Research
My key research interest lies Philosophy of mind, with an overlap in Philosophy of Science, Biology and Artificial Intelligence. Recurrent topics in my work include awareness, consciousness, cognition, behaviour, evolution, comparative cognition and artificial intelligence. I focus primarily on the application of theory and concepts from the philosophy of animal minds to artificial systems, highlighting the beginnings or more minimal instances of cognition, awareness and consciousness.
Doctoral project
In biological and artificial systems, the concept of awareness is often blurred with that of consciousness. However, recent developments in cognitive science, philosophy and artificial intelligence bring to light the need, or potential value, of more precise distinctions between these terms. In my research, I focus on awareness in a more functional and minimal sense, emphasising the abilities a being requires to navigate its world. This emphasises that there is value in exploring the cognitive and behavioural abilities of animals or artificial systems while remaining neutral on their subjective experiences (if any are present). This distinction is vital, especially when considering collective systems where individual entities must coordinate and share information, giving rise to emergent collaboration - without leveraging language use, or advanced cognitive capacities.
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Awareness, in this context, refers to an entity’s abilities to register, process, and act upon relevant features of its surroundings. Collaborative awareness, a novel concept at the core of my research, extends this by exploring how awareness can emerge and operate across groups of entities, leading to a shared understanding of common goals, environments, and tasks. This concept has far-reaching implications, both for our theoretical understanding of multi-agent systems and for the ethical deployment of these systems in real-world settings.
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This work is part of the EU-funded EMERGE project, which entails a collaboration between philosophy of mind, ethics and neuroscience, swarm robotics, neural networks, dynamical systems, and soft and collaborative robotics. The involved partners are: LMU in Munich, University of Pisa, University of Bristol, Delft University of Technology, and Da Vinci Labs.
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My PhD project entails developing a conceptual framework for collaborative awareness. This consists of three key challenges:
Concept of Awareness
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Conceptually engineering a novel concept of awareness, distinct from existing notions of consciousness.
Conceptual Framework of Awareness
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Developing a multidimensional account of awareness, applicable to a variety of systems and/or organisms, and at both the individual and collective level. The developed framework should be operationable, measurable and ethically tractable. ​
Collaborative awareness
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Proposing a bespoke concept of collaborative awareness for distributed artificial systems, and exploring strategies for evaluating collaboration in heterogeneous groups of agents.