Morena Alac seeks to answer questions such as How do cognitive scientists study human vision, interaction or learning? and How do advanced technologies feature in such an enterprise?. She approaches these questions working with videotaped moments of laboratory practice - details of semiotic acts and everyday work of science. In particular, she is interested in how the human body features in such a process.

Richard K. Belew's research interests are in the areas of adaptive knowledge representation: integration of new insights derived from low-level machine learning (data-mining) techniques with other representations of related human knowledge. Primary application are to the search for free-text documents, patterns across genome/proteome sequences, models of the coevolution of drug resistance, and drug design.

David Borgo is an Associate Professor of Music at UC San Diego where he teaches in the Integrative Studies (IS) and Jazz and Music of the African Diaspora (JMAD) Programs. He has a B.M. degree in Jazz Studies from Indiana University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Ethnomusicology from UCLA. David won first prize at the International John Coltrane Festival (1994) and he has toured widely, including featured performances in Sweden, Holland, Armenia, Hong Kong, Macau and Mexico City. David has seven CDs and one DVD under his own name and his book, Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (Continuum 2005), won the Alan Merriam Prize in 2006 from the Society for Ethnomusicology. David’s scholarly work also appears in Jazz Perspectives, Black Music Research Journal, Journal of Popular Music Studies, American Music, Journal of American History, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Parallax, Open Space and in the forthcoming edited volumes Music as Performance: New Perspectives Across the Disciplines (Michigan University Press), Sound Musicianship: Understanding the Crafts of Music (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), The Oxford Handbook on Critical Improvisation Studies (Oxford University Press), and Jazz (Ashgate Publishing).

Diana Deutsch is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego, She is internationally known for the musical illusions and paradoxes that she discovered; these include the octave illusion, the scale illusion, the glissando illusion, the tritone paradox,  the cambiata illusion, the phantom words illusion and the speech-to-song illusion, among others. She also explores memory for music, and  how we relate the sounds of music and speech to each other. In addition she studies absolute pitch - why some people possess it, and why it is so rare.

Charles Elkan joined the UCSD faculty in 1990, after earning his Ph.D. that same year in computer science at Cornell University. He did his undergraduate degree at Cambridge University. Elkan was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. In 1998-99, he was a visiting Associate Professor in computer science at Harvard University. While at Harvard, he was Senior Scientist at the software firm Knowledge Stream Partners. Elkan has consulted for Hewlett-Packard, SAIC, Sony, IBM, and Alcoa. He has won numerous best-paper awards, including first-place at the CoIL Challenge 2000 data mining competition. Elkan is the co-founder of UCSD's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

David Kirsh received his BA from the University of Toronto in philosophy and economics, his D.Phil from Oxford University on foundations of cognitive science, and I spent five years at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab as a research scientist. I am a Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California at San Diego. Although his official areas of specialization are artificial intelligence, situated cognition, philosophy of mind and science, and foundations of cognitive science, he has been working for some years now on cognitive engineering and how to better design highly interactive environments.

Roger Levy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. He runs the Computational Psycholinguistics Lab, and his research focuses on theoretical and applied questions in the processing of natural language. Inherently, linguistic communication involves the resolution of uncertainty over a potentially unbounded set of possible signals and meanings. How can a fixed set of knowledge and resources be deployed to manage this uncertainty? To address these questions he uses a combination of computational modelling and psycholinguistic experimentation. This work furthers our understanding of the cognitive underpinning of language processing, and helps us design models and algorithms that will allow machines to process human language.

Ramesh Rao is the director of the University of California, San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). In 2004, he was appointed the first holder of the Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Telecommunications and Information Technologies in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, where he has been a faculty member since 1984. Prior to becoming the Calit2 UCSD division director in 2001, he served as the director of UCSD's Center for Wireless Communications (CWC).

Ayse Sagin received her PhD in Cognitive Science from UCSD, and has an MSc in computer science and BSc in mathematics. After a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, she returned to UCSD as a Professor in the fall of 2009.

Nuno Vasconcelos is a Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of UCSD, where he heads the Statistical Visual Computing Laboratory. Before joining UCSD, he was a member of the research staff at the Compaq Cambridge Research Laboratory, which later became the HP Cambridge Research Laboratory. He received a PhD from MIT in 2000 and was a research assistant at the MIT Media Laboratory for the duration of my studies. His areas of research interest are computer vision, statistical signal processing, machine learning, and multimedia.