Olaf Witkowski is the Founding Director of Cross Labs, an AI research institute in Kyoto, where he leads fundamental research in Artificial Life and Ethical AI. He serves as Board Director and Executive Officer at Cross Compass Ltd, a leading AI company in Tokyo. He is also a lecturer in information sciences at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Tokyo, a research scientist of the Earth-Life Science Institute of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and a regular visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
He co-founded various research ventures poised at the edge of mind science and technology on three continents, including YHouse Inc.—a nonprofit transdisciplinary research institute in New York, focused on awareness, artificial intelligence and complex systems—and the Center for the Study of Apparent Selves—a new institute in Kathmandu studying Buddhist philosophy and AI ethics. He received his PhD in neuroevolution learning and collective intelligence under Takashi Ikegami, from the Computer Science Department of the University of Tokyo.
He is the President of the International Society for Artificial Life since 2023. He is also the lead organizer of numerous meetings in AI and cognitive sciences, including Cross Roads (Tokyo/online), YHouse Consciousness Club (Manhattan), IAS Cognition Lunches (Princeton), and ALife for Social and Environmental Good (online). He co-organized the ALIFE 2018 conference ‘Beyond AI’ in Tokyo, remained involved in the next editions, and co-founded ALIFE JAPAN in 2021.
Olaf Witkowski’s research focuses on expanding human abilities via empathic and trustworthy AI designs, by aiming at simultaneously reaching a deep mathematical understanding of the nature of intelligence in living and artificial substrates. To do so, he researches how to translate affect and empathy in the language of artificial intelligence, develop intelligence augmentation interfaces, universal mechanisms across diverse cognitive beings, implement extended mind paradigms, while developing a careful theory for the ethics of AI and hybrid beings, to eventually reach new paradigms for the next steps in human, machine, and hybrid intelligence design.
Contact: https://linktr.ee/olafwitkowski
Dr. Olaf Witkowski 