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We are pleased to announce that Professor Ruzena Bajcsy—NEC Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) at the University of California, Berkeley, and founding director of CITRIS (the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society)—has been elected an Academician of WAAC, in recognition of her systematic contributions to active perception, computer vision and robotics, medical image registration, and the creation of cross-disciplinary research platforms.
Over the years, Professor Bajcsy has pursued a research program centered on “perception–action–interaction,” building a body of work that links theory to engineering practice: in 1988, she published a classic paper in Proceedings of the IEEE that set out a modeling and control framework for Active Perception; in 1978, at the University of Pennsylvania, she founded and led the GRASP Laboratory, establishing a paradigm for robotic perception and multidisciplinary collaboration; and in medical imaging, she and her team introduced elastic matching and digital anatomical atlas methods that helped bring multimodal MRI/PET/CT registration into clinical practice. Taken together, these contributions provide testable computational models and experimental pathways for understanding and engineering “consciousness cues”—such as selective attention, resource allocation, and cross-modal integration—in complex artificial systems.
- Global Collaboration and Academic Ecosystem
Academicians of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness hail from institutions such as Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Cambridge, the University of California, the French Academy of Sciences, the University of Padua, the University of Queensland, Columbia University, and the University of Exeter. Honorary Academicians come from a wide range of countries and regions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Canada, Australia, Spain, and China. In addition, leading scientists from prominent research institutes and technology companies—such as Google, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and ZEEKR—also participate.
- About WAAC
The World Academy for Artificial Consciousness (https://www.waac.ac/) is a global academic institution established in Paris in 2025. Its mission is to advance frontier research and international collaboration in artificial consciousness through the integration of science, technology, and philosophy. The Academy publishes open research, policy recommendations, evaluation standards, and more. The current President is Academician Yucong Duan, and the Secretary-General is Dr. Yingbo Li. The Honorary Academician List: On May 3, 2025, WAAC released its first batch of Top 100 Honorary Academicians, recognizing scholars who have made foundational or leading contributions to the theory of artificial consciousness.