Amol Kelkar is an Artificial Intelligence (AI), Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Machine Consciousness Research Scientist based in United States. He is also a Chief Technology Officer. Over the last 25 years, he has worked in cognitive neuroscience, bayesian statistics, evolutionary biology, psychology and philosophy that has brought forward a set of common themes to understand perception, inference, attention, action, emotion, agency and consciousness. He feels that the recent advancements in deep learning technologies and hardware capabilities have enabled scientists to explore novel computational architectures to test some of these ideas—and the time is right to approach consciousness and artificial general intelligence with scientific rigor. He explores these uncharted waters, with the free energy principle, active inference, predictive coding and homeostasis as guiding posts. He is currently working on an RBM inspired deep predictive neural network architecture for sensory perception and action. Longer term goal for the architecture is to model conscious agency, presence, selfhood, awareness, attention and some other attributes of consciousness.
