Eric Elmoznino

Eric Elmoznino is a doctoral researcher at Mila and the Université de Montréal working on consciousness and machine intelligence. His research connects two ideas the field usually keeps apart, that attention selects information for its usability, and that the connection between consciousness and competence runs through that selection. His published work argues that content becomes conscious-relevant, in the functional sense, when attention selects it for maximal usefulness to the task at hand, a formulation with direct consequences for how machine systems are assessed.

Elmoznino wrote the first drafts of the global workspace implementation sections of the Butlin and Long indicator-properties report, the collaboration this site examines in the nineteen researcher checklist, specifying how multiple specialized systems, a limited-capacity workspace, and global broadcast could be implemented in current AI.

The position his work defends is that the workspace architecture is not merely an analogy for large language models and their relatives. It is an implementable specification, and the interesting question is which systems realize how much of it. That is the engineering half of the site’s measurement program, stated by one of the people drafting it.

Known for. Global workspace implementation analysis in AI, attention and usable information, consciousness and competence, indicator properties collaboration

Coverage on this site

• What Would AI Consciousness Actually Look Like? The 14-Indicator Checklist Explained March 2026

Related researchers

• PB Patrick ButlinEleos AI Research. Previously the Global Priorities Institute, OxfordLead author of the indicator properties framework for assessing consciousness in AI systems AI welfare21 articles
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• David ChalmersNew York University. Co-director, Center for Mind, Brain and ConsciousnessNaming the hard problem of consciousness, and the philosophical zombie argument Functionalist15 articles
• KF Karl FristonUniversity College London. Chief Scientist, VERSES AIThe free energy principle and active inference Functionalist17 articles
• Jonathan BirchLondon School of Economics and Political ScienceThe Edge of Sentience, the LSE Criteria, and the run-ahead principle AI welfare12 articles
• Yoshua BengioMila, Université de MontréalThe Consciousness Prior, deep learning foundations, Turing Award, global workspace-inspired representation learning Integrated information1 article

Eric Elmoznino is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.