AGI-26 keynote
Alex Wissner-Gross
Alex Wissner-Gross is Founder and Chief Scientist of Physical Superintelligence, with a doctorate in physics from Harvard and a published record that moves between the laboratory bench and the question of what intelligence is, physically.
“A physicist, computer scientist, entrepreneur, and investor working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and the physical world.”
— his own description, alexwg.org
A small corpus, deliberately wide
This is the shortest publication record in the constellation, and reading it in order is unlike reading the others: the topics barely repeat. What repeats is a move — take a behaviour everyone treats as given, and find the physical law that already constrains it.
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Moving matter with fields
Harvard, 2005–2009The record opens in the laboratory: silicon nanowires "dielectrophoretically assembled, reconfigured, and disassembled between gold electrodes", organic clusters grown on gold nanodot arrays. Structures placed by a field rather than by hand — self-assembly with a knob on it.
Dielectrophoretic reconfiguration of nanowire interconnects (2006) ↗ -
Rules in ensembles
2007–2008The same interest, abstracted. Cellular automata are, in his words, "attractive models for a range of biological and physical self-assembling systems" — but real systems coexpress many rules at once, and this paper reports what it calls the first analysis of the equally-weighted ensemble: pattern formation without any favored local interaction.
Pattern Formation without Favored Local Interactions (2007) ↗ -
Physics with a purpose
2007–2010Then a run of problems that look unrelated and share a method: find the physical constraint nobody costed. Ice on a diamond surface melting well above body temperature. Granular beds treated as elastic boundaries. And the light-speed one — where on Earth to stand to arbitrage two exchanges, given that information cannot outrun c.
Relativistic statistical arbitrage, Physical Review E (2010) ↗ -
Intelligence as a force
2012–2013The central paper of the archive. It observes that work "ranging from cosmology to computer science" has "hinted at a possible deep connection between intelligence and entropy maximization, but no formal physical relationship between them has yet been established" — and proposes one: a force that acts to keep future options open, over a finite time horizon.
Causal Entropic Forces, Physical Review Letters (2013) ↗ -
Systems with people in them
2006–2013Running alongside all of it, a quieter line about the interface between people and machines: reading lists generated from the link structure of Wikipedia, barcodes designed to be legible across a room, and "participatory telerobotics" — a system that treats humans carrying mobile devices as ad-hoc telerobots.
Preparation of Topical Reading Lists from the Link Structure of Wikipedia (2006) ↗ -
Deployed learning
2019–2021The most recent work is applied and defense-adjacent: few-shot learning for human-robot teaming in contested environments, reconstructing where ECG leads were placed from the signals alone, blockchain consensus to keep distributed sensor imagery tamper-evident, and representation learning over sparse graphs.
Adaptive Online Learning for Human-Robot Teaming in Dynamic Environments (2019) ↗
At a conference called AGI-26
Causal Entropic Forces makes an unusual kind of claim for this roster: not that intelligence can be built a particular way, but that it might be a physical quantity — behaviour that maximizes the diversity of futures still reachable, over some horizon. Adaptive, goal-like conduct falls out of a thermodynamic quantity rather than being programmed in.
It is a strong claim and it has been argued with. The archive links the paper, in the venue it was published in, and leaves the argument where it belongs — with the reader and the literature, not with a summary.
Read Causal Entropic Forces ↗What this archive can and cannot show
A publication record is a partial picture of anyone, and here it is unusually partial: the public work that most people know him for — talks, a widely read newsletter, company building, and the venture side — leaves no trace in a citation database. This archive covers the 21 indexed research records and makes no claim to be the rest.
Selected work
15 entries drawn from the archive — nearly the whole of it — titled exactly as the records read, with his position in the author list computed from each record.
- 2021Joint sparsity-biased variational graph autoencodersThe Journal of Defense Modeling and Simulation Applications Methodology Technology last of 4 authors
- 2020Computational Reconstruction of Electrocardiogram Lead PlacementComputing in cardiology first of 6 authors
- 2020
- 2019Adaptive Online Learning for Human-Robot Teaming in Dynamic Environmentsfirst of 3 authors
- 2013Participatory teleroboticsProceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE first of 2 authors
- 2013Causal Entropic ForcesPhysical Review Letters first of 2 authors
- 2012A Thermodynamic Model for Behavioral IntelligenceAPS March Meeting Abstracts first of 2 authors
- 2010Relativistic statistical arbitragePhysical Review E first of 2 authors
- 2008
- 2008Intruder Dynamics on Vibrofluidized Granular SurfacesMaterials Research Society Symposium Proceedings sole author
- 2007Diamond stabilization of ice multilayers at human body temperaturePhysical Review E first of 2 authors
- 2007Multicolor symbology for remotely scannable 2D barcodesProceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE first of 2 authors
- 2006Dielectrophoretic reconfiguration of nanowire interconnectsNanotechnology sole author
- 2005Dielectrophoretic control of semiconductor nanostructure growth and assemblyfirst of 2 authors
Background
- Now
- Founder and Chief Scientist of Physical Superintelligence, per his own site.
- Education
- Ph.D. in Physics, Harvard (2007). Triple major at MIT (2003) in physics, electrical science and engineering, and mathematics — both as stated on alexwg.org.
- Recurring collaborator
- Cameron E. Freer, co-author on both Relativistic statistical arbitrage and Causal Entropic Forces — the two papers where the method is at its most explicit.
About this archive
This is an independent archive of Alex Wissner-Gross’s indexed publication record, built for Society of Minds Aligned and AGI-26. Records span 2005–2021 and are drawn from OpenAlex. It is small — 21 records — and the site says so rather than padding it.
Biography, degrees and the quotation above come from his own site. Patent counts, award tallies and audience figures that appear there are not repeated here: they are self-reported and not independently checkable from this corpus.
Not written by, reviewed by, or endorsed by Alex Wissner-Gross. If you are Alex and something here is wrong, the feedback control at the bottom of the page reaches us directly — and the claim bar will hand you the site.