Community engagement, organized events, service to the scientific community, and art-science collaborations.

Art-Science Collaborations

NON-FAKE TIMES (2024)

An immersive media art series exploring low-dimensional manifolds through sensory experiences. The project asks: “Can our senses help us understand and make sense of low-dimensional representations of complex data?”

Using real-time algorithms developed by the lab, the series includes two major works:

• Overparameterized Time: An immersive audiovisual piece examining movement and real-time computational processes. A new type of persistent continuous-valued working memory based on two oscillating stable limit cycles integrates the visual motion energy of the performer.
• Manifold Time: An interactive installation transforming space into a collective system through human presence detection and pattern movement.

The works create aesthetic experiences that evoke the scientific process of understanding brain complexity through sonification and visualization.

Team:

• Nico Espinoza (Creator, Director, Spatial Sound & Light Design)
• Il Memming Park (Co-creator, Concept Developer)
• Hyungju Jeon (Generative Data Visualization)
• Ábel Ságodi (Gabor Filter Code, Video Rendering)
• Mahmoud Elmakki (Lab Support)
• Matt Dowling (Lab Support)
• Suia Ferlauto (Performance)

Presentations:

• May 16-18, 2024: Metamersion: Healing Algorithms, Champalimaud Warehouse, Lisbon
• March 5, 2024: COSYNE 2024, Champalimaud Warehouse, Lisbon

Funding: Champalimaud Centre For The Unknown

Videos:

Project Website: nicoespinoza.com/NON-FAKE-TIMES

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Organized Workshops & Events

• 2025 Oct Chair (with Shreya Saxena, Guillaume Hennequin)
  Champalimaud Research Symposium 2025 — Neuro-Cybernetics at Scale
  https://neurocybernetics.cc
• 2025 Apr Co-Organizer (with Sool Park)
  Beyond Clarity: The first smooth exchange between the discrete and the continuous
  https://beyond-clarity.github.io/
• 2024 Mar Workshop Co-organizer (with Daniel Durstewitz)
  COSYNE 2024 workshop — Reconstructing Dynamical Systems from Neural Data
  https://sites.google.com/research.fchampalimaud.org/cosyne-dynamical-systems-ws
• 2023 Oct Planning committee
  Time Research Forum 3
  https://timingforum.org/
• 2022 Oct Organizer
  Neural Latent State and Dynamics Inference Workshop
  https://github.com/catniplab/latent_dynamics_workshop/
• 2022 Apr – 2023 Jul Co-Director
  Cajal course on Machine Learning for Neuroscience
  https://cajal-training.org/on-site/artificial-intelligence/
• 2020 Apr Co-organizer (with Jeffrey Heinz, Christian Luhmann, Heather Lynch)
  Interpretable AI: Across the Disciplines
  https://interpretable2020.wordpress.com/
  (cancelled due to COVID-19 pandemic)
• 2019 Oct Local Organizing Committee Member
  Deepmath
  https://www.deepmath-conference.com/
• 2019 Mar Workshop Co-organizer (with Benjamin F. Grewe et al.)
  COSYNE 2019 workshop — Why Spike?
  https://whyspike.wordpress.com/
• 2016 Jul Workshop Co-organizer (with Ian Stevenson)
  Organization for Computational Neuroscience (CNS) 2016 workshop — Statistical analysis of neural time series
  http://stevensonlab.github.io/cns2016-neural-timeseries/
• 2014 Dec Workshop Co-organizer (with Ferran Diego, Jeremy Freeman, Jakob Macke, Eftychios Pnevmatikakis)
  NIPS 2014 workshop — Large scale optical physiology: From data-acquisition to models of neural coding
  http://hci.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/Staff/fdiego/LargeScaleOpticalPhysiology/
• 2014 Mar Workshop Co-organizer (with Evan Archer, Jonathan Pillow)
  Computational Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) 2014 workshop — Scalable models for high-dimensional neural data
  http://scalablemodels.wordpress.com/

Lab Outings

2024 Lab Retreat