Francisco holds an A.B. in Biochemistry and a Ph.D. in Organismal and Evolutionary Biology, both from Harvard, and has three years of postdoctoral experience at the Institute of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics. He is the author of fifteen publications in topflight scientific journals, and his research has achieved international attention in the popular as well as the scientific press and has been described in numerous textbooks. Throughout his academic career he studied the patterns and processes of molecular evolution, whereby the gradual accumulation of small modifications at the genetic level can produce highly complex and specialized adaptations at the organismal level. Francisco soon realized that many of these concepts could be directly applicable to the study of mind. Following his postdoc he began applying his expertise in biochemistry to maintain his currency in neuroscience research, and his expertise in population dynamics and molecular evolution to the development of sophisticated computing methods, including genetic algorithms, machine learning, and neural networks. He has found that there are many exciting parallels between molecular evolution and neural learning: for example, between the dynamics of genetic alleles drifting in populations and the dynamics of competing neural firing patterns, between the emergence of complex genetic regulatory pathways and the emergence of complex interacting neural circuits, and between the fitness function of natural selection and the fitness function of positive and negative reinforcement and internal consistency. He has spent the last two years developing a new neural learning system, implemented in Java with dozens of classes and hundreds of pages of code, for which he has received one patent and has another pending.

Christian du Croix deWilde

Christian (known to friends and family as Cruz) holds a Bachelor of Science from Stanford University in Symbolic Systems, with a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction. From an early age, Cruz found irony in the notion that despite our extraordinary ability to understand and describe external phenomena in exacting detail, no one has yet offered a satisfactory explanation of the internal relationship between body and mind. Driven by the desire to understand the subjective sense of identity, he chose an academic path focused on examining the emergence of thought from the dynamic complexity of symbolic interaction. His multidisciplinary background, which spans Philosophy of Mind, Cognitive Psychology, Linguistics, Computer Science, and Symbolic Logic, has trained Cruz to effectively identify logical correlations between seemingly disparate systems. This conceptual cross-fertilization allows him to reach beyond the limitations of a single predefined framework and approach questions openly, taking into consideration a wide array of different perspectives. For the past ten years, Cruz has worked in Silicon Valley as a software developer and network management architect. He has designed and implemented enterprise-wide NMS infrastructures for three major corporations, and has programmed a number of specialized information-management applications. Above all, his experience in the technology industry has taught him not to lose sight of the practical applications of scientific research. (Portfolio)