Andy Clark is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He is the author of several books including The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality (Penguin Random House, 2023), Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford University Press, 2016), Mindware (Oxford University Press, Second Edition 2014), Supersizing the Mind (Oxford University Press, 2008), and Being There: Putting Brain, Body And World Together Again (MIT Press, 1997). Academic interests include artificial intelligence, embodied and extended cognition, robotics, human-technology systems, and computational neuroscience. From 2017-2021 he was PI on a European Research Council Advanced Grant: Expecting Ourselves: Embodied Prediction and the Construction of Conscious Experience. He is currently PI on an ERC Synergy Grant, XScape. Material Minds: Exploring the Interactions between Predictive Brains, Cultural Artifacts, and Embodied Visual Search.

Axel is a postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Engineering and Informatics of the University of Sussex (UK). His research focuses on Bayesian approaches to human cognition as applied to the study of Law, Psychiatry, Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology, and Evolutionary Biology.

Laura Desirèe Di Paolo is currently doing her PhD in Cognitive Sciences at the University of Sussex. She has already earned a PhD in Philosophy of Mind and Biology at Sapienza, University of Rome, and has worked as Postdoctoral researcher at the German Primate Center (Deutsche PrimatenZentrum) and at the Lichtemberg-Kolleg Institute in Göttingen, Germany. As Editor-in-Chief, she published the volume Evolution of Primate Social Cognition (Springer, 2018), along with paleoanthropologist Fabio Di Vincenzo and primatologist Francesca De Petrillo. Her interests lie in Social Learning and Cognition in Primates, Early Homo, and Children. Right now, she is looking at the design of objects, and their role in transmitting mental models and learning mechanisms, with a particular emphasis on “educational” (schools and learning devices), and on “archeological” artefacts, within the ERC Synergy Grant, XScape. Material Minds: Exploring the Interactions between Predictive Brains, Cultural Artifacts, and Embodied Visual Search.

Avel GUÉNIN--CARLUT is currently a PhD student in cognitive science under the supervision of Andy CLARK. Their research focuses on the relation between cognition and cultural evolution, as well as the formalisation of the "unfolding" of physical possibilities in evolution and cognition and its link to consciousness / sentience. Their work in the XSCAPE project leverages the computational phenomenology of human agents, as described by Active Inference. They aim to build from it a detailed conceptual and mathematical framework enabling the inference of the socio-cognitive landscapes of past societies from archeological and historical evidence. In particular, their research suggests the necessity of reframing the target of cognitive archeology as the socio-cultural constraints enacted by past societies and their intrinsic self-productive "flow", rather than the grist and mills of individual minds.

University of Sussex, Leverhulme funded PhD student

University College London | Karl Friston is a theoretical neuroscientist and authority on brain imaging. He invented statistical parametric mapping (SPM), voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and dynamic causal modelling (DCM). These contributions were motivated by schizophrenia research and theoretical studies of value-learning, formulated as the dysconnection hypothesis of schizophrenia. Mathematical contributions include variational Laplacian procedures and generalized filtering for hierarchical Bayesian model inversion.

University of Sussex | I am Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where I am also Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science. I am also Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Program on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness, and of the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme: From Sensation and Perception to Awareness. I was recently an Engagement Fellow with the Wellcome Trust

University College London | VERSES | I'm the Senior Director of Research at VERSES and affiliated with the Spatial Web Foundation. My research focuses on the free-energy principle, multiscale active inference, and computational phenomenology. I now direct the VERSES Research Lab, which focuses on probabilistic model-based approaches to (artificial) intelligence (active inference, multi-agent modelling and group inference, computational phenomenology of XR experience, category theory, and AI ethics