ECSU updates (September 2026)

August was a conference month for the unit — the ECogS program is out, a familiar colleague is back as a postdoc, and there were talks on both sides of the Pacific.

ECogS 2026. The detailed program is out for November at OIST, under the theme From Embodied AI to LLMs and Back. Murray Shanahan opens on embodiment and large language models, with Jun Tani, Takashi Ikegami, Marieke van Vugt, Luc Steels and others across the week. Conference page

Welcome, John. We're delighted to welcome John Sykes back as a postdoctoral researcher — his first day is today, though he's been on campus since mid-August. John was with us as a visiting doctoral researcher a few years ago; he now joins the philosopher-of-embodied-cognition line, with a recent Cambridge chapter on how affectivity moves the mind because it has the weight of the world behind it.

Los Alamos. Tom gave a seminar at Los Alamos National Laboratory's Center for Nonlinear Studies — A cognitive science perspective on the mind-body problem — and stopped at the Santa Fe Institute, whose early artificial-life volumes were a PhD-era inspiration.

A Varela review. Tom's invited review of the new annotated edition of Francisco Varela's Principles of Biological Autonomy (edited by Ezequiel Di Paolo and Evan Thompson for MIT Press) appeared in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. He takes the book as a thought experiment that pushes autopoietic closure until it fails, and follows the fault lines to the contingency that gives the world back its independence. DOI: 10.1007/s11097-026-10212-9

Artificial life. Georgii Karelin presented at ALIFE 2026 in Waterloo, joining a workshop online from Okinawa on the definition of life. The unit's ALife thread keeps running even when the conference is on the other side of the date line.

Rotation wrap. Julia Zasada wrapped her rotation with us, presenting her work on how clearly pairs in the perceptual crossing experiment feel they have found each other.

More next month.