serving as the first Director of the IU Food Institute.



Daniel Ross

University of California, Riverside, USA

Daniel Ross is Lecturer of Linguistics at the University of California, Riverside and a Ph.D. Candidate in Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has taught courses on Syntax, Semantics, Morphology, and Historical Linguistics. His dissertation focuses on Pseudocoordination, Serial Verb Constructions, and other Multi-Verb Predicates as instances of form-structure mismatches in syntactic structure; from a comparative perspective, these constructions are strikingly similar in function and syntactic properties despite variation in form, and from a theoretical perspective the data from English and other languages proves difficult to explain in conventional syntactic theory. The research in the dissertation is supported by a 325-language comparison of an array of morphosyntactic features. His research interests concentrate on Syntax and its interfaces with Morphology and Semantics, and he explores these topics from a broad perspective including Typology and cross-linguistic comparisons, experimental and corpus-based methods, and field work on Faroese, a North Germanic language spoken in the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic. He has studied twenty languages at the university level and regularly looks for ways that understudied languages can contribute to syntactic theory. He has presented at conferences and published articles on aspects of syntactic theory and cross-linguistic morphosyntactic variation.


Pauli Laine

University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Pauli Laine was born in Jyväskylä, Finland, in 1968. He received the B.Sc. degree in software engineering from the Kymenlaakso University of Applied Sciences in 1997, as well as M.Sc. degrees in Usability from the Tampere University of Technology and Cognitive Science from the University of Jyväskylä, in 2010 and 2014, respectively. In 1997 he joined Novo Group plc as a system specialist, working with many customer projects. In 2005 he joined FDF C5 Agency as a system manager. His current duties include development of system management systems. After establishing a solid career in the ICT, he started creating careers in cognitive science and astrobiology. He started his Ph.D. studies in Cognitive Science after accomplishing M.Sc. degree in the same area in 2014. In 2013 he began astrobiology studies in the University of Turku. Shortly after this, he was invited to help create new NASA astrobiology roadmap, which was then released in 2015. He is currently Member of the ORIGINS (Origins and evolution of life on Earth and in the Universe) COST Action working group. His current research interests include early life, habitability, biosignatures, and connecting aspects of cognitive science and astrobiology in a new research area called cognitive astrobiology.

David Dunér

Lund University, Sweden

David Dunér, Ph.D., is Professor of History of Science and Ideas at Lund University, Sweden and researcher at the Centre of Cognitive Semiotics, Lund University. He is a founding trustee of METI International. His historical research concerns the development of science, medicine, mathematics, and technology during the scientific revolution and onwards. Within Cognitive Semiotics he works on the bio-cultural co-evolution of cognition and language. His latest book is The Natural Philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg: A Study in the Conceptual Metaphors of the Mechanistic World-View (2013).

Dr. Dunér studies the history and philosophy of astrobiology, and he was guest editor of the special issue “The History and Philosophy of Astrobiology” of the journal Astrobiology (2012, 12:10). His astrobiological research includes “astrocognition,” the study of cognition in space, detailed in his chapter “Astrocognition: Prolegomena to a Future Cognitive History of Exploration,” which appeared in Humans in Outer Space – Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2011).

Dr. Dunér’s work on the semiotic and cognitive foundations of interstellar communication appeared in the volume Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (2011), and his work on interstellar intersubjectivity was included in the volume Extraterrestrial Altruism (2014). His most recent publication in astrobiology is a chapter on the prehistory of the L-factor in Drake’s equation, published in The Drake Equation (2015).


Sheri Wells-Jensen

Bowling Green State University, USA

Sheri Wells-Jensen earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the State University of New York at Buffalo and is currently an associate professor in the English Department at Bowling Green State University. Her research interests include xenolinguistics, second language acquisition, speech production, Braille literacy, and language preservation.


Alfred Kracher

Iowa State University, USA

Alfred Kracher (Ph.D. Chemistry, University of Vienna) is a retired Staff Scientist at Ames Laboratory, Iowa State University. He studied the chemistry of meteorites and lunar rocks, first at the Museum of Natural History in his native Vienna, later at UCLA, the University of New Mexico, and the Arkansas Center for Space and Planetary Sciences at the University of Arkansas. For his relevant publications see the section on space science and extraterrestrial life at https://independent.academia.edu/AlfredKracher. A recent presentation at the SETI Institute can be found at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw6IJozmaWbSY1dIpKUOgqjfqXgB6cC76.


David Dunér

Professor of History of Science and Ideas at Lund University, Sweden

David Dunér, Ph.D., is Professor of History of Science and Ideas at Lund University, Sweden and researcher at the Centre of Cognitive Semiotics, Lund University. His historical research concerns the development of science, medicine, mathematics, and technology during the scientific revolution and onwards. Within Cognitive Semiotics he works on the bio-cultural co-evolution of cognition and language. His latest book isThe Natural Philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg: A Study in the Conceptual Metaphors of the Mechanistic World-View (2013). Dr. Dunér studies the history and philosophy of astrobiology, and he was guest editor of the special issue “The History and Philosophy of Astrobiology” of the journal Astrobiology (2012, 12:10).

His astrobiological research includes “astrocognition,” the study of cognition in space, detailed in his chapter “Astrocognition: Prolegomena to a Future Cognitive History of Exploration,” which appeared in Humans in Outer Space – Interdisciplinary Perspectives(2011). Dr. Dunér’s work on the semiotic and cognitive foundations of interstellar communication appeared in the volume Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (2011), and his work on interstellar intersubjectivity was included in the volume Extraterrestrial Altruism(2014). His most recent publication in astrobiology is a chapter on the prehistory of the L-factor in Drake’s equation, published in The Drake Equation (2015).