Biographies

Susan Alexjander

Susan Alexjander is Director of Science & The Arts, which furthers scientific research into the 'musical' universe of frequency; honors a holistic, vibrationally connected vision of creation; and supports outreach through lecturing, writing, and composition. Her CD Sequencia is internationally known for its pioneering work with the molecular frequencies of DNA rendered into sound. It has been featured on CNN, BBC Radio, Wisconsin Public Radio, and has been on exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Museum of Santa Barbara. It is currently part of a New York City-wide celebration of the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA.

Alexjander has taught at the university level and is currently an adjunct faculty member of Union Institute in Sacramento, California and Goddard College, Vermont. Her compositions have been performed throughout the United States, including collaborations with dance companies and film. She holds a Masters degree in Music Composition and Theory from San Jose State University.

Awards include a Fellowship from the Alden B. Dow Creativity Center in Midland, Michigan, to explore the geometry of the mineral kingdom as musical data, and a Leighton Studios Residency in Banff, Canada.

Works in progress include a CD entitled The Fifth Sun (on the Logos Series) featuring the sounds of pulsars, elements, and other natural rhythms. A sound design for film entitled The River

Mauro Annunziato

Mauro Annunziato founded the media art-science group Plancton in 1994 with Piero Pierucci, focusing research on the creative and aesthetic potentials of chaos and artificial life, as well as the relationships between art and science, mind and society, and communication and interaction. Through Plancton, Annunziato has disseminated artworks in international art-science-technology contexts (Imagina

Jerome H. Barkow

Jerome H. Barkow is a biosocial anthropologist in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Canada. His undergraduate degree (in psychology, 1964) was awarded by CUNY (Brooklyn College), and his MA (1966) and PhD (1970), both in Human Development, were granted by the University of Chicago. Barkow has done ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa and, more recently, in Indonesia, and has a long-term interest in evolution and human nature. He is the author of Darwin, Sex, and Status: Biological Approaches to Mind and Culture (1989), and his co-edited volume (with John Tooby and Leda Cosmides), The Adapted Mind (1992), helped launch the now burgeoning field of evolutionary psychology. He is currently editing a volume, Missing the Revolution: Evolutionary Psychology as the Infrastructure of Culture and Society. His other major area of interest has to do with the anthropology of food and with food and culture.

Eleonora Bilotta

Eleonora Bilotta is Professor of General Psychology in the Arts and Humanities Faculty at the University of Calabria, Italy. Her current research interests include intelligent systems in education, the psychology of programming, the psychology of music, and artificial life and music. She is co-director of the Evolutionary Systems Group. Together with Pietro Pantano, she has organized the Artificial Life Models For Musical Application (ALMMA) workshops. The first of these was held during the Sixth European Conference on Artificial Life 2001 in Prague; the second was during the 8th International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (ALife VIII) at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Eleonora coordinates the Ph.D. course in the Psychology of Programming and Artificial Intelligence.

John B. Campbell

John Campbell has been a professional archaeologist for more than thirty years, but he has had interests in astronomy and the possibilities for life elsewhere for nearly fifty years. Now with an expanded range of disciplines involved in astrobiology and SETI research, he sees an opportunity for archaeology to contribute. In high school in Pennsylvania John had hoped to become an astronaut, but instead of Colorado (US Air Force Academy) he did his first degree at Park College (now Park University) in Missouri, majoring in anthropology and sociology with minors in zoology and German. Then it was

William H. Edmondson

William gained a degree in Physics from the University of Surrey in 1968, and studied AI in Edinburgh before moving to Imperial College London where he worked for his PhD with Colin Cherry. The doctoral work was on a new technique for speech training for the deaf. This work led to the PhD award in Psychology/Electrical Engineering in 1974, and to a life-long interest in communication with the deaf, as well as in speech processing.

Research funding proved difficult to come by in the 1970s, and when money dried up for research on classroom communication in schools for the deaf, William re-trained by doing a MA degree in Theoretical Linguistics as well as developing a research and teaching interest in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). He joined the faculty at the University of Birmingham in 1986 to research and teach Cognitive Science (linguistics and HCI). Notably, he was instrumental in the joint organization with the School of Psychology of a MSc in Cognitive Science - well regarded throughout the 1990s until government funding for studentships was halted.

Current research interests are HCI, Cognitive Modelling and AI, Speech and Sign Language processing, and Communication studies generally - notably extending to CETI recently.

Vladimir Ivkovic

Vladimir Ivkovic is a graduate student in Biological Anthropology in the Faculty of Science of the University of Zagreb, and he is employed as a researcher by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Republic of Croatia within the Population Structure of Croatia

Colin Johnson

Colin Johnson is a lecturer in computer science at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England. He studied mathematics at the University of York, and prior to working at Kent worked at Napier University in Edinburgh and the University of Exeter. His main research interests are in projects which combine mathematical and computational ideas with concepts and problems from the natural sciences, in particular biology. This work includes two main aspects. The first of these is projects which take inspiration from biological ideas such as evolution, the immune system, and the behaviour of animal swarms and apply these ideas to computational problems. In particular, recent work has concentrated on the use of "swarm intelligence" ideas in optimization and the application of nature-inspired techniques in bioinformatics. His second main area of interest is the application of computational techniques in biology; in particular, he has recently been involved in a number of projects which attempt to model processes inside cells and to understand how these processes can go wrong in disease.

Alfred Kracher

Alfred Kracher is Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Arkansas and a principal investigator in the Arkansas-Oklahoma Center for Space and Planetary Sciences. He is currently involved in research on the chemical composition of asteroids as well as the establishment of a new graduate degree program in space and planetary sciences.

A native of Vienna, Austria, he holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Vienna, where he is a guest lecturer in environmental science. He has previously worked in meteorite research at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, UCLA, the University of New Mexico, and Iowa State University.

Aside from his primary work on the cosmochemistry of meteorites and asteroids he is interested in the wider social implications of space research and the dialogue between science and religion. He has so far written 11 papers and book chapters in this area, in addition to numerous technical and scientific papers, conference abstracts, and popular science contributions to newspapers and magazines.

Ulla Lehtonen

Ulla Lehtonen holds a Master of Theology degree in Comparative Religion and a Master of Arts degree in History and Philosophy from the University of Helsinki, Finland, as well as a Master of Studies degree in the History of Ancient Religions from Oxford University, UK. She is a DPhil student at Oxford University, UK and teaches Multicultural Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests lie in the history of ancient religions (her doctoral thesis discusses cultural identity issues in the ancient Roman Empire), indigenous religions, historiography and methodological issues in the study of history, intercultural and interreligious dialogue, and peace education. Lehtonen

Dominique Lestel

Dominique Lestel, born in 1961 in Paris, is a philosopher and an ethologist. He has been an associate professor at Ecole normale sup

Hubert Meisinger

Hubert Meisinger is Campus Minister at the Evangelische Studierenden-/Hochschulgemeinde (ESG) at Darmstadt University of Technology, as well as Scientific Programme Officer and Co-Editor of the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology (ESSSAT). He also is a member of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS) and the newly formed International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR). Meisinger holds a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Heidelberg, with an interdisciplinary dissertation Love and Altruism: An Exegetical Approach towards the Dialogue between Theology and Science. He received the 1996 ESSSAT Prize for Studies in Science and Theology for this dissertation. In 1999 he received an award from the Science and Religion Course Program of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) was given to him, as well as a CTNS European Award for Teaching in Science and Religion in 2002. Meisinger has a long-term interest in the dialogue between science, technology, and religion, focusing especially on cosmology, sociobiology, and theology. He is currently involved in the publication of two books - one entitled Visions of Humankind in an Era of Genes and the other one called Cosmology, Physics and Spirituality.

Richard K. Merritt

Richard K. Merritt is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department of Luther College, where he teaches computer art, design, and art history. After completing his B.A. in history at Carleton College, he received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, where he focused on painting, intermedia/multi-media, and video. His current work is influenced by robotics, fundamental cryptography, and 3D cellular automata.

Merritt has published in such diverse periodicals as Leonardo, Imaging and Image Processing, and Agora, and he is currently completing two books: Deep Constructs: The Origins and History of Immersive Experience and Dances of Survival: Performance, Music, Ritual and Practice in the Martial Arts of Africans in the New World. His art has recently been exhibited at the Ninth New York Digital Salon, held in New York

Alexander Mihalic

Alexander Mihalic is a composer, a computer programmer, and the creator of a "live-electronic" instrument. He obtained his Ph.D. in composition in 2000 for his work on the influence and use of extramusical rules and data on musical composition. All musical compositions of his project "Encyclopaedia Musicalis" (started in 1992) are based on extramusical data applied to musical parameters and forms, drawing on such topics as crystal symmetries, astronomy, and the structure of DNA. He has also applied brain waves to musical and visual parameters on interdisciplinary projects involving biofeedback. In 1997 Mihalic constructed the Pedalophone, which is used by numerous musicians and composers for creating live-electronic music. Currently he is the Computer Music Department Manager at the National Center for Electroacoustic Music in Bourges, France.

Alexander Ollongren

Alexander Ollongren is Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Computer Science and Guest Professor of Astronomy at Leiden University in The Netherlands. His fields of interest include syntax and semantics of formal languages, functional programming, numerical mathematics, dynamical astronomy in the galaxy and solar system, and logic.

Ollongren became interested many years ago in the formalism of Hans Freudenthal's Language for Cosmic Intercourse (Lingua Cosmica, or Lincos), and he first considered reformulating Lincos in terms of concepts in list processing, itself based on the lambda calculus in logic. He realised later that too many primitives would be involved and changed course in 1999 to reformulating Lincos in terms of constructive logic, at first without induction. This formalism is also based on the lambda calculus, but in a type-theoretic setting, with a minimal set of basic concepts. He has used the new system to explain the logic contents of various kinds of messages constructed for ETI.

Ollongren

Pietro Pantano

Pietro Pantano is Professor of Classical Mechanics and Applied Mathematics in the Engineering Faculty at the University of Calabria, Italy. His current research interests include non-linear phenomena and wave propagation theory, complexity, self-organized criticity, artificial life, and generative and evolutive music. He is Director of the Evolutionary Systems Group. Together with Eleonora Bilotta, he has organized the Artificial Life Models For Musical Application (ALMMA) workshops. The first of these was held during the Sixth European Conference on Artificial Life 2001 in Prague; the second was during the 8th International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (ALife VIII) at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Sonya Rapoport

Sonya Rapoport, an electronic artist since 1976, produces cross-cultural multi-media artworks, interactive installations, and (since 1994) art work for web viewing.

Her computer assisted artworks reflect an ideology of transmutation: trans-cultural, trans-sexual and trans-genic. She has collaborated in art/science projects with the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; Anthropology and Plant & Microbiology Departments at the University of California, Berkeley; and the Instituto de Agricultura Sostenible in Cordoba, Spain.

Rapoport's cross-cultural multi-disciplinary and interactive installations have been presented internationally at Sao Paulo, Brazil; Ars Electronica, Austria; Documenta, Kassel, Germany; the Kuopio Museum, Finland; ISEA conferences; and traveling exhibitions sponsored by the U.S. Information Service and the National Endowment for the Arts. Most recently, she lectured and exhibited her work at the Second International Art Biennial-Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Since 1988 Rapoport has created art projects for the Internet, for which she received a California Arts Council grant for ACEN Telecommunication. Her artwork references scientific, biblical, and gender topics.

Rapoport serves on the governing board of LEONARDO/ISAST. Her art critiques appear in their MIT publications. She is a member of the Community Advisory Committee for the Berkeley Art Museum of the University of California.

David Rosenboom

David Rosenboom is a composer, performer, conductor, interdisciplinary artist, author, and educator, known as a pioneer in American experimental music. He has explored ideas in his work about the spontaneous evolution of forms, languages for improvisation, new techniques in scoring for ensembles, cross-cultural collaborations, performance art, computer music systems, interactive multi-media, compositional algorithms, and extended musical interface with the human nervous system since the 1960s. Rosenboom has been Dean of the School of Music and Conductor of the New Century Players at the California Institute of the Arts since 1990 and was Co-Director of the Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology from 1990 to 1998. He taught at Mills College from 1979 to 1990, was Professor of Music, Head of the Music Department, Director of the Center for Contemporary Music, and held the Darius Milhaud Chair from 1987 to 1990. He studied at the University of Illinois, where he was later awarded the prestigious George A. Miller Professorship and has held positions in the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York in Buffalo, York University in Toronto, where he was Professor of Music and Interdisciplinary Studies, and others.

Sundar Sarukkai

Sundar Sarukkai studied physics and philosophy as a graduate student at Purdue University. His formal doctoral degree is in particle physics. He has been a faculty member in the philosophy group at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore since 1994 and is currently a Fellow there. He was awarded the Homi Bhaba Fellowship from 1997

John Schott

John Schott is the James W. Strong Professor of the Liberal Arts at Carleton College, where he has directed the Media Studies Program for the past 20 years. As a graduate student in Art History at the University of Michigan, he was elected into the Michigan Society of Fellows, which provided complete support for three years to work on projects of his choosing. As a fine art photographer, his work was collected by the Museum of Modern Art and appeared in the landmark exhibition The New Topographics at George Eastman House. He has received individual artists grants in photography from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Minnesota State Arts Board. He has produced two feature documentary films in association with E. J. Vaughn: America

M. A. Mosalam Shaltout

Professor Mosalam Shaltout is Chairman of the Space Research Center at the Desert Environment Research Institute of Minufiyia University in El-Sadat City, Egypt. Born in Egypt on May 9, 1946, he earned a B.SC. in physics and astronomy (1967), an M.SC. in solar physics (1973), and a Ph.D. in solar flares (1977), all from the Faculty of Science at Cairo University.

While still pursuing his advanced education , Dr. Shaltout worked as a Research Assistant at the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics (NRIAG) in the Helwan area of Cairo, Egypt between 1968 and 1977. He then worked as a researcher at NRIAG from 1978 to 1981. Following this, from 1981 to 1985 Dr. Shaltout served as an Associate Professor of Solar-Terrestrial physics in the Faculty of Science of King Abd-EL- Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He has been a Full Professor at NRIAG since May 1987. Moreover , he was Vice-Chairman of the Solar and Space Research Department from 1989 to 1995, and Chairman of the same department from 1995 to 1998.

Additionally, Professor Shaltout has been Egypt's representative at more than 65 international conferences and world congresses between 1985 and 2002. He has received several honors, including the Country Encouragement Prize in Physics in 1986 and the Country Medal of Excellence, First Class in 1995, amongst others.

Notably, Dr. Shaltout is one of the most famous leading intellectuals in the Arab world, and he is well known to the general public through television, radio, and newspapers. Also, he is an independent writer on the subjects of national strategy and projects in the fields of scientific research, technology development, energy, and the environment. Recently, he has suggested several worldwide projects for the twenty-first century in articles written for international journals, including proposals for solar hydrogen production from Nasser Lake in Upper Egypt, the Abu Simel Radio telescope in Upper Egypt as a part of the world

Diana Slattery

As Associate Director of the Academy of Electronic Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Diana Reed Slattery researches, designs, and produces highly interactive, game-like multimedia environments for education, entertainment, and the arts. Slattery

Henna T

A group of students at Kuusamo High School in Kuusamo, Finland conducted a SETI workshop in November 2002, culminating in a paper presented at the current workshop. This paper represents the work of eleven students, all 16 or 17 years old: Suvi Aittakumpu, Kaisa Haataja, Kristiina Haataja, Annemari Heikkinen, Petra Koramo, Emilia Suoraniemi, Markus Takkinen, Johanna Tuovila, Henna T

Douglas Vakoch

Douglas Vakoch is the Interstellar Message Group Leader at the SETI Institute, as well as the only social scientist employed by a SETI organization. He is particularly interested in how we might compose reply messages that would begin to express what it's like to be human. Supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Vakoch leads the SETI Institute's project to compose interstellar messages that may some day be sent in reply to a signal from extraterrestrials. This message-making project describes the evolution of human behavior and morality, with an emphasis on altruism.

As Chairman of a series of international meetings on designing interstellar messages, Vakoch facilitates discussions between scholars from a variety of disciplines and nations. Drawing on these meetings, he is now editing a book that examines ways to combine artistic and scientific perspectives on composing interstellar messages. This book will be published by The MIT Press in 2004.

As a member of the International Institute of Space Law, Vakoch examines international policy issues related to sending messages to extraterrestrials. Through his affiliation with the Department of Psychology at the University of California at Davis, he also studies people's reactions to the detection of life beyond Earth.

In addition to being a clinical psychologist (Ph.D., State University of New York at Stony Brook), Vakoch has formal training in comparative religion (B.A., Carleton College) as well as the history and philosophy of science (M.A., University of Notre Dame).