Session 3: Diverse Approaches in Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Prof. Shyamanta M Hazarika

Professor

Affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mehta Family School of Data Science & Artificial Intelligence, IIT Guwahati

Research Interest: Robotic Neurorehabilitation, Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

Dr. Shyamanta M Hazarika is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mehta School of Data Science& Artificial Intelligence at IIT-Guwahati. Dr. Hazarika is a Abdul Kalam Technology Innovation National Fellow.

Previously, he presided as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Tezpur University. He was also a professor of of Cognitive Systems & NeuroInformatics, University of Bremen, Germany. He holds B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Assam Engineering College, Guwahati, India; M.Tech. in Robotics from IIT Kanpur, India. He completed his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from School of Computing, University of Leeds, England.

He leads the Biomimetic Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Lab at IIT-Guwahati. He has published widely in the field of Rehabilitation Robotics as well as knowledge representation and Reasoning.

Prof. Ramesh Kumar Mishra

Professor

Affliation: Center for Neural and Cognitive Sciences, University of Hyderabad

Research Interests: Cognitive Psychology, Psycholinguistics, Cognitive neurosciences

Dr. Ramesh Kumar Mishra is the head of Center for neural and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Hyderabad. His areas of interest lie in action control, attention vision, psycholinguistics, and Cognitive Neurosciences.

With a PhD from the University of Delhi, his expertise lies in fields of Cognitive Psychology, Psycholinguistics, and Cognitive Neurosciences. A leading cognitive scientist of India, he looks at these multifarious processes of Human cognition using state of the art methods such as eye-tracking and neuroimaging in his Action Control and Cognition Lab.

Professor Mishra’s talk will focus on eye-tracking as an online signature of cognition drawing upon his vast experience in the domain of visual attention.

Dr. Tushar Singh

Assistant Professor

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, Banaras Hindu University.

Research Interests: Visual Imagery, Affective Processes, Time Perception, and Collective Experiences

Dr. Tushar Singh is an Assistant professor at Department of Psychology at Banaras Hindu University. With his Post Doctoral Fellowship in Centre of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Allahabad, he is highly reputed and well-cited in the field of Visual Imagery, Affective Processes, Time Perception, and Collective Experiences.

He is also involved in a UK-India collaborative group working on “Collective participation & social identification”. He actively involved in training psychological/ soft skills related to Understanding Self, Communication skills, Group Dynamics, Stress management, Memory enhancement, GD & Interviewing Skills to the students and professionals.

In his talk Dr. Singh will discuss the relationship between Cognition and Emotion, how positive and negative affective states influences one’s cognitive processes and how this multi-directional relationship can be viewed in a larger context.

Dr. Bidisha Som

Associate Professor

Affiliation: Department of Humanities and Social Sciences & Centre for Linguistics Science and Technology, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati.

Research Interests: Cognition and Culture Interaction among Bilinguals, Bilingualism and Cognitive Control, Language teaching and Learning, Cognitive Linguistics, and Heritage Language Processing.

Dr. Som is currently an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, and guides students at the Language and Cognition Lab  that is focused on research on psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, cognitive control, bilingualism, Visual & Spatial cognition, and sociolinguistics.
She has done her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University and has an expertise in language processing, culture & cognition, and social linguistics. Apart from having a very impressive publication record, Dr. Som is also the principal investigator of the iBrain initiative in IIT Guwahati.     
Dr. Som will focus on Bilingualism and its relation with other cognitive processes. She will then discuss the nuances and future research possibilities of Language and Cognition in India.                                                  

Previously Invited Speakers:

iBrain Training Workshop: Methods in Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Basic Statistics: Analysis and Interpretation in R

Dr. Suvashisa Rana

Associate Professor

Affiliation: Centre for Health Psychology, School of Medical Sciences, University of Hyderabad.

Research Interests: Positive Psychology, Positive Organizational Behavior, Peace Psychology, and Psychometrics.

Teaching Areas: Advanced Statistics, Research Methodology (Quantitative and Qualitative), Application of Software in Data Analyses (SPSS, R, NVivo), Positive Psychology, Organizational Psychology.

Dr. Suvashisa Rana is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Health Psychology, School of Medical Sciences, University of Hyderabad. Dr. Rana has obtained his MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees in Psychology from the Centre of Advanced Study in Psychology, Utkal University, Odisha. He has been the recipient of the University Gold Medal in his master degree and the coveted Doctoral Fellowship of Government of India by the Bureau of Police Research & Development (BPR&D), Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India to pursue his PhD research on Police-Public Partnership for Peace. He has also obtained BEd (SE-MR), a professional degree certified by the Rehabilitation Council of India. He has served as Psychologist under the Government of India after being selected by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) for a substantial period of time. He has also attained success of getting selected under two State Civil Services. He is also a recipient of University of Hyderabad Chancellor’s Award (Citation, Scroll, and Research Grant of Rs. One Lakh) for his contribution to teaching, research, and corporate life. Dr. Rana was also the Principal Investigator for IoE Funded Project entitled, “Health beliefs and indigenous health practices related to non-communicable diseases and accessibility to health care services: A participatory action research on tribal communities in Telangana and Odisha” under Research call 3.

As a Resource Person, Dr Rana has conducted several workshops and training programmes on research methodology and data analyses across Central Universities, National Institutes, and other national and state organisations. Nevertheless, he has published several research papers in national and international refereed and peer-reviewed journals and books published by Springer, Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Routledge, and Pearsons.

Session 2: Diverse Approaches in Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Dr. K. M. Sharika

Assistant Professor

Affiliation: Department of Cognitive Sciences, IIT Kanpur

Research Interests: Cognitive neuroscience, Neurobiology of Affect and Motivation.

Dr. Sharika pursued her undergraduate in Biochemistry at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi. During her college days, she was keenly interested in human physiology, endocrinology, immunology, and metabolism. She also figured that brains seemed to hold the reins of behavior and applied to the National Brain Research Centre (NBRC, Manesar)’s inaugural program of a Master’s in Neuroscience (by research).

During her training in NBRC, she came across the field of Cognitive Neuroscience for the first time and decided to do a Ph.D. working there. After graduating in 2014, she joined Prof. Michael Platt’s lab (first at Duke University and later at the University of Pennsylvania) for her post-doctoral research.

Dr. Sharika is also a DBT Ramalingaswami Fellow. She joined the Interdisciplinary Program of Cognitive Science at IIT Kanpur in December 2019 as a Visiting Assistant Professor (and subsequently, the Department of Cognitive Science as an Assistant Professor in June 2021).

Dr. Amitash Ojha

Assistant Professor

Affiliation: Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Jammu

Research Interests: Multimodal tropes and Creativity, Augmented Cognition and Human-Agent Interaction, User experience and Cognition, Social Robotics, Alternative Measure of Cognitive Processing, Multiple Intelligence

Dr. Ojha was a former research fellow from the Department of Pedagogy, Philosophy, and Psychology at the University of Cagliari, Italy. He completed his post-doctoral from the School of Electronics and Engineering at Kyungpook National University, Daegu, South Korea. Being in the field of Cognitive Science for more than a decade now, he specializes in Eye-tracking, Pupillometry studies, Brain imaging (EEG, fMRI), and Behavioral Experiments.

Dr. Ojha has been awarded several prestigious research grants in the field of Cognitive Science. He received the Best Paper Award at the 10th AEARU conference in 2015 hosted by the University of Tsukuba, Japan; the Best Student Paper Award was Presented at the 2nd analogy conference in 2009 by the Cognitive Science Society at Sofia University, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Session 1: Diverse Approaches in Brain and Cognitive Sciences:

Dr. Cota Navin Gupta

Assistant Professor

Affiliation: Department of Bioscience and Bioengineering, IIT Guwahati.

Research Interests: Imaging Genetics, Biomedical Signal/Image Processing, Multimodal Analysis, Computer Aided Diagnosis, Biomedical Instrumentation.

Dr. Cota Navin Gupta is currently an Assistant Professor with Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, IIT Guwahati. His team at Neural Engineering lab is currently working on disease subtyping for psychiatric disorders using data mining techniques and acquisition of brain signals on the move for natural environment cognitive applications.  He completed his Postdoctoral learning in the area of schizophrenia imaging genetics on a joint National Institute of Health (NIH) grant between Mind Research Network, USA and Georgia State University, USA. Previously he obtained his PhD from Brain Computer Interfaces and Neural Engineering (BCI-NE) Group, University of Essex fully funded by the competitive Overseas Research Student award for international students and University of Essex scholarships. His PhD work involved designing an offline P300 Brain Computer Interface system. During his doctoral work he also explored integrating electroencephalogram and near infrared spectroscopy modalities for mental workload applications. His Masters in Biomedical Engineering was from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore where his thesis proposed a novel heart sound segmentation algorithm, which has nearly 300 citations till date.

Dr. Neeraj Kumar Sharma

Assistant Professor

Affiliation: Mehta Family School of Data Sciences and Artificial Intelligence.

Research Interests: Sensing, exploration, and understanding of audio (bio-acoustics, health-acoustics, speech and music); Brain-informed signal processing (behavioural and EEG data capture and analysis); AI for human-machine interaction (perception and cognition); Non-stationary time-series signal modelling (sampling and time-frequency analysis). His explored fields include quantification of spatial cognition triggered by speech and audio signals. Furthermore, he made use of behavioural and EEG listening experiments to capture and analyse spatial audio cognition.

Neeraj Sharma did BTech in Instrumentation and Electronics Engg. from the College of Engineering & Technology, Bhubaneswar. He completed his Masters and PhD from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He has worked as a research intern at the Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris, Frace), and a research fellow at the Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, USA), the Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore), and the International Audio Labs (Erlangen, Germany). His work has been recognized by the Brain Hub Postdoctoral fellowship from CMU and the CV Raman Postdoctoral fellowship from IISc.

Currently, he is an Assistant Professor, School of Data Science and AI, at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati (India) where he is establishing the SPIN Lab, focused on the intersection of signal processing, artificial intelligence, and sensory signal understanding. He will be delivering lecture in the upcoming lecture on “Beyond Decibels:  Quest to understand auditory perception using reaction time clues”.

Workshop on Application of Eye-Tracking in Cognitive Science Research

Dr. Jay Prakash Singh

Assistant Professor

Affiliation: The Centre of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (CBCS), University of Allahabad

Research interests: Bilingualism and Cognitive Control, Emotion and Cognition, Literacy, Decision-Making.

Dr. Singh was also a research investigator at Defence Institute of Psychological Research- Defence Research and Development Organization.

He will be conducting the workshop on Eye-Tracking, which will enable young researchers to explore different avenues related to eye-movement data and analysis, perception, attention, memory, and decision-making.

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