Luc Steels studied linguistics at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA).
His main research field is Artificial Intelligence covering a wide range of intelligent abilities, including vision, robotic behavior, conceptual representations and language. In 1983 he became a professor of computer science at the University of Brussels (VUB) and in 1996 he founded the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris and became its first director.
Currently he is ICREA Research Professor at the Institute for Evolutionary Biology (CSIC,UPF).

Francesca Tria is a researcher at the Physics Department of Sapienza University of Rome. She got her degree in physics at Sapienza University of Rome and her PhD in physics at the University of Naples Federico II. She spent two years as a post-doc at the ICTP Institute in Trieste before moving at the Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI) in Turin. Starting from a background in statistical physics and complex systems, she explored different research realms where this expertise could be successfully applied. In particular, her research activity includes complex systems approaches to biologically related problems, such as evolutionary dynamics and phylogeny reconstruction, to social phenomena, such as language evolution, learning and innovation dynamics. She was recently part of the EU project EveryAware, locally coordinating the activities of the group of ISI. She is currently coordinating the ISI team in the KREYON project.