VERSES Technologies Inc. announced that Dr. Karl Friston, Professor of Neuroscience at University College London, Scientific Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, and one of the world's leading and most cited scientists in the study of the brain and mind (i.e., Computational Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence), has joined the Company as its Chief Scientist to direct and oversee the Company's advanced AI research and development. Friston's world-leading expertise in the development and application of Active Inference, which approaches the design of intelligent systems using design principles from nature (i.e., the physics and neurobiology of information processing), will be central to the R&D of the class of next-generation AI systems being developed at VERSES. The first output of his tenure as Chief Scientist of VERSES AI Research Lab, which is directed by Dr. Maxwell Ramstead, will be a White Paper that will propose a novel approach to addressing the current limitations of AI and offer a multi-stage roadmap toward enabling the “holy grail” of AI known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Friston who was ranked #1 most influential neuroscientist in the world by Semantic Scholar in 2016 has had an illustrious and decorated scientific career. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006 and The Royal Society of Biology in 2012, received the Weldon Memorial Prize and Medal in 2013 for his remarkable contributions to mathematical biology and was elected as a member of EMBO in 2014 and the Academia Europaea in 2015. He was the 2016 recipient of the Charles Branch Award for unparalleled breakthroughs in Brain Research and the Glass Brain Award from the Organization for Human Brain Mapping.

He holds Honorary doctorates from the universities of York, Zurich, Liège, and Radboud University.