Despite recent progress, AI still faces fundamental problems at the intersection of technology and perception. AI can help us gain deeper insights into visual perception and artificial consciousness from an AI perspective.

Visual perception refers to how living beings, including humans, interpret and make sense of visual stimuli from the surrounding environment. It spans the reception of visual information through the eyes, the processing of this information by the brain, and the subsequent construction of a meaningful perceptual experience.

On the other hand, artificial consciousness considers the possibility of designing machines or artificial systems associated with forms of consciousness or subjective experience. Today, an AI can reliably recognize a face, but can it see it? Is an AI able to identify itself by visually self-perceiving itself? Does conscious awareness compare favourably to what today's AI can do? Are we missing a key component?

• Description of the workshop: 

AIxPAC gathers contributions from the scientific community and industry representatives to discuss theoretical and practical concepts. Two separate sessions will be allocated for contributors to hold their presentations and answer questions from the audience (15-minute presentation + 5-minute question and answer session). Besides, multidisciplinary collaboration from scientists and researchers with different backgrounds will be fostered by offering panels on the physicalist ontology of consciousness and artificial consciousness and colour perception from externalism and internalism viewpoints. 

Throughout the workshop sessions, the following research questions will be tackled:

1) Can a Visual Perception system be embedded in machines?

2) How accurately does AI tackle Visual Attention processes? And what is the relation between attention and consciousness?

3) What is the Ontology of Consciousness and Artificial Consciousness?

4) Can current AI architectures and approaches be used to design Artificial Consciousness?

5) How do generative AI systems contribute to understanding and simulating perceptual experiences and artificial consciousness?

The above-mentioned questions are all but easy to answer. Furthermore, they can be faced using different approaches. Some researchers focus on cognitive architectures to try and deliver a complete vision of the world, with others mostly involved in building specific modules entailing human tasks (vision, speech, motion, reading, reasoning) as tiles of a bigger and more complex mosaic.

Here is a list of topics of interest for the workshop:

• AI Models for Visual Perception and Visual Attention

• Attention and Self-attention-based applications

• Computational Approaches for Visual Saliency

• Consciousness and Artificial Consciousness Ontology

• Computational Models of Consciousness

• Cognitive Architectures for Artificial Consciousness

• Biologically inspired AI solutions.