Manuel Baltieri - RIKEN CBS, Japan
Manuel Baltieri received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex in 2019, under the supervision of Christopher Buckley. During his Ph.D. he was also a visiting student at ELSI Origins of Life Network, Tokyo, Japan. After graduating. he stayed at the University of Sussex to work with Warrick Roseboom and Anil Seth. At the end of 2019, he then moved to RIKEN CBS (Center for Brain Science) in Saitama, Japan, to work with Taro Toyoizumi as a Royal Society - JSPS Postdoctoral research fellow.
His research stands at the intersection of embodied cognitive science, artificial intelligence, probabilistic inference and control theory. His interests include agent-based modelling for (minimal) cognition, agency and agent-centric perspectives on uncertainty, action-perception loops and feedback control, enactive accounts of sensorimotor coupling in adaptive agents, and studies of the origins of life and their possible connections to theories 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, Japan
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 - Cross Labs, Japan
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 (Cross Labs) at Cross Compass Ltd. which works on AI and the fundamental principles of intelligence. 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 under Takashi Ikegami, from the Computer Science Department of the University of Tokyo. He was a Program Chair for the ALIFE 2018 conference ‘Beyond AI’.
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:
Lana Sinapayen - Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Japan
Lana Sinapayen received a Ph.D in multi-disciplinary sciences from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 2018. She has been an Associate Researcher at Sony CSL in Tokyo since 2018. She was also a Researcher at the Earth-Life Science Institute in Tokyo in 2019, and a Rutherford Fellow at the University of Sussex in 2019. The same year she became the Research Chair of the International Society for Artificial Life. In 2020 she became an eLife Open Science Leader.
Lana’s research interests include Predictive Coding, biological and artificial Neural Networks, Open Ended Evolution, and visual perception in humans and artificial systems. She is also involved in Science Communication and Open Science projects.