CHAIRED BY: Piero Scaruffi

David Kirby (Cal Poly) on "The Nature of Diegetic Prototypes and their Social Impact"
Jessie Liu (UC Berkeley), David Moses (UCSF) & Sean Metzger (UCSF) on Speech Neuroprosthesis
Alysson Muotri (Director of the Stem Cell Program Institute for Genomic Medicine, UC San Diego) on "Applications of human brain organoids"

Event Info

When: 6^th October 2021, 6pm PDT (UTC-7)

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Website: http://lasertalks.com/

       Speakers Bios:

• David A. Kirby is Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Liberal Arts and Director of the Science Technology & Society Program at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. Previously he was Professor of Science Communication Studies in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester. His research examines how movies, television, and computer games act as vehicles of scientific communication, trying to understand how the stories told about science in media products impact the construction of ideas and our perceptions of science as a social, cultural, and political force. Several of his publications address the relationship between cinema, genetics and biotechnology. He has also explored the collaboration between scientists and the entertainment industry in his book "Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists and Cinema" (MIT Press, 2011), which was named one of Physics World magazine's top 10 best popular-physics books of 2011. He is currently writing a book titled "Indecent Science: Religion, Science, and Movie Censorship".
• Jessie Liu (UC Berkeley), David Moses & Sean Metzger (UCSF) work in the lab of UCSF neurosurgeon Edward Chang. They have developed a "speech neuroprosthesis" that decodes the signals sent by the brain to the vocal tract and turns them into words displayed on a screen, and then uses statistical language models to improve accuracy. The brain implant and the related A.I. software has enabled a man with severe paralysis to communicate in sentences, although limited to a vocabulary of 50 words.
• Alysson Muotri is a professor at the Departments of Pediatrics and Cellular & Molecular Medicine at UC San Diego. He is also the Director of the Stem Cell Program and Archealization Center. He earned a BSc in Biological Sciences from the State University of Campinas in 1995 and a Ph.D. in Genetics in 2001 from University of Sao Paulo, in Brazil. He moved to the Salk Institute as Pew Latin America Fellow in 2002 for a postdoctoral training in the fields of neuroscience and stem cell biology. His research focuses on brain evolution and modeling neurological diseases using human induced pluripotent stem cells and brain organoids. He has received several awards, including the prestigious NIH Director's New Innovator Award, NARSAD, Emerald Foundation Young Investigator Award, Surugadai Award, Rock Star of Innovation, NIH EUREKA Award, Telly Awards among several others.

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The Leonardo/ISAST LASERs are a program of international gatherings that bring artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together for informal presentations, performances and conversations with the wider public. The mission of the LASERs is to encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region by fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and opportunities for community building to over 40 cities around the world. To learn more about how our LASER Hosts and to visit a LASER near you please visit our website. @lasertalks