The ICREAs

ICREA Research Professors form a vibrant community of scientists and researchers in all areas of knowledge that contribute to the advancement of humankind by exploring, interpreting and questioning. Have a look and learn about their amazing discoveries and findings here:

Bijnens, Bart

Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)

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Bijnens, Bart
Research Professor at
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Engineering Sciences
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Research interests

Translational Cardiovascular Pathophysiology, focussing on assessing cardiac function and understanding changes induced by disease and how treatment can modulate this remodelling. This is approached by integrating information handling and computing, combined with basic pathophysiology knowledge in order to advance clinical sciences. This implies an approach from basic understanding of disease towards a clinical study; selecting/designing appropriate investigational tools to assess relevant clinical parameters; quantifying diagnostic information (from clinical information to imaging data) to extract pertinent information and interpreting results and relate them to pathophysiology. Recent projects include the combination of computational modelling with interpretable machine learning in order to find easy to implement/deploy techniques for the identification of patients at risk for adverse events, as well as to improve our understanding of disease and decission making.

Key words
Cardiac Imaging, Cardiovascular Dynamics, Cardiac Function and Deformation

ORCID
: 0000-0003-3130-6937

RESEARCHER ID
: C-2955-2008
Blas Temiño, Diego

Institut de Física d'Altes Energies (IFAE)

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Blas Temiño, Diego
Research Professor at
Institut de Física d'Altes Energies (IFAE)
Experimental Sciences & Mathematics
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Research interests

Astrophysical probes of dark matter and gravitational waves

I look for new ways to use astrophysical data (from the timing of pulsars, to galactic dynamics, or the orbit of the Moon) to find new information about dark matter and gravitational waves.

New developments in gravitational wave searchers

I am part of the LISA Consortium, associated to the LISA Mission, and led the dark matter studies since 2019. I am also part of the Einstein Telescope. I was founding member of the AION Collaboration and member of the ELGAR initiative, both aiming at searching for gravitational waves and dark matter with atomic interferometers.

(Quantum) precision technologies for fundamental physics.

I am very interested in using cutting-edge technology to detect fundamental backgrounds. I have studied atomic clocks, co-magnetometers, atomic interferometers and electromagnetic cavities for dark matter and gravitational waves. I am really excite to open new directions in this line.

Key words
Astrophysical probes of dark matter, Gravitation, Theoretical cosmology, Fundamental physics with pulsars, Quantum devices for fundamental physics, Gravitational waves

ORCID
: 0000-0003-2646-0112

RESEARCHER ID
: AAL-8192-2021
Blasi, Damian E.

Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)

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Blasi, Damian E.
Research Professor at
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Social & Behavioural Sciences
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Research interests

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Worldwide cross-linguistic patterns. A fundamental facet of my research involves discovering and testing cross-linguistic (ir)regularities across diverse domains of language using large linguistic databases, with a special emphasis on those relevant for human cognition and culture. Recent examples include independent publications on (1) deep clausal embedding depths, (2) the efficiency of word encodings, (3) form-meaning mappings in basic vocabulary  (4) grammatical gender, their modifiers, and semantic substrates, (5) surprisal effects on word choice, (6) syntactic dependency minimization effects.
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Linguistic diversity through human history. I have researched different aspects of how the 6,500 languages in the world today came to be the way they are, covering processes and historical events ranging from the last hundred years to the onset of the Holocene. In particular, I have studied and published on (1) the complex relation between diet, behavior and speech sounds after the Neolithic revolution, (2) the rise of creole languages as the result of colonialism, and (3) the inter-related genetic, cultural, and linguistic histories of languages in North East Asia.
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Development of open data in collaborative team.: I have participated in a number of projects aimed at digitizing and making publicly available different types of data relevant for the study of linguistic diversity. This includes independent databases of (1) grammatical information and (2) genetic panels, which are scheduled to be published this year.
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More recently, I became interested in notions of linguistic fairness and low-resource languages. In this regard, I contributed to (1) a first attempt to quantify the degree of inequality on language technologies across the world’s languages, (2) a study on the lack of linguistic coverage in COVID-19 health guidelines, and (3) novel algorithms to assess the quality of specific computational linguistic resources when data is scarce.
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Key words
linguistic diversity, language evolution, cultural evolution, language and cognition

ORCID
: 0000-0002-9885-1414
Boeckx, Cedric

Universitat de Barcelona (UB)

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Boeckx, Cedric
Research Professor at
Universitat de Barcelona (UB)
Humanities
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Research interests

My current research focuses on developing new ways to shed light on the neurobiological foundations of the human language faculty. My graduate training and early career were in theoretical linguistics, but my more recent work has a more explicit biological, and experimental orientation. My current projects are all intended to facilitate integration among disciplines (linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and genetics), and lead to better experimental testing of theoretical hypotheses, as well as to more solid interpretations of experimental findings. I also seek to exploit the full pluralism characteristic of the life sciences to force a rethinking of long-held assumptions in theoretical linguistics and other domains of cognitive science.

Key words
cognitive biology, theoretical and comparative linguistics, cognitive sciences, ethology

ORCID
: 0000-0001-8882-9718

RESEARCHER ID
: F-4781-2016
Boleda Torrent, Gemma

Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)

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Boleda Torrent, Gemma
Research Professor at
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Engineering Sciences
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Research interests

I want to understand how language works; in particular, how humans convey meaning through language. The focus of my research is how the linguistic system and its use in communication influence each other. For instance, a speaker of English can use different expressions (e.g. "the dog/chihuahua/small dog") when referring to a given chihuahua. The choice depends, a.o., on the words and grammar available in the language and the properties of the object. In turn, over time, specific speaker choices in communicative situations change the system itself. I study these dynamics in a range of semantic phenomena; which aspects are universal across languages; and what governs variation.

My team and I address these research questions with a cross-disciplinary approach that integrates methodologies from Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Science. Our approach requires large amounts of data, and part of our work involves gathering linguistic data on a large scale.

Key words
Linguistics; Computational Linguistics; Natural Language Processing; computational semantics; semantic theory; distributional semantics; neural networks; deep learning; reference; concepts; lexicon

ORCID
: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6140-7080
Bonatti, Luca

Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)

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Bonatti, Luca
Research Professor at
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Social & Behavioural Sciences
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Research interests

I am fascinated by thinking, by the very fact that we conceive structured states of mind that can be true or false, that can be imaginary or real. I am fascinated by how pervasively thinking populates our mental life. We reason when we read, or when we speak, but also when we walk around, or when we dream. Indeed, thinking is at the roots of the unique cognitive place humans have in the animal kingdom. I investigate its early structure, finding ways to describe the potential primitives of the scaffoldings supporting the combinatorial structure of human thought. I try to reveal bits and pieces of the representations underlying our abilities to come to conclusions, to form expectations, or to find what happens next. When time allows, I also work on how infants and adults find linguistic structure in speech, and how we can pack so much conceptual information inside those tiny and odd bits of sounds that we call words.

Key words
Language acquisition, Cognition, Infant cognition, Probabilistic Reasoning, Deductive Reasoning