Grand Amphithéatre Constant Burg
(Institut Curie - Laboratoires Constant Burg)
12, rue Lhomond
75005 Paris

The theme for the 2004 symposium is Creativity. We will explore both the practice of creativity in music, architecture, the arts, and the sciences, and reflections on creativity from the viewpoint of psychology and brain science. The invited speakers are: Ute Meta Bauer, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Alan Kay, Francois Pachet, Miroslav Radman, Luc Steels.

Symposium Program

5th October 2004
9:00 - 17:00

Abstracts of the talks are available (Click Here)

Biographies of the Speakers

LUC STEELS Luc Steels is director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris and professor of computer science at the University of Brussels (VUB). After his studies at the University of Antwerp and at M.I.T. (US) he worked as researcher at the MIT AI Laboratory and the Schlumberger-Doll research laboratories (US) before becoming full professor at the VUB in 1983. Luc Steels is one of the leading researchers in the field of artificial intelligence in Europe and particularly in the fusion of artificial life with artificial intelligence. He was a co-founder of ECCAI, and chairman of several major conferences and workshops, including the largest European AI conference ECAI (1986). Until 1996 he was chairman of the computer science department at the University of Brussels (VUB). In 1996 he set up Sony-CSL Paris as a spinoff from Sony-CSL Tokyo.
Steels is interested in the fundamental problem how cognition may have originated and developed and he tests through experiments with robotic systems his biologically inspired theories. In this line, Steels has been conducting a series of experiments in which robotic agents develop sensory-motor competence by interacting with the environment and each other, leading to the behavior-based based approach to robotics.
More recently he has been focusing on the origins of language as a way to bootstrap these robots towards cognitive levels. By viewing language as a complex adaptive system, he and his group have already achieved fundamental results in the domains of phonetics, lexicon formation, meaning and the origins of grammar. Steels was founding co-Editor of AI Communications, and the Journal of the Evolution of Communication, is in the editorial board of a dozen scientific journals, and published a dozen books and more than two hundred scientific articles, including the Transactions of the Royal Society, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Trends in Cognitive Science.

UTE META BAUER Ute Meta Bauer, since 1996 Professor of Theory, Practice and Transfer of Contemporary Art at the Academy of fine Arts Vienna and since 2002 Founding Director of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway in Oslo. From 1999-2002 she was Co-curator of Documenta11 in the team of Okwui Enwezor. More recently she curated the 2004 Berlin Biennale. She was a guest prefessor in 2003/2004 at the Institut fur Kunst im Kontext at the Universitaet der Kuenste Berlin.
Focusing on art, architecture and sound linked to feminist and socio-political discourses, her curatorial work includes the exhibition she made for the European Cultural Capital Porto 2001 named First Story - Women Building/New Narratives for the 21st Century. In the same year she curated the exhibition Architectures for Discourse for the Fundacio Antoni Tapies in Barcelona.
As artistic director at Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart from 1990 to 1994, she was responsible for numerous exhibitions, lectures and conference about international contemporary art, such as A new spirit in curating? (1992) and Radical Chic (1993). Her publications include 'Education, Information, Entertainment. New Approaches to Higher Artistic Education (Vienna, 2001) and periodicals like Meta 1 - 4 (Stuttgart) and case (Barcelona 2001). 

ALAN KAY, President of Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc.,and Senior Fellow at Hewlett Packard Labs and is best known for the ideas of personal computing, the intimate laptop computer, and the inventions of the now ubiquitous overlapping-window interface and modern object-oriented programming. His deep interests in children and education were the catalysts for these ideas, and they continue to be a source of inspiration to him. One of the founders of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, (PARC) he led one of the several groups that together developed modern workstations (and the forerunners of the Macintosh), Smalltalk, the overlapping window interface, Desktop Publishing, the Ethernet, Laser printing, and network "client-servers."
Prior to his work at Xerox, Dr. Kay was a member of the University of Utah ARPA research team that developed 3-D graphics. There he earned a doctorate (with distinction) in 1969 for the development of the first graphical object-oriented personal computer. He holds undergraduate degrees in mathematics and molecular biology from the University of Colorado. Kay also participated in the original design of the ARPANet, which later became the Internet.  After Xerox PARC, Kay was Chief Scientist of Atari, a Fellow of Apple Computer for 12 years, and then for 5 years Vice President of Research and Development at The Walt Disney Company. In 2001 he founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization located in Glendale, CA., and in 2002 he joined the Hewlett-Packard Co. as a Senior Fellow. Dr. Kay has received numerous honors, including the ACM Software Systems Award, the ACM Outstanding Educator Award, the J-D Warnier Prix D'Informatique and the NEC 2001 C&C Prize. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Arts, and the Computer Museum History Center. He is a recipient of the ZeroOne Award from the University of Berlin, and recently received an honorary doctorate degree from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH).

FRANÇOIS PACHET is a civil engineer (Ecole des Ponts & Chaussées), Ph.D. from University of Paris 6. Assistant Professor in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science at Paris 6 University until 1997. He set up in 1997 the music research team at SONY Computer Science Laboratory (Paris), and developed the vision that metadata can greatly enhance the musical experience in all its dimensions, from listening to performance. His team conducts research in interactive music listening and performance using musical metadata and developed several innovative technologies and award winning systems (MusicSpace, constraint-based spatialization, PathBuilder, intelligent music scheduling, The Continuator for Interactive Music Improvization). François Pachet is the author of over 70 scientific publications in the fields of musical metadata and interactive instruments.

MIROSLAV RADMAN is professor of Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Paris and CNRS director at the Faculty of medicine Necker Hospital. In 2003 he won the 'Grand Prix Inserm' for his innovative research.
Earlier he was a professor at the University of Brussels (1973-1983) and CNRS director at the Institut Jacques Monod (1983 -1998). Radman has worked on mechanisms for DNA repair at the molecular level and on questions related to evolution. He is particularly well known for the SOS-response theory which relates genetic mutations to responses to genotoxic shocks to the cell, and for the application of this theory to the origins of cancers. He is a member of the French Academy of Science, the New York Academy of Science, and several other scientific organisations and has a large number of key publications in the domain of genetics.