Max Welling
Professor of Machine Learning, University of Amsterdam; Chief AI Officer, CuspAI
Builder The claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open
Max Welling is a professor of machine learning at the University of Amsterdam and one of the builders of two lines this site follows. The first is AKOrN, Artificial Kuramoto Oscillatory Neurons, which he co-authored with Takeru Miyato, Sindy Löwe and Andreas Geiger (ICLR 2025, oral). AKOrN replaces threshold units with Kuramoto oscillators inside deep networks, and it supports fully connected, convolutional and attention coupling. The project’s own binding layer uses that mechanism, with five module oscillators integrated through the update rule in the public research repo (the Brain Waves Console runs the same equations in the browser). The second line is Neural Wave Machines, co-authored with T. Anderson Keller (his profile), where locally coupled oscillatory RNNs carry sequences through traveling waves in their hidden state.
Welling’s broader research sits at the geometry of learning, from variational inference and Bayesian methods to geometric deep learning and graph neural networks, and the oscillatory work is where that geometry meets neural dynamics. For consciousness research his relevance is concrete. AKOrN is a working, inspectable implementation of the Kuramoto binding idea, which is why a 2026 cortex review cites it beside the neural wave models, and why this project chose it as the mechanism its workspace binding layer runs.
Known for. Co-author of Artificial Kuramoto Oscillatory Neurons (Miyato, Löwe, Geiger and Welling, ICLR 2025), Neural Wave Machines with T. Anderson Keller (ICML 2023), and foundational work on variational inference, geometric deep learning and graph neural networks
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Max Welling is listed with the other builders, who hold that the claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.