People

Chao Liu

Chao Liu

Psychologist and Brain Scientist; 2022-2023 Berggruen China Center Fellow

Biography

Dr. Chao Liu is Professor of the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning and IDG/ McGovern Institute of Brain Science, Beijing Normal University. He gained a Ph.D. in Psychology at University of Michigan Ann Arbor. His research direction is emotional and social neuroscience, mainly focusing on the regulatory role and brain mechanism of emotion in social cognition, especially moral cognition, as well as its application in education, management, public safety and other fields. He has published more than 40 papers in related journals such as Cerebral Cortex, Neuroimage, Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience, etc.

At present, he is the Fellow of many academic associations including the Emotional and Health Psychology branch and Cultural Psychology branch of the Chinese Psychological Society; the Social Cognition branch of the Chinese Cognitive Science Society; the Emotional Machine Intelligence branch of the Chinese Artificial Intelligence Society, and the Chinese branch of the International Social Neuroscience Society.

He is editor of several journals such as Frontiers in Decision Neuroscience, Acta Psychologica Sinica, Advances in Psychological Science; He was Keynote speaker of the National Psychological Conference and won a number of national talent titles. He is also the PI of two Major Project of National Social Science Foundations: “Characteristics of Chinese Moral Cognition and Emotion: Interdisciplinary Research of Psychology, Brain Science and Artificial Intelligence ” and “Characteristics of Chinese Social Cognition: Integration Research of Psychology and Brain Science”.

As a Berggruen China Center Fellow, Professor Chao Liu will carry out the research project “Philosophical, Psychological and Brain Research on How Intelligent Machines Acquire Social Emotions in a Man-machine Coexistence Society”.

composed by Arswain
machine learning consultation by Anna Tskhovrebov
commissioned by the Berggruen Institute
premiered at the Bradbury Building
downtown Los Angeles
april 22, 2022

Human perception of what sounds “beautiful” is necessarily biased and exclusive. If we are to truly expand our hearing apparatus, and thus our notion of beauty, we must not only shed preconceived sonic associations but also invite creative participation from beings non-human and non-living. We must also begin to cede creative control away from ourselves and toward such beings by encouraging them to exercise their own standards of beauty and collaborate with each other.

Movement I: Alarm Call
‘Alarm Call’ is a long-form composition and sound collage that juxtaposes, combines, and manipulates alarm calls from various human, non-human, and non-living beings. Evolutionary biologists understand the alarm call to be an altruistic behavior between species, who, by warning others of danger, place themselves by instinct in a broader system of belonging. The piece poses the question: how might we hear better to broaden and enhance our sense of belonging in the universe? Might we behave more altruistically if we better heed the calls of – and call out to – non-human beings?

Using granular synthesis, biofeedback, and algorithmic modulation, I fold the human alarm call – the siren – into non-human alarm calls, generating novel “inter-being” sonic collaborations with increasing sophistication and complexity. 

Movement II: A.I.-Truism
A synthesizer piece co-written with an AI in the style of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, to pay homage to the space of the Bradbury Building.

Movement III: Alarmism
A machine learning model “learns” A.I.Truism and recreates Alarm Call, generating an original fusion of the two.

Movement IV: A.I. Call
A machine learning model “learns” Alarm Call and recreates A.I.Truism, generating an original fusion of the two.

RAVE (IRCAM 2021) https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE