July 17, 2025
Value-Aware AI (VALAWAI)
Understanding the moral values embedded in user-generated content is essential for building AI systems that interpret and engage with human discourse, especially in polarized, emotionally charged spaces like social media. This project pioneers value-aware AI, capable of detecting and reasoning about the moral undercurrents driving online conversations.
July 2, 2025
ROMI, Robotics for microfarms
The long-term goal is to develop robotic tools and AI systems to monitor, model and manage food-producing ecosystems. The ecosystems that we are targeting are small, highly diversified, organic farms. The tools that we are designing will have to intervene in this complex natural environment and will have to gather the necessary data that allows to track and predict the health of the plants and the ecosystem. These new tools may help increase food production AND the biodiversity of farming systems while at the same time lowering the physical effort needed to run a farm.
July 1, 2025
Emmanuel Deruty
Is traditional music theory relevant to recent popular music, and how should it evolve? Traditional music theory assumes fixed scales, predefined tuning, and the clear transmission of well-defined pitches. Modern popular music challenges these assumptions, incorporating alternative tuning frameworks and uncertainty in pitch perception. Inspired by Cartesian doubt and phenomenology, the presentation advocates suspending biases, prioritising observation, and generalising cautiously. Pitch perception is more complex than commonly assumed. Similarly to how a physical line’s dimension can exceed one, tones may resist classification as a single pitch. Modern popular music follows principles that differ from those that historically shaped scale construction. A new theoretical framework suggests that the tones themselves can define the tuning system rather than conforming to a predetermined structure. Another hypothesis proposes that repetition in music takes advantage of multi-stable pitch percepts. A more precise understanding of musical evolution prevents misinterpretations and false conclusions. It enhances music technology and AI applications while fostering creative exploration beyond classical constraints. Western classical music theory is a specific system, not a universal truth. Understanding modern popular music requires observing how it develops rather than imposing outdated frameworks.
July 1, 2025
Riz Fernando Noronha
Soil is a complex, dynamic material, with physical properties that depend on its biological content. We propose a cellular automaton model for self-organizing soil structure, where soil aggregates and serves as food for microbial species. These, in turn, produce nutrients that facilitate self-amplification, establishing a cyclical dynamic of consumption and regeneration. Our model explores the spatial interactions between these components and their role in sustaining a balanced ecosystem. The main results demonstrate that (1) spatial structure supports a stable living state, preventing population collapse or uncontrolled growth; (2) the spatial model allows for the coexistence of parasitic species, which exploit parts of the system without driving it to extinction; and (3) optimal growth conditions for microbes are associated to diverse length scales in the soil structure, suggesting that heterogeneity is key to ecosystem resilience. These findings highlight the importance of spatio-temporal dynamics of life in soil ecology.