Olaf Witkowski

Cross Labs

Intelligence is a central feature of human beings’ primary and interpersonal experience. Understanding how intelligence originated and scaled during evolution is a key challenge for modern biology. Some of the most important approaches to understanding intelligence are the ongoing efforts to build new intelligences in computer science (AI) and bioe...

Interactive storytelling is a form of digital entertainment that has gained attention with the development of creative computational methodologies. However, one of the main problems this field is facing is the poor control that the content creator (e.g. film director or game designer) has over the experience of the user (e.g. viewer or player) once...

This work presents CLIPDraw, an algorithm that synthesizes novel drawings based on natural language input. CLIPDraw does not require any training; rather a pre-trained CLIP language-image encoder is used as a metric for maximizing similarity between the given description and a generated drawing. Crucially, CLIPDraw operates over vector strokes rath...

Over the years, the field of artificial life has attempted to capture significant properties of life in artificial systems. By measuring quantities within such complex systems, the hope is to capture the reasons for the explosion of complexity in living systems. A major effort has been in discrete dynamical systems such as cellular automata, where...

Due to a large number of potential applications, a good deal of effort has been recently made toward creating machine learning models that can recognize evoked emotions from one's physiological recordings. In particular, researchers are investigating the use of EEG as a low-cost, non-invasive method. However, the poor homogeneity of the EEG activit...

Artificial Life (ALife) as an interdisciplinary field draws inspiration and influence from a variety of perspectives. Scientific progress crucially depends, then, on concerted efforts to invite cross-disciplinary dialogue. The goal of this paper is to revitalize discussions of potential connections between the fields of Computational Creativity (CC...

Fifty-four years after Karl Benz decided to put a gas-powered engine into a three-wheeled vehicle and filed a patent for his innovation which revolutionized the automobile industry in 1886, General Motors (GM) proposed an idea of autonomous maneuvering an electric vehicle (EV) ushered by radio controlled electromagnetic (EM) fields and assisted wit...

With the rapid growth in energy demand due to the increasing population, industrialization, and technological advancements, effective energy management plays a pivotal role in maintaining a balance between energy demand and supply. This increase in energy demand can potentially result in significant economic or environmental implications. In this r...

Evolutionary computation is a sub-field of artificial intelligence and artificial life that uses biologically inspired methods to solve optimization problems, using iterative refinements of a set of solutions via change and selection. This approach, which began in the 1950s, constitutes a growing set of algorithms capable of solving a wide range of...

The expected fifth industrial revolution or Industry 5.0 (I-5.0) is human-centered and concerns societal values, and sustainability. I-5.0 focuses on human and machine coworking by augmenting human-collaborative intelligent robots. The current developments in information communications and the increasing market need for high agility and innovative...

Meditation is a mindful practice known for its difficulties, requiring focused attention despite distractions. Many people have traditionally relied on meditation apps with calming audio for support. This paper introduces an innovative AI-driven system aimed at improving the meditation experience, personalized to each user’s needs. This system cons...

Today, the development of urbanization and increasing the number of vehicles has resulted in displeased consequences like traffic congestion and vehicle queuing. The vast majority of countries in the world encounter the challenge of the explosive rise in traffic demand. In this regard, it is necessary to meet traffic demand in transport networks, e...

Chromatics, or the science of color, not only studies the description of colors in terms of the physics of electromagnetic radiations, but also their perception through the human eye and cognitive apparatus. Although in purely physical terms colors may be described by as few as three dimensions – such as hue, saturation, and brightness – an open de...

Artificial life is a research field studying what processes and properties define life, based on a multidisciplinary approach spanning the physical, natural, and computational sciences. Artificial life aims to foster a comprehensive study of life beyond “life as we know it” and toward “life as it could be,” with theoretical, synthetic, and empirica...

The relationship between humans and technology has attracted increasing attention with the advent of ever stronger models of artificial intelligence. Humans and technology are intertwined within multiple autopoietic loops of stress, care, and intelligence. This paper suggests that technology should not be seen as a mere tool serving humans' needs,...

Computation, if treated as a set of physical processes that act on information represented by states of matter, encompasses biological systems, digital systems, and other constructs, and may be a fundamental measure of living systems. The opportunity for biological computation, represented in the propagation and selection-driven evolution of inform...

The relationship between humans and technology has attracted increasing attention with the advent of ever stronger models of artificial intelligence. Humans and technology are intertwined within multiple autopoietic loops of stress, care, and intelligence. This paper suggests that technology should not be seen as a mere tool serving humans' needs,...

Artificial life is a research field studying what processes and properties define life, based on a multidisciplinary approach spanning the physical, natural and computational sciences. Artificial life aims to foster a comprehensive study of life beyond "life as we know it" and towards "life as it could be", with theoretical, synthetic and empirical...

We examine the difference between attending to our mental states by looking 'within' and attending to the process of perceiving the object through a higher-order type of reflection. The distinction bears particular significance for the field of phenomenology as it corresponds to a crucial difference phenomenologists make between “introspection” (lo...

Chromatics, or the science of color, not only studies the description of colors in terms of the physics of electromagnetic radiations, but also their perception through the human eye and cognitive apparatus. Although in purely physical terms colors may be described by as few as three dimensions – such as hue, saturation, and brightness – an open de...

Lately, studying social dynamics in interacting agents has been boosted by the power of computer models, which bring the richness of qualitative work, while offering the precision, transparency, extensiveness, and replicability of statistical and mathematical approaches. A particular set of phenomena for the study of social dynamics is Web collabor...

Intelligence is a central feature of human beings’ primary and interpersonal experience. Understanding how intelligence originated and scaled during evolution is a key challenge for modern biology. Some of the most important approaches to understanding intelligence are the ongoing efforts to build new intelligences in computer science (AI) and bioe...

When we reflect on our experience, our attention shifts from the objects of our experience towards the experience of the objects. This shift of attention can be understood in at least the following three ways: (1) an instance of introspection where a physical self is attending to its own experience, (2) an instance of psychological reflection where...

Inspired by natural evolution, evolutionary search algorithms have proven remarkably capable due to their dual abilities to radiantly explore through diverse populations and to converge to adaptive pressures. A large part of this behavior comes from the selection function of an evolutionary algorithm, which is a metric for deciding which individual...

In the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, while millions of people await the administration of a vaccine, social distancing remains the leading approach towards the effect commonly known as "flattening the curve" of infections. Over the last year, governmental administrations throughout the globe have implemented various lockdown policies in...

Meta-learning models, or models that learn to learn, have been a long-desired target for their ability to quickly solve new tasks. Traditional meta-learning methods can require expensive inner and outer loops, thus there is demand for algorithms that discover strong learners without explicitly searching for them. We draw parallels to the study of e...

Due to a large number of potential applications, a good deal of effort has been recently made towards creating machine learning models that can recognize evoked emotions from one's physiological recordings. In particular, researchers are investigating the use of EEG as a low-cost, non-invasive method. However , the poor homogeneity of the EEG activ...

Criticality is thought to be crucial for complex systems to adapt at the boundary between regimes with different dynamics, where the system may transition from one phase to another. Numerous systems, from sandpiles to gene regulatory networks to swarms to human brains, seem to work towards preserving a precarious balance right at their critical poi...

We explore the integrated structure (or the unity) of consciousness by examining the “phenomenological axioms” of the “integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT)” from the perspective of Husserlian phenomenology. After clarifying the notion of phenomenological axioms by drawing on resources from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (S...

In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life research and provide a targeted history of the developments that have led to the multidisciplinary field of origins-of-life studies. We outline these issues and developments to guide researchers and students from all fields. With respect to philosophy, we pr...

In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life research and provide a targeted history of the developments that have led to the multidisciplinary field of origins-of-life studies. We outline these issues and developments to guide researchers and students from all fields. With respect to philosophy, we pr...

We propose an approach to open-ended evolution via the simulation of swarm dynamics. In nature, swarms possess remarkable properties, which allow many organisms, from swarming bacteria to ants and flocking birds, to form higher-order structures that enhance their behavior as a group. Swarm simulations highlight three important factors to create nov...

We propose an approach of open-ended evolution via the simulation of swarm dynamics. In nature, swarms possess remarkable properties, which allow many organisms, from swarming bacteria to ants and flocking birds, to form higher-order structures that enhance their behavior as a group. Swarm simulations highlight three important factors to create nov...

The emergence and inter-play of cooperation versus competition in groups of individuals has been widely studied, for example using game-theoretic models of eusocial insects [11], [1] experimental evolution in bacterium [5], and agent-based models of societal institutions [8]. Game theory models have been demonstrated as indispensable analytical too...

Many examples of cooperation exist in biology. In chemical systems however, which can sometimes be quite complex, we do not appear to observe intricate cooperative interactions. A key question for the origin of life, is then how can molecular cooperation first arise in an abiotic system prior to the emergence of biological replication. We postulate...

The introduction of convolutional layers greatly advanced the performance of neural networks on image tasks due to innately capturing a way of encoding and learning translation-invariant operations, matching one of the underlying symmetries of the image domain. In comparison, there are a number of problems in which there are a number of different i...

We extend an abstract agent-based swarming model based on the evolution of neural network controllers, to explore further the emergence of swarming. Our model is grounded in the ecological situation, in which agents can access some information from the environment about the resource location, but through a noisy channel. Swarming critically improve...

Swarming behavior is common in biology, from cell colonies to insect swarms and bird flocks. However, the conditions leading to the emergence of such behavior are still subject to research. Since Reynolds' boids, many artificial models have reproduced swarming behavior, focusing on details ranging from obstacle avoidance to the introduction of fixe...

Contents 1. Introduction 1.1. A workshop and this document 1.2. Framing origins of life science 1.2.1. What do we mean by the origins of life (OoL)? 1.2.2. Defining life 1.2.3. How should we characterize approaches to OoL science? 1.2.4. One path to life or many? 2. A Strategy for Origins of Life Research 2.1. Outcomes—key questions and investigati...

It brings out the animal in us " is often heard, when speaking of unaltruistic behavior. Frans de Waal has argued against a " veneer theory " of one of humanity's most valued traits: morality. It has been proposed that morality emerges as a result of a system of evolutionary processes, giving rise to social altruistic instincts. Traditional researc...

In Evolutionary Biology and Game Theory, there is a long history of models aimed at predicting strategies adopted by agents during resource foraging. In Artificial Life, the agent-based modeling approach allowed to simulate the evolution of foraging behaviors in populations of artificial agents embodied in a simulated environment. In this paper, di...

Species diversification is generally thought to emerge from space barriers, which isolate individuals from each other long enough so that they diverge significantly from each other, each adapting to their own ecological niche. However, the search for ecological opportunities alone does not account for all cases of speciation (Schluter 2000, Rundell...

From colonies of bacteria to swarms of bees and flocks of birds, countless organisms exhibit a swarming behavior based on local, individual decision making. In such species, the information is used efficiently at the group level to reach optimal behaviors in tasks such as food foraging, which allow to overcome noisy sensory inputs and local minima....

From biological cells to bee swarms and bird flocks, nature shows countless examples of self-organized groups displaying a collective mind. In such species, individuals interacting together end up producing an emergent behavior that increases their chances of survival and reproduction. This thesis shows an exploration of the evolution of communicat...

The evolution of cooperation has long been studied in Game Theory and Evolutionary Biology. In this study, we investigate the impact of movement control in a spatial version of the Prisoner's Dilemma in a three dimensional space. A population of agents is evolved via an asynchronous genetic algorithm, to optimize their strategy. Our results show th...

Since Reynolds boids, swarming behavior has often been reproduced in artificial models, but the conditions leading to its emergence are still subject to research, with candidates ranging from obstacle avoidance to virtual leaders. In this paper, we present a multi-agent model in which individuals develop swarming using only their ability to listen...

(Original title: "Essai de décryptage des cordelettes quipus utilisées par les Incas comme moyen de communication : un exemple d’ethno-cryptographie")