Larissa Albantakis PhD

Larissa Albantakis's professional goal is to conduct innovative, transdisciplinary research, bridging the gap between causal structure and function in complex (biological) systems. Her Ph.D. at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain) investigated the neural mechanisms underlying sensorimotor decision-making given multiple choice alternatives and the option to “change one's mind,” making use of large-scale, biophysically-realistic neural models and dynamical systems theory.

Larissa Albantakis postdoctoral training, She joined the laboratory of Prof. Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012, to explore the relationship between causation, information, consciousness, and cognition in neural networks. In December 2015, She transitioned to a Scientist position in the same group. Her postdoctoral work proved essential for (1) developing the latest formalism of the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness (cited > 125 times since 2014); (2) demonstrating of adaptive advantages of recurrent architectures and high information integration in evolving artificial organisms (Markov Brains); (3) a body of work assessing causal relations across micro and macro Spatio-temporal scales in artificial neural networks; and (4) an account of the relation between causal and dynamical complexity in discrete dynamical systems, such as cellular automata (see publication record).

In December 2016, She was honored to receive a 3-year Independent “Power of Information” Research Fellowship by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, to work on a project addressing the problem of causal responsibility in informationally-autonomous agents (artificial and biological). The goal is to develop a quantitative framework of actual causation (“what caused what”), as well as a formal account of the informational autonomy of an agent from its environment.