Alexandra Maria Proca

Imperial College London, Department of Computing

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I’m a PhD student in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London supervised by Pedro Mediano and Murray Shanahan. Broadly, my research interests span the fields of computational neuroscience, machine learning, and consciousness science. I’m interested in using the tools of machine learning for developing general theories of learning, cognition, and consciousness to better understand both biological and artificial minds.

Before attending Imperial, I received my bachelors degree in computer science and neuroscience (with a music minor) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then completed a masters degree in machine learning at University College London. During my degrees, I worked as a research assistant in several labs on various topics in the fields of machine learning and neuroscience. After finishing my masters, I worked as a research assistant in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zürich with João Sacramento, studying the use of hypernetworks for meta-learning. For more information, you can view my CV.

I really enjoy discussing and engaging with science and philosophy with other people. I currently help organize Qualiaheads, a club of graduate students studying the state of research in consciousness science.

Outside of research, I love anything outdoors (marathon running, hiking, skiing, traveling, etc.). I also enjoy playing music and writing. I’ve been playing piano for 18 years and while I lived in Zürich, I was a singer in a local band. I occassionally write poetry and (less frequently) share it.

news

Jan 2023 Awarded the Imperial College London President’s PhD Scholarship.
Aug 2022 I gave a talk at the AMCS Modelling Consciousness Cabin Workshop in Dorfgastein, Austria.
Jul 2022 I presented a poster on PID in multitask ANNs at ASSC25 in Amsterdam.
Jul 2022 I gave a talk on meta-learning with hypernetworks at the Sinergia Meeting in Bern, Switzerland.
Jun 2022 Qualiaheads organized a Q&A with Pedro Mediano, discussing his recent work on weak IIT.
May 2022 Qualiaheads organized a Q&A with Anil Seth, after reading his new book Being You.

selected publications

  1. Synergistic information supports modality integration and flexible learning in neural networks solving multiple tasks
    arXiv, 2022