ECSU updates (July 2026)

June was one of the fullest months the unit has had in a while — two book chapters and a journal paper out, a conference paper accepted, a keynote in Finland, and a new colleague joining the lab. Here's the roundup.

Beyond the individual. Overcoming methodological individualism appeared in Royal Society Open Science, led by Ani Grigoryan with Laura Mojica, Leonardo Zapata-Fonseca, Iwin Leenen, and Tom. Working from our perceptual crossing data, it shows that a live social interaction is more than the moment-to-moment moves of either partner — the pair, not the individual, is the right unit of analysis. DOI: 10.1098/rsos.252131

Two for MIT Press. Two open-access book chapters landed within a week of each other. Embodied AI based on dynamic human–computer interaction, with Dobromir Dotov, makes the case for AI built around real-time coupling rather than fixed input and output. And Making meaning matter with irruption theory, with PhD student Georgii Karelin and Takashi Ikegami, carries irruption theory into biosemiotics — how meaning can make a genuine difference to living matter. (Embodied AI · Making meaning matter.)

A keynote in Finland. Tom gave an invited keynote at PaMoSA 2026 — Philosophy and Mathematics of Situated Agency — at the University of Oulu, in good company alongside Daniel Hutto and Kevin O'Regan. The theme was a question that keeps resurfacing in our work: when should an agent act? The perceptual crossing experiment keeps giving a clock-free answer, where the timing of a decision falls out of the rate of the interaction itself. The companion paper, Embodied temporal anticipation, was accepted to IEEE ICDL 2026.

A new face. We're delighted to welcome Ann Huang, who joins us as a postdoctoral researcher — her first day is today. After a PhD in cognitive science at Osnabrück, she brings an experimental-psychology background to our work on haptic human–computer interaction, widening the unit's range.

Bubbles, wrapped. Keisuke Shiba, our visiting researcher from Suntory, brought his carbonation-and-EEG pilot to a close as his visit wrapped up — running the last of five sessions with Brian and Milan and presenting the results to the unit. What began in April as "exactly as fun as it sounds" is now a pilot dataset heading into analysis.

More next month.