Fulbright program is intended for Slovenian doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers visiting the US, and for American citizens visiting Slovenia. Candidates are selected on the basis of a selection procedure by the Fulbright Commission and the final confirmation of the candidates by the competent authority in the United States.

What research will Dr. Gutman perform while in the US?

Overall objectives of the research:

- to combine theoretical and quantitative knowledge in dream research, with the help of the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Anthropology (UCLA), the researcher will use all currently available tools for detecting typical patterns in a large textual database of dreams

- exploring the causality between the content of dreams and daily events (at the level of the individual and the population level)

- establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue among artificial intelligence professionals and anthropologists and psychologists

- training for independent use of computer tools, which the researcher will be able to apply to different cultural forms later in the research 

- transfer of theoretical knowledge in understanding dreams to the field of artificial intelligence.

Planned activities:

- guest lectures at the Department of Anthropology (UCLA)

- co-organisation of a symposium on the topic of modern methods of dream research in cooperation with Dr. Kelly Bulkeley and MIT Media Lab (scheduled for early October in Oregon)

- organisation of daily symposia on interdisciplinary dream research (on the UCLA campus, as well as at other universities in California)

- guest lectures on modern computer tools in dream analysis and the problem of dream multi-modality

- raising awareness of the professional and general public about the results of the research (participation in media activities at the international level)

Short bio:

Maja Gutman is an interdisciplinary researcher in media studies, studies of consciousness and studies of science and technology. Her central research fields are the relationship between man and machine, and the psychological dynamics of dreams. She currently works as a coordinator and co-author of the project "2020 Dreams", which takes place in collaboration with Stanford University Press and with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. From 2016 to 2020, she worked as a research associate with the American University of Los Angeles, California, where she worked on immersion in virtual environments, psychology between man and machine, and computer processing of dream data. In the last four years, she has presented the results of her studies at more than 20 international conferences.