Lab Overview | Research of Interest | Goals | Benefits

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Lab Overview

As the “brain” has been the center of human civilizations, understanding it more close than ever is helping scientists in answering real-world problems in more accurate and measurable manners ever. In the era of human computing; the fields of cognitive, neuro-computings and computational psychology and cognitive neuroscience have attracted researchers from a wide range of disciplines. 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 that in turn can interpret our neuro, cognitive and psychological behaviors.

In the University of Zakho and on February 15th, 2021, 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

  1. Computer Science; Machine Learning and Brain-computer-interaction (BCI):
    • Computational cognitive and neuro modeling for constructing intelligent computer agents.
    • Applications:
      • Semantic processing for topic learning and text comprehension.
      • Mind/Brain-controlled robotics
  2. Social Sciences:
    • Finding the neuro-basis of social problems, such as divorce, addiction and violence.
    • How the brain influences our cognition and behaviors? How neuro-disorders affect our cognitive abilities and behaviors?
    • Post-War Trauma: Do wars affect the neuro-wiring of our brains? If so, then which sections of the brain get disordered? How these disorders can be diagnosed, and how these post-war psycho- and neuro-cognitive disorders can resolved back to their approximate stable status. This line of research is originated from unhappy numbers in the region; as in Iraq of post-war there are approximately 1.8 million IDP 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 .
  3. Educational Sciences
    • How children learn natural languages faster than adults?
    • Why kids sometimes hate what they learn? How to let kids love the learn process?
    • How behavior shapes the learning process of high-schoolers?
  4. Philosophical Sciences
    • What is the mind?
    • 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?
    • How human ontology is constructed? What are the philosophical basis of this construction?
  5. 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

  1. Performing brain-based research to answer both computational and natural research problems based.
  2. To encourage the multidisciplinary-based research and thinking methodology in UoZ.
  3. To encourage the research collaboration culture in UoZ.
  4. Building community by solving the real-world problems in the society.
  5. Serving postgraduate students.

Benefits

  1. 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 and argue experimental results
    • Enhance their competitiveness for graduate programs
  2. Faculty members will:
    • Have access to lab’s unique equipments for experimental studies  
    • Have the opportunity to work in a highly collaborative multidisciplinary atmosphere in UoZ
    • Be eligible for reassignment time for conducting undergraduate and postgraduate research and training 
  3. An academic achievement:
    • CCNP lab @ UoZ can be considered one of the applications of the Bologna Process, where it enables the related multidisciplinary postgraduate programs  to be offered on-campus (i.e.computational psychology, cognitive robotics).
    • As offering modular courses on-campus for the given master or Phd degrees, organized by multiple departments.
  4. 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.

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