Dr. Olessia Kirtchik obtained a doctoral degree in sociology from the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris in 2007. In 2008-2011, she taught sociology at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (MSSES), and in 2009-2022, she was employed by the Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow. As a principal researcher at HSE, she coordinated collective research projects on social history of mathematical economics and economic cybernetics in the Soviet Union during the Cold war, on “algorithmic rationality” and on the State planning committee during the late Soviet period. Her current research interests include the relations between SHS and artificial intelligence, and the role of digital technologies in the evolution of governance and public action.

Sarah Perret is a Researcher in International politics and political science at the Chair and is the principal collaborator in the ANR-PrAIrie project entitled ‘AI at the border’. The project aims to study the imaginaries at work in the European agency eu-LISA (the European Union Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice)as a socio-technical ‘interface’ site. 

Before joining the École normale supérieure, she has been Research Associate at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, where she has collaborated to the ERC project called ‘SECURITY FLOWS‘. She contributed to Security flows project by carrying out theoretical, methodological and empirical research on datafication at the EU’s borders. She has also conducted postdoctoral research at the ENS (2017-2019) focused on the re-conceptualisation of ‘risk’ and the sharing knowledge on societal security. She has received her PhD in Political science and International relations from University of Paris-Saclay (in November 2015), in which she compared the security implementation (‘securitization’) of legislative changes on naturalisation in Germany, the United States, and France.

Sarah Perret has been a visiting researcher at Georgetown University’s BMW Centre for German and European Studies during her doctoral studies, and has taught at University of Paris-Saclay, Paris 2 Assas University, Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis University, Georgetown University, Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, Sciences Po and University of Trento.

She also is ‘chercheuse associée’ at King’s College London and at the LabToP-CRESPPA/CNRS in Paris, and a founded Member of the multidisciplinary network on Terrorism Studies called OCTAV (Observatoire collaboratif sur le terrorisme, l’antiterrorisme et les violences).

In parallel of her academic curriculum, she has been parliamentary advisor at the French ‘Assemblée nationale’, and consultant at the World Bank on Governance and Public policies in West Africa. She also has been ministerial advisor on equality and social diversity for the former French Minister of National Education, Higher Education and Research.

Research interests:

• Naturalized citizens, Migrants, Policy makers in the EU
• International relations and International Political Sociology
• Sociological approaches to Critical Security Studies 
• ‘Symbolic Violence’ of Citizenship and in(security) in border policies and devices
• Counterterrorism and counter-radicalization law-making
• Datafication and digital devices

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Dr. Francesca Musiani is Associate Research Professor at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She is Deputy Director of the Center for Internet and Society of CNRS, which she co-founded in 2019. She is also an associate researcher at the Center for the sociology of innovation (i3/MINES ParisTech) and a Global Fellow at the Internet Governance Lab, American University in Washington, DC.

Francesca is the author, with Ksenia Ermoshina, of Concealing for Freedom: The Making of Encryption, Secure Messaging and Digital Liberties (April 2022, Mattering Press), and (co-)author and editor of numerous other articles and books. She is vice-president for research of Internet Society France, has collaborated with the French Parliament (2014-2015) and the French Council for Audiovisual Media (2015-2018), and is the recent co-author of a study on Internet fragmentation for the European Parliament (2022).

Short Bio

I am a Professeur des universités (“full professor” in the US system) at Ecole Normale Supérieure’s Department of Cognitive Studies (DEC), a member of Institut Jean-Nicod, and the principal investigator in the Agence Nationale de la Recherche grant Between Language and Reasoning.  I got my PhD at New York University’s Department of Linguistics in 2014, where I wrote a dissertation on the relationship between human reasoning, natural language semantics, and the philosophy of language.  Between 2014 and 2016, I was a Junior Research Fellow at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, affiliated with the Faculty of Philosophy.

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Matthieu Husson, is a CNRS researcher in the History of Astral Sciences team at SYRTE laboratory (UMR 8630) in Paris Observatory. His work focuses on the history of astronomy and digital humanities. He is the PI of the ERC project ALFA (CoG 723085, 2017-2022) which addresses the Alfonsine astronomical tradition which dominated Europe from the end of the 13th century to the 16th century. He is also the scientific coordinator of the Digital Humanities project DISHAS which has developed, over the last 5 years, a set of digital tools to edit, analyse, and visualise sets of astronomical tables from traditions ranging from China to Europe working with a consortium of partners in Europe, India, China and New Zealand.

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Jean-Baptiste Camps is Associate Professor in Computational Philology at the École nationale des chartes, PSL. He obtained his PhD from Paris-Sorbonne in 2016, in Medieval Studies, and specialises in combining deep learning approaches, computational text analysis and historical methods to investigate the data of the past, close and remote, and to address open questions or solve long standing issues. With Ariane Pinche and Thibault Clérice, he won the 2019 Fortier Prize of the Digital Humanities Conference for Stylometry for Noisy Medieval Data. His stylometric research also appeared in Science Advances, other journals and in a book co-written with Florian Cafiero (Affaires de style, 2022).

I am an evolutionary and computational social scientist: I use evolutionary psychology and computational sciences to study the content and dynamics of cultural phenomena. I ask myself questions like: Why has romantic love become increasingly important in human societies? Why are people interested in imaginary worlds? Why do moralistic religions appear only late in human history? Why do puritanical societies blame and punish seemingly harmless actions like masturbation or indulgence in food pleasure?

My work is thus at the intersection of the natural sciences (evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, experimental psychology), the social sciences (social anthropology, economic history, political sciences) and the humanities (cultural history, moral philosophy, literary theory). I use all kinds of methods (evolutionary modelling, experiments, surveys, online data) and materials (portraits, novels, movies). I have an interdisciplinary academic training, combining degrees in the Humanities (BA and MA in Philosophy), Social Sciences (Licence in History, Master in Sociology), and the Natural Sciences (BA in Biology, MA in Cognitive Science). I did a PhD in Social Sciences under the supervision of cultural and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber. I then did a first post-doc at the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography of the University of Oxford and a second one at the Philosophy, Politics and Economics Program of the University of Pennsylvania before creating the Evolution and Social Cognition in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the Ecole Normale Supérieure – PSL University in Paris.

I am now Research Director at the CNRS and Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure – PSL University in Paris. I supervise the Computational Cultural Sciences team. I am also the co-founder of Bunka, an exploration engine using social media data.

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J. Peter Burgess is professor of philosophy and political science, and Director of the AXA Chair in Geopolitics of Risk at École Normale Supérieure, Paris. His research concerns the meeting place between culture, politics and technology, with emphasis on questions of risk and uncertainty.