Lab Overview | Research of Interest | Goals | Benefits
Lab Overview
As the “brain” has been the center of human civilizations, understanding it more close than ever is helping scientists in answering research and industrial questions in more robust and measurable manner ever. In the era of human computing; the fields of cognitive, neuro-computings and computational psychology and cognitive neuroscience have attracted researchers of a wide range of disciplines around the globe. That is due to the fascinating results given from the understanding and investigating the cognitive and neuro-reactions inside our human brains, and how these reactions can be modeled to computational models and how descriptive models can interpret our neuro, cognitive and psychological behaviors.
In the University of Zakho and in October 2019, the CCNP lab is established and dedicated to perform a multidisciplinary research by creating a diverse group of researchers from departments and disciplines of computer sciences, psychology, medicine, engineering, statistics and biophysics. The CCNP lab is for finding multi-perspectives comprehensive answers to questions on computational mind and brain and their applications.
Research of Interest
- Computer Science
- Computational cognitive modeling for building computational models explaining the cognitive behavior of our mind and to use the presented cognitive models to build computer systems mimicking our abilities in cognition, such as language production and comprehension, and general perception. Such as computational modeling of neuro-bases processes of semantic processing and knowledge construction, representation and comprehension in human brain, such as topic learning and text comprehension. Then using the computational models for solving machine learning (text mining) problems, as well as better understanding the human mechanisms of semantic processing.
- Brain-computer-interaction (BCI) and mind/brain-controlled robotics, from Artificial Intelligence, are the potential research to be performed in lab.
- Social Sciences
- Performing neuro-based social research, through deducting the social problems, such as divorce, addiction and violence, to the neuro-level of experimental methodology. Thus, to explore and discover the neuro-level causes of social problems.
- How the brain and the rest of the nervous system influence our cognition and behaviors? How injuries or illnesses of the brain affect cognitive functions and behaviors?
- Post-War Trauma
- In Iraq of post-war there are approximately 1.8 million internally displaced persons and 6.7 million people in need of humanitarian assistance . Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is currently hosting 40% of all internally displaced persons (IDPs) and 97% Syrian refugees in Iraq, that equals In 2018, only 32,000 of approximately 1.5 million remaining internally displaced persons .
- Knowing the unhappy numbers above, then questions for the scientific community worldwide and in the region are: Do wars and conflicts affect the neuro-wiring of our brains? If so, then which sections of the brain get disordered? How these disorderness can be diagnosed? Ultimately, how this post-war psycho-cognitive disorders can be handled and resolved back to their approximate stable status.
- Educational Sciences
- How children learn natural languages faster than adults? What factors can help children in enjoying their study more than before?
- How behavior shapes the learning process of high-schoolers?
- Philosophical Sciences
- What is the mind, and where is it located in the human body? Is it just the brain that shapes our mind or other parts of human as well, such as the heart? If so, to how degree and for which tasks?
- How human ontology is constructed? What are the philosophical basis of this construction?
- Medical Physics Sciences:
- By the fact that brain and the whole neuro-system is a signal generation and processing system, the CCNP lab will also investigate the electrical basis of feelings, emotions, cognition and social interactions.
Goals
- Performing brain-based research to answer both computational and natural research problems based on neuro-psycho-basis. That is to understand how the brain, as our machine for cognition and psychology, influenced by technology and how it influences the technology.
- To encourage the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary-based research and thinking methodology among the academic community in UoZ and in the region.
- To encourage the collaboration culture among academia (faculty members and postgraduate students) and the society in UoZ, to let the scholars solve the problems in the society, so to produce a more stable and healthier community.
- To accept and graduate postgraduate students from the related postgraduate programs, as the CCNP lab has to be well-equipped, the list of necessary experimental machines are listed at this proposal-document.
Benefits
- Postgraduate and Undergraduate Students Will:
- Gain broad exposure to the unique psychological, computational, cognitive and neuroscience research.
- Interact with faculty and students across different departments
- Learn research methodologies for interdisciplinary research
- Participate in enrichment activities such as journal and seminar series;
- Learn the scientific methods of how to present experiments
- Enhance their competitiveness for graduate programs
- Faculty members will:
- Have access to CCNP’s unique equipments to facilities interesting conducting experiments
- Have the opportunity to work in a highly collaborative interdisciplinary research environment across the UoZ campus, and globally.
- Be eligible for reassignment time for conducting undergraduate and postgraduate research and training
- An academic achievement: CCNP lab @ UoZ can be considered one of the applications of the Bologna Process, where it enables the related interdisciplinary postgraduate programs to be offered on-campus (i.e.computational psychology, cognitive robotics). This is by offering modular courses on-campus for the given master or Phd degrees, organized by multiple departments.
- Global marketing of the UoZ: joint postgraduate programs can be designed for UoZ students, where academic and scientific collaborations will make CCNP research efforts more strong and hearable in the global academic community.