Olaf Witkowski is a director of scientific affairs and chief scientist at Cross Labs, a new research institute which studies the fundamental principles of biological and artificial intelligence (AI), funded and supported by Cross Compass Ltd. He is also a research scientist of the Earth-Life Science Institute, at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and a regular visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is also a founding member of Yhouse¬, a nonprofit transdisciplinary research institute in New York, focused on the study of awareness, artificial intelligence and complex systems. He is currently an elected member of the board of directors of the International Society for Artificial Life, and was a program chair for the ALIFE 2018 conference Beyond AI, and has been organizing numerous meetings on AI and intelligence sciences. He received his Ph.D. under Takashi Ikegami, from the computer science department of the University of Tokyo.