Conscious Machine

Ryota Kanai

Ryota is the founder & CEO of ARAYA Brain Imaging. He is well-known as one of the world-leading researchers in structural and functional neuroimage analysis.

After graduating from Department of Biophysics, Kyoto University, Ryota earned his PhD in Experimental Psychology from Universiteit Utrecht (The Netherlands). He worked as a postdoc in Caltech (with Prof. Shin Shimojo), University College London (with Prof. Vincent Walsh and Prof. Geraint Rees), and started his own laboratory in University of Sussex.

Shuntaro Sasai

Shuntaro is a postdoctral researcher working with Dr. Giulio Tononi at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his PhD from Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo. His research interest is in measuring wakefulness and estimating subjective meaningfulness of stimuli from human fMRI data.

Satohiro Tajima

Satohiro (“Sato”) received the Ph.D. degree in engineering from The University of Tokyo in 2013, during working at Japan Broadcasting Corporation. He has been studying theoretical neuroscience and cognitive science as a postdoc at the Department of Basic Neuroscience, University of Geneva, Switzerland since 2014, and as a postdoc/visiting scientist at RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Saitama, Japan since 2013. He received the JSPS Post-Doctoral Fellowship in 2014.

His research area includes vision, natural statistics, decision making, and nonlinear dynamics. He proposes analysis of neural activities based on embedding theorems in dynamical systems.

Shohei Hidaka

Shohei is an assistant professor at Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Ishikawa, Japan). He obtained PhD in Kyoto University and got postdoc training in Kyoto University, and Indiana University. His main research interest is computational model of cognition.
Shohei’s hobby is playing Go (Japanese chess) and he’s very good at it!

Masafumi Oizumi

Masafumi graduated from Department of Physics, The University of Tokyo and obtained PhD from Department of Complexity Science and Engineering, The University of Tokyo. After he obtained his PhD, he was awarded JSPS postdoctoral fellowship (SPD) and RIKEN special postdoctoral fellowship. He worked on the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness in RIKEN (Prof. Shun-ichi Amari’s Lab), University of Wisconsin (Prof. Giulio Tononi’s Lab), and Monash University (A/Prof. Naotsugu Tsuchiya’s Lab). He is currently working on applying the Integrated Information Theory to experimental data and empirically testing the theory.

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Naotsugu Tsuchiya

Nao is a neuroscientist Associate Professor at Monash University. He studied at California Institute of Technology (PhD supervisor: Prof. Christoph Koch) and awarded PhD in 2006. He had postdoc-training in Caltech and held visiting researcher positions at RIKEN and ATR while receiving JST PREST fellowship.
His research intrest is consciousness – “What is consciousness? Can we tell if other animals experience subjectivity, or whether there will be conscious machines or robots?” Nao and his team seek for answers to these fundamental philosophical questions!

Jun Kitazono

Jun received his Ph.D. degree from The University of Tokyo in 2013. He was a JSPS pre-doctoral fellow (DC1) from 2010 to 2013, a postdoc at JST-ERATO OEIP from 2013 to 2014 and at The University of Tokyo in 2014, and an assistant professor at Kobe University from 2014 to 2016. He joined Araya in 2016. His research interests include computational neuroscience and machine learning. He is currently studying IIT theory.

Martin Biehl

Martin Biehl is a PhD student in artificial life at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. His main interest is in the formalization of the concept of agents within dynamical systems. He mainly uses tools from information theory to investigate the distinguishing features of the processes underlying the occurrence of agency. Before becoming fascinated by the peculiarities of acting matter Martin studied dead matter physics at the Humboldt University zu Berlin and Vienna University of Technology.

Olaf Witkowski

Olaf Witkowski is a postdoctoral researcher in swarm intelligence and artificial life at the Ikegami Lab, at the University of Tokyo. His main goal is to understand the mathematical foundations of distributed cognition, information flows in abiogenesis and future evolutionary transitions in complex societies. Before coming to Japan, Olaf originally graduated as a Civil Engineer specialized in AI at the UCL in Belgium and was a co-founder and Chief Research Officer at Commentag LLC.

Taiki Miyanishi

Taiki Miyanishi is a researcher at ATR, Japan. He obtained the Ph.D. in Engineering from Kobe University. His research focuses on information retrieval in the physical world.

Motoaki Kawanabe

Motoaki is a principal researcher at ATR, Japan. He obtained the Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of Tokyo and
then worked as an assistant professor at the University of Tokyo and as a postdoc researcher at Fraunhofer FIRST (Prof. K.-R. Mueller’s lab.) in Berlin, Germany.
His research focuses on statistical signal processing, biomedical engineering, machine learning and their applications to real-world data.

Takuya Maekawa

Takuya is an associate professor at Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University, Japan and a cooperate researcher at ATR, Japan. He obtained the Ph.D. in Information Science and Technology from Osaka University.
His research focuses on pattern recognition using sensor data, especially, activity recognition and indoor positioning. He is also interersted in developing healthcare applications based on these techniques.

Atsunori Kanemura

Dr. Kanemura is a Research Scientist at AIST, Tsukuba, Japan, and a Cooperate Researcher at ATR, Kyoto, Japan. He obtained the Ph.D. in Informatics from Kyoto University. He has won a 2010 JNNS Best Paper Award and a 2015 IEEE TrustCom Best Paper Award. His research focuses on intelligent analysis of human-related data.