Arthur W. Juliani, PhD

I am currently a research scientist at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies. My interests reside at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, machine learning, and philosophy.

My graduate research at University of Oregon focused on human navigation and computational models of the brain systems which support it. In that work, I used a combination of behavioral experiments and novel computational modeling to develop a deep learning inspired model of the hippocampal place cell system.

While at Unity Technologies, I was one of the founding developers of the Unity ML Agents toolkit. I also lead a project to develop and host the Obstacle Tower Challenge, a reinforcement learning competition in which hundreds of researchers benchmarked their algorithms.

During my time at Araya Inc I led a pair of projects studying the potential for current deep learning architectures to capture the functional properties of current leading models of consciousness. This included a proposal that the Transformer architecture can be understood as functional Global Neuronal Workspace.

At Microsoft Research I focused on using the theoretical framework of deep reinforcement learning to model both healthy and pathological representation learning, belief formation, and decision making in humans. The goal of this line of research was to better understanding mental health disorders and their potential treatment through novel modalities such as psychedelic-assisted therapy, meditation, and neurofeedback.

Download my curriculum vitae