The conference will include 8 oral sessions where invited speakers will introduce their session by addressing key challenges in the field and asking provocative questions regarding the direction of the field.
Session Topics and Invited Speakers:
Cognitive and social neuroscience, including topics as language processing, visual learning, HYPER-SCANNING, and statistical learning
Simone Cutini
Dr. Cutini is an Associate Professor in the Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Padua, Italy. He is the director of the functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy Laboratory. He has been using a multidisciplinary approach in the field of cognitive psychology (e.g., computational modeling, behavioral methods, neuroimaging). His current research interest revolves around cognitive neuroscience and his research activity is mainly focused on the behavioral and neuroimaging investigation of cognitive control, visual short-term memory, numerical cognition.
Clinical applications 1, focused on diagnosis, monitoring and therapy guidance in neonatal and pediatrics neurological diseases
Mamadou Diop
Dr. Diop is an assistant professor in the Departments of Medical Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering at Western University, London, ON, Canada, where he leads the Translational Biophotonics Lab. His work focuses on developing optical devices and advanced data analysis methods for monitoring tissue perfusion and metabolism. Some of these technologies are currently used for neonatal neuro-monitoring.
neurodegeneration, aging, AD, dementia, vascular disfunction, etc.
Ann-Christine Ehlis
Dr. Ehlis is the Group leader of Psychophysiology & Optical Imaging in the Department of Psychiatry & Psychotherapy, University Hospital Tuebingen, Germany. After completing her graduate studies (Psychology) at the Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf in 2001, she started working as a research assistant at the Psychiatric University Hospital Wuerzburg in the group of Andreas Fallgatter (Psychophysiology & Functional Imaging) where she first started working with fNIRS. After finishing her PhD on the topic of frontal lobe functions in schizophrenia in 2008, she accepted a position at the Psychiatric University Hospital of Tuebingen in 2010 as scientific head of the newly installed group “Psychophysiology & Optical Imaging” with fNIRS as the core research method. Her research interests include: Application of fNIRS in neuropsychiatric research; methodical development of fNIRS; multimodal functional imaging (e.g., combined fNIRS/EEG; combined fNIRS/fMRI); noninvasive neuromodulation (e.g., fNIRS-based neurofeedback trainings, rTMS, tDCS); frontal lobe functions and pathological alterations; action-monitoring and cognitive control processes/executive functions.
Clinical applications 2, focused on neuro-monitoring of patients in critical conditions, like traumatic brain injury, stroke, general anesthesia
Gregory W. Fischer
Dr. Fischer is a Professor and the Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY. Dr. Fischer is a board-certified anesthesiologist with specialty training in cardiothoracic anesthesia and critical care medicine. Among his many research interests Dr. Fischer for more than 15 years has investigated and supported the use of cerebral oximetry for noninvasive monitoring of brain oxygen levels during surgical procedures.
NEURAL NETWORK AND NEURO-FEEDBACK APPLICATIONS INCLUDING MACHINE LEARNING, BRAIN COMPUTER INTERFACE, NEURO-MARKETING, ETC.
Tao Liu
Dr. Liu is a ZJU100 Young Professor in the Department of Marketing at Zhejiang University, China. His work has mainly focused on Neuro-entrepreneurship, Neuromarketing, and Social Neuroscience using functional near-infrared spectroscopy. He is best known for his research on group decision-making and interactions, as well as his insights on nexus of neuroscience and management. His work has been published in leading journals, including Neuroimage, Cerebral Cortex, Long Range Planning, Accident Analysis & Prevention, Ergonomics, among others.
hardware development SPANNING NOVEL devices, technologies and METHODs BOTH FOR SPECTROSCOPY AND IMAGING
Ashwin Parthasarathy
Dr. Parthasarathy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL. He heads the Translational Optics Imaging and Spectroscopy lab, where he develops diffuse optical instruments for clinical applications such as bedside monitoring cerebral tissue health. His recent research focus has been to improve the portability and accessibility of biophotonic devices by developing technologies that reduce cost and size.
Data analysis and algorithms, spanning novel data analysis methodologies both for spectroscopy and imaging, new opensource software toolboxes and machine learning methods
Paola Pinti
Dr. Paola Pinti is the Senior Research Laboratory Developer at Birkbeck College, London, UK and an Honorary Research Associate in the Biomedical Optics Research Laboratory in the Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at University College London (UCL). Her research involves the use of fNIRS in the field of cognitive neuroscience and, in particular, of the new generation of wireless and wearable fNIRS devices in naturalistic environments. More precisely, her work focuses on the development and implementation of new algorithms and tools for the analysis of fNIRS data collected in more ecologically-valid settings with unstructured cognitive tasks. Her current role involves the development of a new Toddler Lab that integrates cutting-edge wearable technologies like fNIRS, EEG, motion capture, eye-tracking in an immersive Virtual Reality environment for the study brain development in ecological settings.
Neurodevelopmental neuroscience, spanning from normal brain development, to neurodevelopmental disorders including intellectual disability, communication disorder, autism spectrum disorders. Also included socioeconomic factors affecting developmental outcomes
Masami Yamaguchi
Dr. Yamaguchi is a Full Professor in the Department of Psychology, Chuo University, Japan. Dr. Yamaguchi lab has been using fNIRS since 2007 to explore the development of facial processing abilities in infants. By measuring the hemodynamic responses in infants’bilateral areas, she has succeeded to prove that a variety of face processing effects that have been reported in adults, such as the face inversion effect, the frontal-profile face-view processing, and the perceptual narrowing effect, already occur around the age of 7 months old. By using this know-how, she extended her research to the field of categorical color perception. She provided the first evidence that categorical color perception arise before the development of linguistic abilities.
