Juan Carlos FarahJuan Carlos Farah received his Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Harvard University, completed studies in Computer Science at Stanford University, and a Master of Science in Computing at Imperial College London. Since 2017, Juan Carlos has worked as a researcher and software engineer at the Interaction Systems Group (REACT) of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He is the technical lead for the Graasp Ecosystem, a suite of native and web applications that support digital education activities and are the core technology behind the Horizon 2020 Next-Lab and GO-GA European Innovation Action Projects. As a part of these projects, Juan Carlos conducted research on privacy-preserving systems for technology-enhanced learning. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Robotics and Intelligent Systems at EPFL, focusing on human-computer interaction and the perception of anthropomorphic traits in intelligent conversational agents. As part of his teaching duties, he gives a yearly lecture on trust, privacy and reputation frameworks for social media platforms.
Alexandra Corina NiculescuEducational expert with 15 years of experience in multicultural environments, I take my passion from supporting learners in improving their performance in achievement settings. Having worked for or collaborated with prestigious academic, governmental and non-profit institutions, I take a multi-disciplinary approach on education with insights from psychology, medical education and organizational management. During my research and teaching, academic coaching, curriculum design or consultancy, I value the human aspect of education and focus on the role of emotions and the value of providing feedback for better performance. In my approach, success is the outcome of an interaction between what characteristics a learner brings in and the amount of support provided by the environment. In other words, academic success is a matter of finding the most suitable educational approaches of engaging the learner in the learning process.
Emanuela De FalcoI am a physicist by training, and I have been a researcher in the neuroscience field since 2014. During my neuroscience training, I worked with intracranial recordings from patients suffering from epilepsy. Here, I investigated declarative memory and the encoding of concepts in the human medial temporal lobes. Afterwards, I spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher working on high-density electrophysiological recordings from the medial prefrontal cortex of rodents and investigating neuronal population dynamics underlying complex behaviors.I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and a member of the Laboratory of Congitive Neuroscience (LNCO). My current research projects are centered around the investigation of the neural basis of bodily self-consciousness and its link to cognitive processes.
