Organisers

Sean D. Lynch - International Research Center for Neurointelligence, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Sean focuses his research on social cognition, specifically how atypical visual perception influences cognitive development and social interactions. He is interested in understanding how people control their movements with respect to what is perceived. Moreover, he is keen to understand how deficits in cognitive processes influence daily interactions. To achieve these goals the research involves the use of virtual reality as a tool to control environmental characteristics and visual stimuli while using motion tracking to assess and identify behavioural variances.

Keisuke Suzuki - Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience, Hokkaido University, 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 (2008-2011). 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.

Yukie Nagai - International Research Center for Neurointelligence, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Dr. Yukie Nagai has been investigating underlying neural mechanisms for social cognitive development by means of computational approaches. She designs neural network models for robots to learn to acquire cognitive functions such as self-other cognition, estimation of others’ intention and emotion, altruism, and so on based on the theory of predictive coding. The simulator reproducing atypical perception in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which has been developed by her group, greatly impacts society as it enables people with and without ASD to better understand potential causes for social difficulties. She was elected to “30 women in robotics you need to know about” in 2019 and “World’s 50 Most Renowned Women in Robotics” in 2020. She serves as the principal investigator of JST CREST “Cognitive Mirroring” and CREST “Cognitive Feeling” since December 2016 and October 2021, respectively.