Orthogonal Research and Education Lab (OREL) is a distributed community of investigators pursuing interdisciplinary research and open science, while valuing the underpinning philosophy within disciplines and societal impact of advances in AI and other technologies. With projects spanning computer science, biology & neuroscience, and cognitive science & psychology, we foster collaboration and communication across diverse fields of study alongside development as researchers educators, and science communicators. OREL was established in 2014 by Director of Science Dr. Bradly Alicea.

Open Positions!

Please see our Get Involved page to view internships and other ways to join our lab!

Lab News

2024

Summer Congratulations to Sarrah Bastawala for being selected as Google Summer of Code Scholars (sponsored by INCF), and Adama Koita and Shubham Soni for being selected as Open-source Development Scholars. They will be mentored by Dr Bradly Alicea and Jesse Parent.

April Conference: Embodied Intelligence Workshop 2024: multiple lab presentations. Medium post

March Preprint: A Primer on Gibsonian Information. arXiv, 2403.18829.

January Publication: Super-performance: sampling, planning, and ecological information. Studies in Computational Intelligence, 1130, 31-45.

2023

October Publication: Intelligence Offloading and the Neurosimulation of Developmental Agents. International Workshop on Embodied Intelligence, IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 1292, 012019.

June OREL presents at Open-source Sustainability: an agent-based, cybernetic approach at Sustainable AI Conference.

Summer Congratulations to R.V. Rajagopalan and Vrushali Nandurkar for being selected as Google Summer of Code Scholars (sponsored by INCF). They will be mentored by Dr Bradly Alicea and Jesse Parent.

May (13) Beginning of our Cybernetic Reading Group series on YouTube.

April Conference: Embodied Intelligence Workshop 2024: multiple lab presentations. Medium post

April Publication: Embodied Cognitive Morphogenesis as a Route to Intelligent Systems. Royal Society Interface Focus, 20220067. Part of the special issue on Symmetries in Mind and Life

January Publication: Layers, folds, and semi-neuronal information processing. Procedia Computer Science, 213, 443-452.

January Publication: Flipping the Switch on Local Exploration: Genetic Algorithms with Reversals. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, 608, 719–734.

2022

November Meta-brain Models: biologically-inspired cognitive agents. IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 1261, 012019.
September (25) Conference: Neuromatch Academy (NM5): multiple lab presentations.

Spetember (22) Conference: WeRobot: multiple lab posters. Medium post.

August Publication: Braitenberg Vehicles as Developmental Neurosimulation. Artificial Life, 28(3), 369–395.

June (3) Bradly Alicea presents at GSoC Mentor Summit.

Summer Congratulations to Himanshu Chougule, Brian McCorkle, and Hussain Ather for being selected as Google Summer of Code Scholars (sponsored by INCF). They will be mentored by Dr Bradly Alicea and Jesse Parent.

April (23) Conference: Embodied Intelligence Workshop 2022: multiple lab presentations.

April (22) Beginning of our Cognition Futures Reading Group series on YouTube.

April (19) OREL presents at New York Celebration of Women in Computing 2022.

April (9) Society Ethics & Technology team presents: Frontiers in Data Privacy and Technology Ethics. New York Celebration of Women in Computing

February Welcome 2022 Spring Interns!

February Publication: Gibsonian Information: a new approach to quantitative information. Studies in Computational Intelligence, 1032. ​

January OREL solidifies partnership with University at Albany, SUNY’s undergraduate research center

2021

December Neuromatch Academy (NM4): multiple lab presentations.

November (19) Introduction to Developmental Embodied NeuroSimulation at MAIN Conference on NeuroAI.

August Congratulations Jesse Parent on acceptance to the National Science Foundation’s CISE Graduate Fellowship!

July (28) Trajectories in Cognitive Science Discussion Group at CogSci 2021, hosted and organized by OREL’s Congition Futures team

July Cultural Evolution Society (CES 2021): multiple lab presentations.

May (15) Allostasis Machines: a model for understanding internal states and technological environments. ACM CHI 2021 Workshop on Emergent Interaction.

April (9) Challenges and Opportunities in Integrating Critical Voices in AI Ethics: Towards a Unified Ethical Framework for AI. New York Celebration of Women in Computing 2022.

April (23) Conference: Embodied Intelligence Workshop 2021: multiple lab presentations. Medium post

2020

December (11) (https://medium.com/orel-group/observer-dependent-models-a-talk-at-the-philosophers-web-cafe-4c503cd47778) Presentation by Bradly Alicea and Moderator Jesse Parent in “Observer-Dependent Models” talk at Philosopher’s Web Café.

December OREL members attending NeurIPS 2020 and MAIN2020.

November Conference: Neuormatch Academy (NM3): multiple lab presentations.

July Publication: Developmental Embodied Agents as Meta-brain Models. DevoNN Workshop, Artificial Life 2020.

July Conference: Neuormatch Academy (NM2): multiple lab presentations.

April Epistomological Directories (EDs) for Research Development and Education at csv,conf.

April Conference: Neuormatch Academy (NM1): multiple lab presentations.

2019

September Conference presentation: Stefan Dvoretskii presented on Modeling Neural Development with Braitenberg Vehicles. INCF Neuroinformatics Conference, University of Warsaw, Poland.

August Publication: Cultural association based on machine learning for team formation. Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computing, Communication, Control and Automation.

Summer Congratulations to Stefan Dvoretskii for being selected as Google Summer of Code Scholars (sponsored by INCF), and Ziyi Gong, Ankit Gupta, and Jesse Parent for being selected as Open-source Development Scholars. They will be mentored by Dr Bradly Alicea.

2018

November Publication: Origins of the Embryo: Self-organization through cybernetic regulation. Biosystems, 173, 73-82.

Summer Congratulations to Sam Felder and Cheng-Hsun (Jim) Hsueh for being selected as Google Summer of Code Scholars (sponsored by INCF). They will be mentored by Dr Bradly Alicea.

Foundations

Robert Stone and Bradly Alicea. The Foundations of Control and Cognition: The Every Good Regulator Theorem. Figshare, 10.6084/m9.figshare. 1559095.v3

Bradly Alicea. Data Reuse as a Prisoner’s Dilemma: the social capital of open science. bioRxiv, doi:10.1101/093518.

Bradly Alicea. The ‘Machinery’ of Biocomplexity: understanding non-optimal architectures in biological systems. arXiv, 1104.3559.

Bradly Alicea. Contextual and Structural Representations of Market-mediated Economic Value. arXiv, 1403.7021 [q-fin.GN].

Bradly Alicea. Animal-oriented Virtual Environments: illusion, dilation, and discovery. F1000 Research, 3:202.