News

We are pleased to announce that Professor Dov Sagi, from the Department of Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, has been elected as an academician of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness (WAAC) for his pioneering research in the fields of visual perception learning, consciousness thresholds, and perceptual plasticity.

Professor Sagi has long been dedicated to exploring the plasticity of the visual system, revealing how perceptual learning influences perceptual stability and conscious experience. His research shows that perceptual learning not only enhances sensitivity to visual stimuli but also affects current perceptual reports through sequence dependence, highlighting the importance of visual memory in the generalization of learning.

• 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.

We are pleased to announce that, in recognition of his foundational contributions to concept and category learning, folk biology, and research on culture–cognition interactions, Professor Douglas Medin of the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University has been elected an Academician of the World Academy of Artificial Consciousness (WAAC).

Professor Medin’s Context Theory/exemplar model reshaped scholarly understanding of human concepts and categorization: classification judgments can be driven directly by similarity to stored “instances” in memory, rather than relying solely on abstract prototypes and rules. Validated through rigorous experimental paradigms, this framework established exemplar-based learning and reasoning as a central pathway and a key baseline for subsequent work in category learning and representational modeling.

• 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.

We are pleased to announce that Professor Ellen Langer of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University— a pioneer of mindfulness research—has been elected an Academician of the World Academy of Artificial Consciousness (WAAC) in recognition of her foundational contributions and cross-disciplinary impact in mindfulness centered on context and active attention (a non-meditative approach), mind–body unity, and the illusion of control.

As a Harvard psychologist, Professor Langer proposed the Langerian mindfulness framework built around “actively noticing novelty,” systematically investigated the causal pathways linking mindset with health, learning, and decision-making, and on this basis advocated a theoretical orientation of mind–body unity. Her general-audience book The Mindful Body (2023) synthesizes more than forty years of evidence, demonstrating the potential influence of mindset and contextual design on physiological indicators and the management of chronic disease.

• 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.

We are pleased to announce that Diana Reiss—professor at the City University of New York and an animal cognition scientist—has been elected an Academician of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness in recognition of her foundational work on dolphin mirror self-recognition, interspecies communication, and animal consciousness.

Over many years, Professor Reiss has used systematic experimental paradigms to reveal self-representation and social cognition in nonhuman animals: with collaborators, she reported in PNAS (2001) the first demonstration of mirror self-recognition (MSR) in bottlenose dolphins; subsequently documented MSR in Asian elephants in PNAS (2006); and, in PLOS ONE (2018), showed that juvenile dolphins exhibit early markers of self-awareness. These findings expand the comparative-cognition boundaries of the “self” and provide cross-species reference points for research on the origins and evolution of consciousness.

• 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.

We are pleased to announce that Steven Pinker—Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and a renowned cognitive scientist—has been elected an Honorary Academician of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness (WAAC), in recognition of his outstanding contributions to language, cognition, and the computational theory of mind, as well as his sustained impact on public reason and science communication.

Steven Pinker is a professor in Harvard’s Department of Psychology whose research spans visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social cognition. A leading advocate of the “computational mind” and evolutionary psychology, he has articulated the view that the mind is an information-processing system shaped by natural selection, providing a theoretical framework for understanding human cognition and building intelligent systems. His research and books on language acquisition, the structure of the mind, and rationality have exerted a lasting influence on both public discourse and academic debates about human nature and reason.

• Global Collaboration and Academic Ecosystem

The Academicians of WAAC come from universities and research 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, among others. Honorary Academicians represent multiple countries and regions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Canada, Australia, Spain, and China. Additionally, leading scientists from renowned research institutions and technology companies—such as Google, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and Zeekr—are also involved.

• 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.

We are pleased to announce that, in recognition of her foundational contributions to human memory malleability and eyewitness testimony, Professor Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California has been elected an Academician of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness.

A leading figure in contemporary memory science and legal psychology, Professor Loftus has systematically revealed the misinformation effect and the plasticity of memory: post-event information and leading questions introduced after an incident can alter both the content of a person’s recollection and their confidence in it. The classic “car accident wording” experiment by Loftus and Palmer first demonstrated, with rigorous experimental paradigms, how linguistic cues reshape eyewitness recall and judgment. Over the ensuing three decades, further research delineated the conditions under which individuals are more or less susceptible to misleading information, and explored false-memory induction paradigms—such as the “lost in the mall” technique—in healthy populations, along with their ethical implications. This body of work has profoundly influenced investigative procedures, the assessment of eyewitness testimony in courts, and public policy worldwide.

• 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.

We are pleased to announce that Professor Laurent Itti, a professor of Computer Science, Psychology, and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California (USC), has been elected as an academician of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness (WAAC) for his pioneering contributions to computational models of visual saliency and attention.

Professor Itti’s research, starting from biological visual mechanisms, proposed and developed the “saliency map” theory and bottom-up attention models, which have had a wide impact on fields such as computer vision, robotics, and human-computer interaction. His work has also advanced the exploration of computational mechanisms and interpretable pathways for “machine consciousness.”

• Global Collaboration and Academic Ecosystem

The Academicians of WAAC come from universities and research 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, among others. Honorary Academicians represent multiple countries and regions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Canada, Australia, Spain, and China. Additionally, leading scientists from renowned research institutions and technology companies—such as Google, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and Zeekr—are also involved.

• 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.

We are pleased to announce that Christoph Gerber—Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Basel and a pioneer of scanning probe microscopy—has been elected an Academician of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness (WAAC), in recognition of his groundbreaking contributions to atomic force microscopy (AFM) and nanomechanical microcantilever biosensing, as well as the methodological impact of his highly sensitive characterization of biomolecular interactions in the life sciences.

Professor Gerber has long advanced research and academic leadership at the University of Basel and across Switzerland’s nanoscale science ecosystem. As a co-inventor of AFM, he expanded the field from imaging to biosensing, pioneering the use of microcantilever arrays for label-free detection of interactions among DNA, proteins, and other biomolecules, thereby establishing mechanistic and translational foundations for immunosensing and mutation detection. His nanomechanical measurement paradigm has fostered deep cross-fertilization among physics, chemistry, and the life sciences, and has had a lasting influence on biomedical diagnostics and the standardization of nanotechnology.

• Global Collaboration and Academic Ecosystem

The Academicians of WAAC come from universities and research 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, among others. Honorary Academicians represent multiple countries and regions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Canada, Australia, Spain, and China. Additionally, leading scientists from renowned research institutions and technology companies—such as Google, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and Zeekr—are also involved.

• 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.

We are pleased to announce that Angela D. Friederici—Director and Founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS), Germany—has been elected an Academician of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness (WAAC), in recognition of her foundational research on the neural bases of language processing and her cross-disciplinary impact.

Professor Friederici has long led the Department of Neuropsychology at MPI CBS, integrating behavioral methods, ERP/MEG, and fMRI/structural connectivity to systematically chart the human language network and its developmental trajectory. Drawing on extensive reviews and empirical studies, she has proposed that the language network comprises at least two dorsal and two ventral pathways: the dorsal pathways subserve auditory–motor mapping and complex syntax, while the ventral pathways support semantic processing and basic syntax—a framework that has become a core model in neurolinguistics. Developmental research further shows that the ventral pathways are present at birth and mature earlier, whereas the dorsal pathway to the inferior frontal gyrus, associated with complex syntax, matures later—providing a biological basis for language acquisition and informing educational interventions.

• Global Collaboration and Academic Ecosystem

The Academicians of WAAC come from universities and research 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, among others. Honorary Academicians represent multiple countries and regions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Canada, Australia, Spain, and China. Additionally, leading scientists from renowned research institutions and technology companies—such as Google, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and Zeekr—are also involved.

• 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.

We are pleased to announce that Arnaud Delorme—research lead at CerCo/UMR 5549, CNRS–Université Paul Sabatier (Toulouse III), and Senior Research Scientist at the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience (SCCN) / Institute for Neural Computation (INC), UC San Diego—has been elected an Academician of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness (WAAC), in recognition of his programmatic contributions to EEG and meditation, consciousness-related oscillations, and closed-loop neurofeedback.

Delorme has long leveraged high-dimensional EEG and independent component analysis (ICA) to parse the dynamics of conscious states, establishing cross-laboratory, reproducible paradigms for the neural phenotypes of meditation and mind-wandering. His signature contribution is the open-source platform EEGLAB: together with Scott Makeig, his 2004 paper in the Journal of Neuroscience Methods set community standards for single-trial EEG dynamics and ICA, now widely used in neuroscience and clinical research. For general audiences, he authored Why Our Minds Wander, synthesizing the science of mind-wandering; the trajectory and methodological implications of his work have been widely covered by institutions and media including UCSF and UC San Diego.

• Global Collaboration and Academic Ecosystem

The Academicians of WAAC come from universities and research 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, among others. Honorary Academicians represent multiple countries and regions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Canada, Australia, Spain, and China. Additionally, leading scientists from renowned research institutions and technology companies—such as Google, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and Zeekr—are also involved.

• 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.