Tianqiao & Chrissy Chen Institute – Change perception, change your world | Chen Institute

Summary: The 2025 NeuroPSI–Chen Institute Joint Conference brought together global researchers to explore the neural basis of behavior, communication, and emotion. Held in France, the two-day event featured sessions on social cognition, language, and brain–machine interfaces, spanning studies in humans, animals, and AI models. Key topics included empathy circuits, emotion contagion, psychiatric risks, prosocial decision-making, […]

Summary: AI Prize Grand Prize winner Zhuoran Qiao uses generative AI to model dynamic protein structures and their interactions with small molecules—dramatically accelerating drug discovery. Inspired by diffusion models, his approach predicts not only protein folding but also binding behaviors, enabling the design of new treatments, including for “undruggable” diseases. His work replaces years of […]

Summary: AI Prize finalist Alizée Roobaert, a researcher at the Flanders Marine Institute, uses machine learning to map how coastal waters absorb carbon dioxide (CO₂). While oceans are known to absorb about one-quarter of human CO₂ emissions, coastal regions remain poorly understood. Roobaert combined satellite and in situ data with AI to generate highly detailed […]

Summary: AI Prize finalist Aditya Nair uses machine learning to uncover hidden patterns in brain activity related to emotions like anger and fear. While individual neurons show little correlation to emotional states, Nair’s model analyzes collective neural activity—like listening to an orchestra—to detect persistent emotional signals. His work revealed a “line attractor” pattern in the […]