(Update on March, 2013)

Luisa Damiano (PhD) is a Research Fellow in Philosophy of Science at the University of Bergamo (Italy), where she just established, together with Gianluca Bocchi, the Epistemology of the Sciences of the Artificial Research Group (ESARG).

Her main research fields are:

– Epistemology of Cognitive Sciences and Philosophy of Mind, with a focus on Cognitive Extension, Minimal Cognition, Inter-subjective Cognition, Embodiment and Enaction;

– Philosophy of Biology, with a focus on Self-organization, Autopoiesis, Minimal Life, Origins of Life;

– Epistemology of the Sciences of the Artificial, with a focus on the Synthetic Modeling of Life and Cognition, in particular in Synthetic Biology and in Cognitive, Developmental and Social Robotics.

She worked on these topics in close collaboration with scientific teams at the University of Rome Three, Italy (Origins of Life Group, SynthCells European Project), at the Ritsumeikan University of Kyoto, Japan (Graduate School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences, Empathy and Frontier Sciences and Artificial Empathy JSPS Projects), and at the University of Hertfordshire, UK (Adaptive Systems Research Group, Feelix Growing and Aliz-é European Projects), with which she is still collaborating.

She is a member of EucogIII (3rd European Network for the Advancement of Artificial Cognitive Systems, Interaction and Robotics), and of the Scientific Committee of Aldebaran Robotics (Romeo Project).

On the topics of her research she wrote several articles and a book (Damiano L., Unità in dialogo, Mondadori, Milano 2009, being translated into English). She is preparing, together with Paul Dumouchel, a book on Artificial Empathy which will be published both in English (The Michigan State University Press, under contract) and in French (Seuil).

Together with Pasquale Stano and Yutetsu Kuruma, she is organizing the satellite workshop "What Synthetic Biology can offer to Artificial Intelligence?" at ECAL 2013.

She is organizing, together with Vincent Müller, the International Workshop "Synthetic Modeling of Life and Cognition: Open Questions", which will be held at the University of Bergamo from the 12th to the 14th of September 2013.