Olaf Witkowski

Background

About Olaf Witkowski

Olaf Witkowski is a Leader of Technological Innovation and an Ambassador for Empathic AI and Artificial Life Research, based in Japan. He is the Founding Director at Cross Labs, an AI research institute in Kyoto focused on fundamental research in Diverse Intelligences and Trustworthy AI. He is the Executive Officer in charge of Science and Technology at leading AI company Cross Compass Ltd. in Tokyo. He is the President of the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL), and co-founded ALIFE JAPAN in 2021. He is a Lecturer in Information Sciences at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Tokyo, a Researcher 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 ventures in 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. Olaf Witkowski received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 2015. He originally graduated as an Civil Engineer from University of Louvain, Belgium, in 2007. His first background is Artificial Intelligence. He successively was a research fellow at the Information Systems Research Group (UCL), the NLP Research Group (University of Sheffield), then Tsujii Lab (University of Tokyo). During that period, he contributed to various Machine Learning projects: the Khipu Research Group, Tweetag.com, GATE and U-Compare. After getting his PhD in 2015, he became a Postdoctoral fellow at the School of Arts and Sciences, at the University of Tokyo. He later joined the Earth-Life Science Institute as a Research Scientist in Artificial Life, at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. In 2016, he co-founded YHouse Inc, a privately funded institute for the study of the emergence of consciousness in the universe, based in Manhattan, New York. He co-organized ALIFE 2018 ‘Beyond AI’, in Tokyo. Back in Tokyo, he co-founded the Cross Research Institute, an international research hub for the transdisciplinary study of forms of intelligence over any substrate, which then became Cross Labs. He is also the lead organizer of many initiatives in AI, cognitive sciences, technology, and ethics. In 2019, he was elected on the Board of Directors of the International Society for Artificial Life, and elected as its President since 2023.