Tagged: Artificial Consciousness

We are delighted to announce that Philip H. S. Torr (FREng, FRS), Professor in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford and Head of the Torr Vision Group (TVG), has been elected an Academician of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness (WAAC) in recognition of his pioneering contributions to deep learning for scene understanding and recognition, visual object tracking and segmentation, and robust estimation and model selection.

Over the years, Professor Torr has followed a unifying trajectory “from robust geometry to end-to-end deep vision,” establishing a chain of results spanning modeling, learning, inference, and real-time applications: in Computer Vision and Image Understanding (2000), he proposed the MLESAC framework for robust estimation, markedly improving the noise tolerance of geometric model fitting; in the International Journal of Computer Vision (2002), he advanced Bayesian model estimation and selection (including the MAPSAC/GRIC line of ideas), laying the groundwork for automatic selection in multi-body/multi-model contexts; entering the deep-learning era, at ICCV (2015) he introduced CRF-RNN, integrating conditional random fields with convolutional networks in an end-to-end, backpropagatable architecture that significantly sharpened fine-grained boundaries for semantic segmentation; subsequently, at the ECCV Workshops (2016) he presented the fully convolutional Siamese network (SiamFC), bringing general object tracking into a real-time, end-to-end paradigm; at CVPR (2019), he and collaborators unified single-object tracking (SOT) and video object segmentation (VOS) in SiamMask, achieving real-time segmentation–tracking synergy at 55 FPS.

• 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 Michael N. Shadlen, Professor of Neuroscience at Columbia University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator, has been elected an Academician of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness (WAAC) in recognition of his sustained contributions to the neural mechanisms of perceptual decision-making and to evidence-accumulation processes related to conscious accessibility.

Over many years, Professor Shadlen has used random-dot motion (RDM) paradigms and single-neuron recordings to demonstrate that neurons in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) represent evidence accumulation and threshold (bound) crossing in decision-making (Journal of Neurophysiology, 2001). Together with Joshua I. Gold, he articulated a comprehensive neural framework “from evidence integration to commitment” in Annual Review of Neuroscience (2007). His team has also reported, in human studies, the critical process by which an “aha” moment enters awareness (Current Biology, 2017; accompanied by a Columbia University news release), and showed in Neuron (2022) that parietal decision representations can generalize across fixed reference frames. Collectively, these studies link decision formation to conscious accessibility from single units to systems, providing key evidence for how the brain transforms unconscious processing into reportable conscious contents.

• 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 Michael X. Cohen, neuroscientist at Radboud University Medical Center and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, has been elected an Academician of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness (WAAC) in recognition of his sustained contributions to neural oscillations and neural time-series analysis—especially advances in time–frequency methods, cross-frequency coupling, and empirically determining frequency-band boundaries.

Over many years, Professor Cohen has pursued a continuous research program on how oscillatory dynamics characterize information processing and help identify consciousness-related representations. His MIT Press monograph, Analyzing Neural Time Series Data, established a comprehensive framework for time–frequency and synchrony analyses of EEG/MEG/LFP. In Journal of Neurophysiology (2013), he reported the relationship between midfrontal theta and conflict monitoring/behavioral prediction, yielding quantifiable markers of reportable control and arousal regulation. In eLife (2017), he introduced a multichannel cross-frequency coupling method based on generalized eigen-decomposition (gedCFC), enabling the detection of integrative cross-frequency pathways in multichannel data. In Journal of Neuroscience Methods (2021), he further proposed gedBounds to derive individualized frequency-band boundaries in a data-driven manner. Complementing these methods, his authoritative review in Trends in Neurosciences (2017) clarified the sources, interpretations, and limits of EEG signals. Collectively, these contributions have expanded testable routes from oscillatory integration to metrics 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 Ned Block, Silver Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at New York University, has been elected an Academician of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness (WAAC) in recognition of his foundational contributions to distinguishing and deepening the theories of phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness.

Over many years, Professor Block has advanced the phenomenal–access framework through systematic theory and interdisciplinary evidence: in the classic paper “On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness” (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1995), he drew a clear distinction between the consciousness of experience and the consciousness that is available for thought and report; in “Consciousness, Accessibility, and the Mesh between Psychology and Neuroscience” (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2007), he articulated how accessibility interfaces with evidence from psychology and neuroscience; and in Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2011), he advanced the overflow argument, using iconic-memory paradigms to show that what we are conscious of often exceeds what is immediately reportable or usable in cognition. Collectively, this work has reshaped the boundaries of research on reportability and subjective experience and provided a robust theoretical foundation for artificial consciousness and cognitive 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 Mara Mather, Professor at the University of Southern California (USC) Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and Director of the Emotion & Cognition Lab, has been elected an Academician of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness (WAAC) in recognition of her sustained contributions to the interplay between attention and emotion, aging, and levels of consciousness.

Over many years, Professor Mather has placed the brainstem locus coeruleus (LC) at the center of a program explaining how emotional arousal shapes attention and memory, and how these processes change with age. In Perspectives on Psychological Science (2011), she proposed the Arousal-Biased Competition (ABC) theory to account for why arousal selectively enhances or suppresses perception and memory. In Neurobiology of Aging (2016), she used neuromelanin-sensitive MRI to demonstrate links between LC signal and cognitive reserve. In the Journal of Neuroscience (2018), combining fMRI, pupillometry, and LC indices, she showed that LC activity strengthens consolidation of high-priority information. Further, studies in NeuroImage (2017) and the International Journal of Psychophysiology (2023; randomized controlled trial) connected LC-MRI measures with high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV) and with HRV biofeedback, respectively, illustrating the feasibility and plasticity of modulating the arousal–attention system via autonomic pathways. Collectively, these achievements provide cross-level empirical grounding for understanding conscious accessibility, attentional control, and emotion regulation across the aging process.

• 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 Gerwin Schalk, a leading scholar in brain–computer interfaces (BCI) and neuroengineering, has been elected an Academician of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness (WAAC) in recognition of his sustained and pioneering contributions to brain–machine communication and to the assessment of disorders of consciousness (DoC).

Over many years, Professor Schalk has built an influential body of work centered on neural signaling pathways underlying communicative capacity and conscious accessibility. In IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (2004), he systematically introduced the BCI2000 platform, establishing an integrated, cross-signal and cross-paradigm architecture. In Journal of Neural Engineering (2007), he achieved the first high-accuracy decoding of two-dimensional movement trajectories from human electrocorticography (ECoG), expanding the clinical utility of cortical surface signals. In NeuroImage (2017), he proposed “instantaneous voltage” as a unifying perspective on power and phase, directly linking them to cortical excitability and enriching electrophysiological understanding of the arousal–attention system and communication-control pathways. Together with subsequent studies, these contributions have advanced stable, long-term communication for populations such as those with locked-in syndrome and propelled progress in consciousness evaluation in DoC contexts, laying a solid foundation for human–machine collaboration and clinical translation relevant to artificial 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 Kenneth Williford, Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), has been elected an Academician of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness (WAAC) in recognition of his sustained contributions to the philosophy of mind and phenomenology, especially theories of self-consciousness and phenomenal consciousness.

Over many years, Professor Williford has developed a program of research centered on the self-representational theory of consciousness and phenomenological studies of consciousness. His co-edited volume with Uriah Kriegel, Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness (MIT Press), advanced a systematic discussion of self-representational frameworks in contemporary consciousness studies; his article “Husserl’s Hyletic Data and Phenomenal Consciousness” (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2013) offers a significant elucidation of the relation between Husserl’s hyle and phenomenal consciousness; and in collaboration with Daniel Bennequin, Karl Friston, and David Rudrauf, he proposed the Projective Consciousness Model (PCM) in Frontiers in Psychology (2018), applying projective geometry and the free-energy minimization framework to characterize the first-person perspective, pre-reflective self-consciousness, and mechanisms of subjectivity. These representative achievements have broadened theoretical and formal understandings of consciousness and selfhood while fostering integration between phenomenology and computational neuroscience.

• 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 Luigi De Gennaro, Professor in the Department of Psychology at Sapienza University of Rome and Director of the Sleep Psychophysiology Laboratory, has been elected an Academician of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness (WAAC) in recognition of his sustained contributions to the science of sleep–wake regulation and levels of consciousness.

Over many years, Professor De Gennaro has developed an internationally influential research program centered on canonical EEG elements of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. His comprehensive review in Sleep Medicine Reviews systematically mapped the generation mechanisms and functional roles of sleep spindles, establishing a thalamo–cortical framework for understanding spindle activity. In NeuroImage (2005), he introduced the concept of an individual “fingerprint” of the sleep EEG, demonstrating stable inter-individual differences in NREM power topography and providing a reliable phenotype for longitudinal tracking of consciousness levels and cognitive traits. Through studies of K-complexes in stage-2 sleep—and subsequent work in Alzheimer’s disease cohorts—he further showed the value of K-complexes as indices of sleep stability, synchronization, and pathological change. These achievements have refined the physiological understanding of how conscious states are regulated during sleep and supplied reusable signal-based markers for clinical applications and computational 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 Jean-Pierre Changeux—Professor Emeritus at the Institut Pasteur and the Collège de France, and a member of the French Academy of Sciences—has been elected an Academician of the World Academy of Artificial Consciousness (WAAC) in recognition of his foundational contributions to the theory of allosteric receptors, the first identification of a neurotransmitter receptor, and neural models spanning synaptic selection to the mechanisms of conscious access.

Over decades of work, Professor Changeux has pursued a systematic, cross-scale program unifying the molecule–synapse–network levels. With Jacques Monod and Jeffries Wyman, he proposed the Monod–Wyman–Changeux (MWC) model in Journal of Molecular Biology (1965), establishing the classic framework for allosteric regulation of receptors and ion channels; in the 1970s his team isolated and identified the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR), widely recognized as the first neurotransmitter receptor to be identified, and advanced its structural and functional characterization; he then proposed in PNAS (1973) the theory of “epigenesis of neural networks by selective stabilization of synapses,” and further articulated synaptic selection and competition during development in Nature (1976). At the systems level, together with Stanislas Dehaene and Michel Kerszberg, he introduced the Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW) model in PNAS (1998), linking computational mechanisms of conscious access to whole-brain broadcasting dynamics. These contributions provide a firm foundation for understanding the biological basis of consciousness and offer important guidance for the modelability, verifiability, and controllability of artificial consciousness 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.

We are pleased to announce that Julia B. Hirschberg, the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, has been elected an Academician of the World Academy of Artificial Consciousness (WAAC) in recognition of her foundational contributions to the computational modeling of speech prosody and discourse structure, text-to-speech (TTS) and spoken dialogue systems, and language-based interaction research targeting “consciousness cues” such as trust/deception, emotion, and empathy.

Over many years, Professor Hirschberg has advanced a systematic, experiment-driven and engineering-oriented agenda to “enable machines to understand and generate the consciousness cues in human speech.” She pioneered the integration of discourse structure with prosodic information to improve the naturalness and fluency of TTS, and leveraged these insights to develop methods for automatic recognition of speaker states (e.g., anger, fear, surprise) and derivative states (e.g., uncertainty, deception). Her team further explored dialogic coordination/entrainment, trust and charismatic speech, and empathic speech expression and synthesis in clinical and service contexts, thereby advancing language-interaction models that support the reportability of conscious states and their deployment in real systems. Collectively, this body of work provides computational pathways for understanding the “signs of consciousness” in human–machine interaction and lays the groundwork for multilingual, cross-cultural intelligent speech interfaces.

• 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.