People
Kavan Modi - Department of Physics
My research focuses on several related areas of quantum physics. My group uses the tools of quantum information theory to understand and characterise quantum dynamics, probing, metrology, computation, thermodynamics, and even relativity.
Jakob Hohwy - Department of Philosophy
My research is in philosophy of mind and in cognitive science. I conduct research on the traditional mind-body debate as well as more interdisciplinary areas such as philosophy of cognitive neuroscience and philosophical psychopathology. I am involved in a number of experimental, interdisciplinary research projects with neuroscientists and psychiatrists and have built up a laboratory where we conduct experiments using neuroscience and psychology methods to address philosophical issues, and vice versa.
Tim Bayne - Department of Philosophy
My current research concerns consciousness. I am particularly interested in the nature of global states of consciousness, in questions regarding the kinds of contents that can enter consciousness, and the challenges of how to develop robust and reliable ways of measuring consciousness.
Naotsugu Tsuchiya - Department of Psychology
My research focus on the behavioural effects and neuronal correlates of conscious and non-conscious processing, clarifying the relationship between consciousness and attention, analysis of multi-channel neurophysiological data to understand the neuronal mechanisms of consciousness and testing theories of consciousness, in particular, the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness proposed by Guilio Tononi, using empirical neuronal data.
Karl Friston
Karl Friston is a theoretical neuroscientist and authority on brain imaging who invented statistical parametric mapping (SPM), voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and dynamic causal modelling (DCM). Friston currently works on models of functional integration in the human brain and the principles that underlie neuronal interactions. His main contribution to theoretical neurobiology is a free-energy principle for action and perception (active inference). Mathematical contributions include variational Laplacian procedures and generalized filtering for hierarchical Bayesian model inversion.
Thomas Parr
My research focuses upon active inference, a theoretical framework used to account for Bayes optimal behaviour. This is based upon the idea that we use an internal (generative) model to infer the causes of our sensory data and the appropriate behaviours to pursue. Specifically, I am interested in the inferential message passing implied by a given generative model, its neuroanatomical instantiation, and how generative models might be ‘broken’ in neurological disease.
Jayne Thompson
Mile Gu
Felix Binder
Felix Binder is a research fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His research interest are quantum thermodynamics and the intersection of complexity studies and quantum information theory. He is currently interested in how quantum physics can be harnessed to simulate complex processes and how thermodynamic quantities emerge in quantum processes.
Kelvin McQueen
I am a philosopher of science interested in the neuroscience of consciousness as well as the foundations of quantum theory. Lately I have been writing about whether the integrated information theory can address the hard problem, and whether certain interpretations of quantum theory can address the measurement problem.
Hedda Hassel Mørch
My research focuses on panpsychism, neutral monism and liberal conceptions of physicalism (according to which the physical sciences reveal the structure, but not the full nature, of the physical world). I am interested in how such views can respond to problems in philosophy of mind (such as the hard problem of consciousness and the problem of mental causation) and metaphysics more generally, especially the metaphysics of causation. I'm also interested in the Integrated Information Theory, in particular, whether it can contribute to a solution to the combination problem for panpsychism.
Anil Seth
I’m interested in how consciousness can be understood from a predictive processing perspective, with particular attention to visual phenomenology and the sense of self. Theoretically, I’m keen to understand how complexity-based approaches might relate to formalisms like the free energy principle. Instead of the ‘hard’ and ‘easy’ problems of consciousness, I want to solve the ‘real problem’. https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one
Alec Tschantz
Alec is a PhD student with the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. His primary focus is on how humans actively extract information from their environment, and whether this process can be described by the active inference framework. He hopes to ask whether such principles can be applied to improve artificial systems.
Brennan Klein
Brennan is a fourth-year PhD student in Network Science. He researches how complex systems are able to represent, predict, and intervene on their surroundings across a number of different scales—all in ways that minimize the surprisal experienced in the future. This approach is used to study a range of phenomena from decision making, to experimental design, to causation and emergence in networks. He is currently working with Alessandro Vespignani on a dissertation examining the teleology of networks, or why there appears to be an apparent purpose or goal-directedness to the dynamics and structure of networks.
Conor Heins
Conor Heins is a second-year Masters student in Neuroscience at the International Max Planck Research School in Göttingen, Germany. He is interested in how temporally-extended and complex systems organize their activity into nontrivial sequences. The observation of this ranges from neuronal circuit activity to hierarchically-structured, interpersonal phenomena like language and music. During his doctoral work, Conor plans to study the relationship between normative theories of self-organization and scale (e.g. the free energy principle) and the appearance of temporal sequences and temporal hierarchies in natural and artificial information processing systems.
George Musser
George Musser is a science writer, contributing editor for Scientific American and Nautilus magazines, and author of two trade books on fundamental physics. He has written on machine learning and predictive processing for Quanta, Spectrum News, and other magazines, and he is now researching a new book about the intersection of physics, neuroscience, and A.I.
Andrew Garner
Andrew Garner is a postdoc at IQOQI Vienna. He has worked in the foundations of quantum theory, exploring the fundamental aspects of interference; theoretical thermodynamics, establishing the relationship between single-shot information theory and fluctuation theorems; and complexity science, where he has probed the qualitative difference between classical and quantum observers when describing the complex systems.
Markus Mueller
Markus P. Mueller is a junior research group leader at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna. His research interests are in quantum thermodynamics and quantum information theory, where his most well-known work has been in the reconstruction of quantum theory from information-theoretic principles. He has recently suggested an approach in which the first-person perspective (observers resp. observations) is fundamental and the objective physical world is emergent, and he thinks that there are further fruitful information-theoretic links to the topic of the workshop.
Anna Cattani
My research work aims at exploring the link between theoretical measures of causality and complexity (mainly IIT-related) and empirical measures implemented for assisting clinical diagnosis of consciousness disorders. The motivation of this study is of striking importance to giving a theoretical foundation to empirical measures. Furthermore, I am involved in the theoretical study of the dynamical systems to describe complex datasets, such as simultaneous intracranial (stereo-EEG) and extracranial (high-density EEG) recordings in humans.
Erik Hoel
Erik Hoel is a research professor at Tufts University, where he studies emergence, causation, and how to pick experimental scales and interventions of interest in biological systems using information theory.
William Marshall
My research is primarily focused on the theoretical development, and empirical validation of integrated information. In addition to primary applications in the study of consciousness, I am also interested in applying integrated information as a general measure of complexity in both biological and artificial systems.
Marcello Massimini
My research focuses on implementing theory-inspired measures of causality and complexity that can be used to detect consciousness at bedside of unresponsive patients. I’m also interested in understanding the neuronal mechanisms of loss and recovery of brain complexity to develop new treatments in brain injured subjects.
Felix Pollock
I work on topics in quantum theory ranging from thermodynamics to metrology and sensing. My main focus is on developing theoretical tools to describe, characterise and model the dynamics of open quantum systems; microscopic objects whose behaviour is intertwined with that of their wider environment. More broadly, I am interested in the logical structure of quantum theory and how it provides a new perspective on the emergent classical processes that we see all around us.
Thomas Andrillon
Thomas's research focuses on understanding how modulations of sleep and vigilance constrain our brain's ability to produce sensations, decisions or actions. He is extending this work to wakefulness, investigating the neural bases of spontaneous thoughts such as dreams, daydreams and other forms of mind-wandering, and how they affect our capacity to interact with our environment.
