Central and Eastern Europe
Ivan M. Havel is a cognitive scientist, cofounder and past director of the Center for Theoretical Study, a joint institution of Charles University in Prague and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. He graduated in 1966 from Technical University in Prague and in 1971 earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California at Berkeley, USA. His current research focuses on the human mind, with a special interest in the first-person approaches. He has published several books of scientific and philosophical essays and dialogues. He is a member of Academia Europea, and serves on boards of several academic institutions and educational foundations.
Lukáš Likavčan is a researcher and theorist, writing on philosophy of technology, political ecology and visual cultures. He teaches at Center for Audiovisual Studies FAMU (Prague), and Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design (Moscow). Likavčan is also a collaborator of the Digital Earth fellowship programme (digitalearth.art), a member of Display – Association for Research and Collective Practice (Prague), and an author of Introduction to Comparative Planetology (Strelka Press, 2019). More info at likavcan.com
Jędrzej Niklas is Research Associate at Data Justice Lab at Cardiff University. His current research explores the role of data-driven technologies in the operations of state and their social justice implications. Jedrzej previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leeds and London School of Economics and Political Science. He holds a PhD in law (international public law) from the University of Warsaw. Prior to his academic position he was a legal and policy specialist at the Polish civil society organisation, Panoptykon Foundation addressing policies related to data protection, automated decision-making and surveillance.
Jerzy Stachowicz is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw. His academic interests focus on issues of new media, linguistic practices, and the role of linguistic media in reshaping other media and cultural practices. Other areas of academic interests: history of popular culture, Polish science fiction literature of the interwar period, media archeology. He is also a member of the Polish science fiction fandom and a columnist of the fantasy and SF magazine “Nowa Fantastyka”.
Bogna Konior is a writer and a scholar currently based at NYU Shanghai, Interactive Media Arts department and the AI & Culture Research Centre. She is interested in the human relationship to and imagination of the inhuman, especially at the intersection of large-scale ecological and technological paradigm shifts. Her work can be found at www.bognamk.com
Michał Sobczyk is a young professional with an extensive background in technology, diplomacy and government affairs. At the Lem Institute, he leads on international engagement.
Dr Klára Kudlová is a literary historian and researcher (since 2006) at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS). Currently, she takes part in writing of the lexicon of Czech drama, and works on a monograph about the leading Czech writer of the 1990s, Jáchym Topol. She also lectures on the History of European Culture at Charles University.
Dr Libuše Heczková is an associate professor of Czech and Comparative Literature at Charles University. Her current research concentrates on women in the Czech modern society, literature and visual culture of modernism and avantgarde. She published a monograph about Czech women's literary criticism Writing Minervas (2010). She was also a member of the team that published the history of Czech literary modernism between 1905-1947 in three volumes (2010-2017) and the Glossary of the Catchwords of the Avantgarde (2012).
Dr Rudolf Rosa is a researcher in the field of computational linguistics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University. Rudolf is a robopsychologist and an expert in multilingual language processing. He is the head of research in the THEaiTRE project.
Patrícia Schmidtová is a graduate student of Computational Linguistics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University. Her major academic and professional interest is in Natural Language Processing. She currently focuses on Natural Language Generation and her diploma thesis researches approaches to make long texts (namely theatre plays) more coherent.
Klára Vosecká is an undergraduate student of directing and dramaturgy at DAMU (Theatre Academy of Performing Arts in Prague). Klára is one of the theatre experts on the THEaiTRE project.