When: 14:00–14:45
Where: T5, CS Building, Konemiehentie 2,
02150 Espoo
About the Colloquium
The Mind Meets Machine series is a new monthly forum at Aalto CS that brings together researchers and students across disciplines. We focus on the intersection of mind and technology, from cognitive mechanisms to applied AI, aiming to share cutting-edge research, spark dialogue, and foster collaborations across schools and departments.
October 1, 2025 — Antti Oulasvirta (Aalto)
Simulators Propel Computational Cognitive Models
Emerging software simulators now provide richly detailed replicas of real-world environments. Training and testing computational cognitive models within these simulators makes it possible to account for a wider range of factors, thereby enabling more relevant predictions, inferences, and interventions—while remaining grounded in theory. This capability is opening a new frontier for the application of computational cognitive models across engineering, computing, and design.
Bio: Antti Oulasvirta leads the Computational Behavior Lab (cbl.aalto.fi) at Aalto University. Prior to joining Aalto, he was a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. He received his doctorate in Cognitive Science from the University of Helsinki in 2006. He was awarded the ERC Starting Grant (2015-2020) for research on computational design of user interfaces and the ERC Advanced Grant (2024-2029) for studying computational models of human behavior. He is a Fellow of ELLIS (European Laboratory for
Learning and Intelligent Systems). In 2025, he was invited to the SIGCHI Academy.
November 5, 2025 — Roland Fleming (University of Giessen, Germany )
Bio: Roland Fleming read PPP at Oxford, and did his PhD at MIT. After a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, he joined Giessen University, where he is currently the Kurt Koffka Professor of Experimental Psychology. His research combines psychophysics, neural modelling, computer graphics
and image analysis to understand how the brain estimates the physical properties of objects. He coordinated the EU-funded Marie Curie Training Network ”PRISM: Perceptual Representation of Illumination, Shape and Materials”. In 2013 he was awarded the Young Investigator Award by the Vision Sciences Society, and in 2016 an ERC Consolidator Award for the project ”SHAPE: On the perception of growth, form and process”.
January 7, 2026 — Heiko Hecht & Christoph von Castell (JGU Mainz, Germany)
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