ICUB invites you to a new workshop on AI & technology, September 10, 2026, at the UB Rectorate: “Embodied meaning and artificial intelligence”

On Thursday, September 10, 2026, the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest invites you to a new workshop on AI & technology.

Titled “Embodied meaning and artificial intelligence”, the event features as guest speakers Professor Pietro Perconti from the University of Messina, Professor Peter Mantello from Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, and Dr. Alin Olteanu, associate professor at Shanghai International Studies University and visiting professor at ICUB.

The event will take place at the Rectorate of the University of Bucharest, in the Board of Directors Room (Șos. Panduri no. 90, 1st floor), and is open to the entire UB academic community: students from all degree levels, faculty, and researchers interested in the announced topics.

Topics

This workshop explores emerging digital technologies, such as AI, from cognitive and semiotic perspectives, which posit that the mind is embodied and situated. Comprising three talks, it discusses how AI extends organic cognition in the interrogation of meaning, subjectivity, memory, inference, consciousness and death. Abstracts for each talk are below.

• What Technologies Stabilize: The First Person, the Bearer Problem, and Artificial Subjectivity (Pietro Perconti)
• Artificial Symbionts of the Afterlife: Navigating Presence of the Absent in the Posthuman Umwelt (Peter Mantello)
• A Peircean theory of technology (Alin Olteanu)

Guests

Pietro Perconti is Professor of Philosophy of Mind at the University of Messina and co-founder of the International Center for Consciousness Studies. His work focuses on consciousness, social cognition, and the philosophy of artificial intelligence. He is the co-author of The Future of the Artificial Mind (CRC Press, 2022) and Turing’s Vision (CRC Press, 2025).

Peter Mantello is an artist, filmmaker and Professor of Media Studies at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan. Since 2010, he has been a principal investigator on various research projects examining the intersection between emerging media technologies, social media artifacts, artificially intelligent agents, hyperconsumerism and conflict. His recent research focuses on interdisciplinary inquiries into phenomenological aspects of human-machine relations, especially, those related to emotional AI. He is also working on a feature film that deals with social, political, and cultural concerns surrounding the rise of emotional AI on six continents.

Alin Olteanu is Associate Professor at the Institute of Language Sciences of Shanghai International Studies University. He is a leading scholar in the semiotic approaches to education and literacies.

His visiting project at ICUB, “Putting imagination back in imaginary: a  cognitive and sociotechnical theory of affordances” stems from Alin’s interest in how ongoing digitalization is extending cognition, pluralizing social representation modalities and thus producing new social imaginaries. This is a theoretical effort to bridge cognitive and social sciences by reflecting on the relation between the imagination, as a cognitive capacity to virtually entertain possible worlds, and imaginaries, as social constructions afforded through technical infrastructures. To pursue this, Alin is interested in creating a hub for the study of technological futures at ICUB.

Currently, he is a visiting professor in the Social Sciences Division of the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest (ICUB).