Olaf Witkowski is an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and research leader based in Kyoto, Japan. He is the Founding Director of Cross Labs, a research institute devoted to intelligence science, artificial life, and the future of human-machine cognition; the President of the International Society for Artificial Life; the Founder and Chief Scientist of Cognisee PBC; and a Board Director at Cross Compass Ltd. in Tokyo. His work sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, artificial life, collective intelligence, hybrid computing, AI ethics, and the long-range future of cognition across biological, artificial, and hybrid substrates.
Over the past two decades, Dr. Witkowski has built and led research and innovation efforts across Europe, the United States, and Japan. He has founded and scaled six deep-tech ventures across three continents and helped secure more than $38 million in research funding for programs spanning AI, biocomputation, consciousness, ethics, and diverse intelligences. His academic and research affiliations have included MIT CSAIL, the University of Tokyo, the Earth-Life Science Institute at the Institute of Science Tokyo (formerly Tokyo Institute of Technology), and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Tokyo in 2015 under Takashi Ikegami, following earlier work in computer science, engineering, and ethno-cryptography connected to the Catholic University of Louvain and MIT’s Khipu Research Group.
At Cross Labs, which he founded in Kyoto in 2019, Dr. Witkowski has led interdisciplinary research programs in AI, artificial life, cognitive neuroscience, and diverse intelligences, while building roadmaps, partnerships, public programs, and applied pathways that connect fundamental science to real-world systems. At ISAL, where he has served on the Board since 2019, as Vice President from 2022 to 2023, and as President since 2023, he helps lead an international field spanning complex systems, evolutionary computation, origins of life, robotics, synthetic biology, philosophy, education, and art. Across these roles, he has focused not only on research itself but also on the institutions, narratives, and communities needed to shape responsible long-term progress in intelligence science.
Dr. Witkowski has worked extensively across academia and industry. He has taught, mentored, or held external faculty roles through the University of Tokyo, Ritsumeikan University, Hokkaido University, Chiba Institute of Technology, and ELSI. Earlier in his career, he was a visiting scholar at IAS Princeton and a founding member and research architect of YHouse in New York. On the industrial side, he built the first Twitter search engine in 2007 and later helped deliver advanced AI systems and long-horizon research strategy with major Japanese technology companies including Epson, Renesas, Yaskawa, and Kaga.
His scholarship spans artificial life, open-ended evolution, swarm intelligence, autopoiesis, hybrid life, origins of life, ethics of artificial life, human-AI collaboration, and emerging architectures for collective intelligence. He has published over 100 scientific works, with over 1,000 citations, an h-index of 18, and an i10-index of 27. His publications include contributions in venues and journals such as NeurIPS, Artificial Life, Biosystems, WIREs Cognitive Science, Astrobiology, PLOS ONE, Frontiers, CHI, IEEE outlets, and Springer volumes. His work has received multiple best paper awards as well as director-level recognition at ELSI, reflecting a career that moves fluidly between theoretical depth, scientific originality, and technological translation.
A recurring thread through Dr. Witkowski’s career has been the question of how knowledge, agency, and meaning can persist and travel across radically different minds, bodies, and media. This has led him from embodied swarms and artificial chemistries, to questions of consciousness and ethics, to the design of infrastructures for future human-machine institutions. Today, that trajectory converges in Cognisee, where he is helping build Artificial Collective Intelligence: systems for making tacit expertise, institutional memory, and governed knowledge computable at scale. The broader aim of this work is to complement current language-model paradigms with deeper forms of continuity, judgment, and collective learning—what might be called wisdom-driven AI infrastructure.
He has also co-founded the Artificial Life Institute in Kyoto, the Thirdware Consortium in Tokyo, and the Center for the Study of Apparent Selves in Kathmandu, reflecting a career that bridges science, philosophy, entrepreneurship, and public imagination. Across research, teaching, institution building, and venture creation, Olaf Witkowski’s work is animated by a single challenge: understanding intelligence broadly enough to help build technologies worthy of it.
Dr. Olaf Witkowski 