The ICREAs

ICREA Research Professors form a vibrant community of scientists and researchers in all areas of knowledge that contribute to the advancement of humankind by exploring, interpreting and questioning. Have a look and learn about their amazing discoveries and findings here:

Wagner, Peter

Universitat de Barcelona (UB)

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Wagner, Peter
Research Professor at
Universitat de Barcelona (UB)
Social & Behavioural Sciences
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Research interests

Peter Wagner's research is based in comparative historical and political sociology, social and political theory, and sociology of the social sciences. It focuses on the identification and comparative analysis of different forms of social and political modernity and of the historical trajectories and transformations of modern societies. Initially applied to a comparative political sociology of European societies, the research programme has been elaborated further towards a "world-sociology", focusing on Latin American, Southern African and more broadly BRICS societies in terms of global connectedness. In 2022, he also led the research cluster "Modernity in Central Asia" at U ofA Central Asia. Analyzing the persisting tensions between struggles for autonomy and forms of domination, it explores in the light of historical experiences in different world-regions the current possibilities of progress, not least in the face of human action reaching and exceeding planetary boundaries.

Key words
political sociology, social and political theory, comparative-historical sociology, European studies, sociology of the sciences
Wanner, Leo

Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)

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Wanner, Leo
Research Professor at
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Humanities
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Research interests

Leo Wanner is working in the field of computational linguistics, teaching the computer to understand spoken and written natural language material, to supply people with information that might be useful to them and to interact with people. His research areas include human-computer interaction (in particular, the design and realization of conversational agents that reveal social and cultural competence), automatic written and spoken language generation, automatic summarization of written material, data-driven parsing, information extraction, and, more recently, abusive language analysis, author profiling and the information structure-prosody interface. He is furthermore interested in lexicology and lexicography, and there, in particular, in the automatic recognition, representation and use of lexical idiosyncrasies (so-called "collocations") by both native speakers and learners of a language. An important characteristics of his research is that it is multilingual.

Key words
computational linguistics, language generation, language analysis, summarization, lexicology, lexicography.
Williams, Andrew

Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)

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Williams, Andrew
Research Professor at
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Humanities
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Research interests

My interests lie in moral and political philosophy and practical rationality, as well as intersecting areas in economics and political science. My research focuses in particular on questions about distributive justice, including ones arising across states and generations. I explore how egalitarian distributive principles should guide the design of social institutions that shape the prospects of children, parents, the elderly, and future generations. My most recent work examines how policy makers should deal with gender wage gaps and lifespan variations as well as the role that demographic factors should play in our response to climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Key words
Political Philosophy, Ethics, Rational Action, Distributive Justice, International Ethics, Intergenerational Ethics, Demographic Change, Population Aging, Climate Change, Liberalism, Political Authority, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin

ORCID
: orcid.org/0000-0001-7907-8991
Wiltschko, Martina E.

Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)

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Wiltschko, Martina E.
Research Professor at
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
Humanities
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Research interests

My research explores the fundamental building blocks of human language, how languages differ in their realization, as well as how these building blocks relate to more general cognitive capacities. My empirical emphasis over the past 10 years has been the language found exclusively in interaction: i.e., aspects of language that serve to regulate the construction of common ground among interlocutors on the one hand and the dialogical interaction itself (e.g., turn-taking). I explore how interactional language compares with propositional language (i.e., the language of reference which allows for the construction of thought). My research clearly reveals that interactional language is as much part of our human-specific capacity for language as propositional language is. This suggests that language is equally important for the configration of thought as it is for the configuration of conversational interaction. Significantly, this finding helps to answer a classic question that has divided linguists for centuries: language is an instrument for thought AND for communication. As such, interactional language is a unique and ideal window into the tacit and human-specific knowledge which defines our capacity for language both as an instrument for thought and a tool for communication. To this end, I now explore interactional language from a variety of different angles. i) its acquisition and how it relates to the acquisition of propositional language; ii) its use in populations with neuro-diverse profiles (aphasia, autism, etc.); iii) its relation and place in the architecture of the human mind (relation to theory of mind, construction of emotions, etc.); iv) its role in human-machine interaction. Thus, my research links to neighboring fields, including philosophy (referential semantics, pragmatics), sociology (conversation analysis), and psychology (theory of mind), and artificial intelligence.

Key words
theoretical syntax, syntax-pragmatics interface, language variation, field-work, categories, language of interaction, discourse markers

ORCID
: 0000-0003-4647-3033
Winter, Andreas

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)

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Winter, Andreas
Research Professor at
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Experimental Sciences & Mathematics
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Research interests

I work on quantum information, especially quantum Shannon theory, which aims at incorporating information-theoretic ideas into physics. The Shannon theoretic approach has succeeded in quantifying entanglement as a resource in information processing task, and likewise for other properties of quantum systems such as channel and storage capacities of quantum systems. One of my favourite topics is the interplay between classical and quantum information, evident in the intricate structure of local operations in composite systems, such as data hiding or "information locking". I also work on additivity and non-additivity of quantum channel capacities, quantum data compression, and zero-error quantum communication. Further interests include statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, resource theories, entropy characterization and entanglement measures. But at heart I am a mathematician and will still get fascinated by classic problems: existence of Hadamard matrices, incompleteness, ...

Key words
quantum information, quantum theory, discrete mathematics, probability

ORCID
: orcid.org/0000-0001-6344-4870

RESEARCHER ID
: C-4185-2016
Wulzer, Andrea

Institut de Física d'Altes Energies (IFAE)

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Wulzer, Andrea
Research Professor at
Institut de Física d'Altes Energies (IFAE)
Experimental Sciences & Mathematics
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Research interests

I am a particle physicist. My mission is to unveil the microscopic laws that govern the fundamental particles and their interactions. I study what these laws could be, and how they manifest as concrete predictions for a multitude of experimental measurements that are being and will be performed at particle colliders. Devising strategies to extract maximal information on fundamental physics laws from the data collected at the Large Hadron Collider is a main focus of my research. Another goal is to identify new pathways for further progress at ambitious future collider projects and in particular at a muon collider of very high energy. I attack these questions by employing and developing theoretical tools for predictions based on the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics and special relativity, combined in what is known as "Quantum Field Theory", as well as statistical tools for comparing the predictions with the experimental data.

Key words
Beyond the Standard Model Theory and Phenomenology; Collider Physics;

ORCID
: 0000-0002-4523-1940

RESEARCHER ID
: GIK-5322-2022