Organisers

Manuel Baltieri - Araya Inc., 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 his Ph.D. he joined the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex to work with Warrick Roseboom and Anil Seth on computational models of decision making under different conditions of uncertainty. At the end of 2019, he then moved to RIKEN CBS (Centre for Brain Science) in Saitama, Japan, as a Royal Society - JSPS Postdoctoral research fellow. In November 2021, he then joined Araya Inc., where he now pursues his interests in Bayesian models of decision making and agency, artificial life and (general) artificial intelligence.

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 - Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience, Japan

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. Since 2021, he’s part of the Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience, Hokkaido, Japan.

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.



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:

  1. the emergence of information flows that led to the origins of life,

  2. the evolution of intelligence in the major evolutionary transitions,

  3. the expansion of cooperation in the future of the Anthropocene.