EVENING LECTURES

DATE: August 5, 2025

Short Bio: Gemma Boleda is an ICREA Research Professor in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where she co-leads the Computational Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (COLT) research group. She previously held post-doctoral positions at the University of Trento (Italy), The University of Texas at Austin (USA), and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain). Before that, she graduated in Spanish Philology at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and obtained her Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Language at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (both in Spain). She was also a visiting researcher at the Computational Linguistics & Phonetics department (CoLi) of Saarland University and the Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS) of the University of Stuttgart, both in Germany. In her research, Prof. Boleda uses quantitative and computational methods to better understand how natural languages convey meaning, and why they do it like they do.

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DATE: July 29, 2025

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DATE: August 7, 2025

Short Bio: Phokion Kolaitis is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California Santa Cruz and a Principal Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center. His research interests include principles of database systems, logic in computer science, and computational complexity. He is a Fellow of the AAAS and the ACM, a Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters as well as the Academia Europaea. Among other distinctions, he was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two IBM Research Division Outstanding Innovation Awards, an IBM Research Division Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, two ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Awards,  an ICDT Test-of-Time Award, and an Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation. 

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DATE: July 31, 2025

Short Bio: Kristina Liefke is a Junior Professor at Ruhr-Universität’s Department of Philosophy II, where she leads the research group ‘Philosophy of Information and Communication’. Her research lies at the intersection of formal semantics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. She has worked extensively on intensionality, non-propositional attitudes, type-logical semantics, and natural language ontology. In her most recent work, she tries to apply formal semantic tools to mental representations. Kristina is a PI in the research unit FOR 2812: Constructing Scenarios of the Past (Bochum), an associate member of the Centre for Philosophy of Memory (Université Grenoble Alpes), and an external member of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (LMU Munich). She obtained her PhD from the Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (the Netherlands).

TOPIC: Mnemic meaning: The super semantics of episodic memory