Organisers

Manuel Baltieri - University of Sussex (UK)

Manuel has a background in information and computer engineering (University of Trento, IT), and artificial intelligence (University of Sussex, UK). The use of bio-inspired optimisation techniques in engineering contributed to his shift towards artificial intelligence in order to study and model both living and artificial systems.

In his PhD at the University of Sussex, under the supervision of Dr. Christopher Buckley, he is now focusing on the study of mathematical formulations of cognitive systems with an emphasis on action-perception loops, inspired by both theoretical neuroscience and control theory. In particular, Manuel is building agent-based models based on the Bayesian brain hypothesis, using approximate Bayesian inference (variational Bayes) and stochastic optimal control methods. His goal is to investigate and generalise modern formulations of perception and action based on Bayesian inference and optimal control and provide then a more principled set of ideas for the study of cognition.


Keisuke Suzuki - University of Sussex (UK)

Keisuke Suzuki obtained his Ph.D in Artificial Life from the University of Tokyo in 2007. He stayed as a research fellow in RIKEN Brain Science Institute, working on human cognitive functions in virtual reality environments (2008-2011). Here, with his colleagues, he developed a novel virtual reality system called Substitutional Reality. In this setup, people believe they are experiencing real-world scenes even though they are just exposed to pre-recorded ones. In 2011 he joined the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex as a post-doctoral research fellow.

Keisuke's research focuses on the study of consciousness in terms of embodied cognition, investigating ideas like body ownership, feeling of agency, sense of presence, etc.. His approach builds on state-of-the-art virtual reality setups for the study of conscious presence and the bodily-self, complemented by theoretical modelling of embodied self-consciousness. Recently, his work has extended to the study of hybrid setups, combining Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence, opening up to new ways of studying human perception, cognition, and consciousness.


Hiroyuki Iizuka - Hokkaido University (JP)

Hiroyuki Iizuka received a Ph.D. in multi-disciplinary sciences from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 2004. Since 2005, he has been a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. In 2005 and 2006, he was also a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex. He was an assistant professor at the human information engineering lab, Osaka university (2008-2013).

Currently, he is an associate professor at the autonomous systems engineering laboratory, Hokkaido university, Japan(2013–). His research interests include embodied cognition, complex adaptive systems, deep learning, swarm behavior, virtual reality and the origin of life.


Olaf Witkowski - Tokyo Institute of Technology (JP) and Institute for Advanced Study (US)

Olaf Witkowski is a Research Scientist at the Earth-Life Science Institute in Tokyo, and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He co-leads the Cross Research Institute, with XCompass Ltd., a new research institute for the fundamental principles of intelligence, at the intersection between industrial research and scientific progress, toward and beyond human-level cognition. He is also a Founding Member of YHouse­ ­— a nonprofit transdisciplinary research institute focused on the study of awareness, artificial intelligence and complex systems. He received his PhD from the University of Tokyo.

Olaf’s research tackles distributed intelligence in living systems and societies, employing the tools of artificial life, connectionist learning, and information theory, to reach a better understanding of the following triptych of complex phenomena:

  1. the emergence of information flows that led to the origins of life,
  2. the evolution of cooperation in the major evolutionary transitions,
  3. the expansion of intelligence in the future of the Anthropocene.


Lana Sinapayen - Sony Computer Science Laboratories (JP)

Lana Sinapayen is an Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Tokyo. Her main interests are the emergence of artificial cognitive functions such as predictive coding, and evolutionary dynamics leading to open ended systems.

Originally from France, she received an engineering degree in Information Technologies from the National Institute of Applied Sciences in Lyon and continued her graduate education in Japan, earning a Master's degree for her work on Swarm Robotics from Tohoku University and a PhD for her work on Artificial Life from the University of Tokyo.