Ravi Gomatam

Ravi Veeraraghavan Gomatam (born 1950, in Chennai, India) is the Director of Bhaktivedanta Institute (Berkeley and Mumbai) and the newly formed Institute of Semantic Information Sciences and Technology (Berkeley and Mumbai) He is also Adjunct Professor at Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani, Rajasthan, India Gomatam is one of the pioneers in the field of consciousness studies, which is an emerging interdisciplinary scientific field He organized the First International Conference on the Study of Consciousness within Science in January 1990 in San Francisco The speakers at the 2day conference included two Nobel Laureates (Sir John Eccles and George Wald) as well as twelve other distinguished researchers in the field (including Henry Stapp, John Searle, ECG Sudarshan, Karl H Pribram, Herbert Frohlich)Subsequently, Gomatam conceived and launched the worlds first MS/PhD programs in consciousness studies, in collaboration with the Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani (one of Indias foremost technological universities) The program was inaugurated in 1997 by Charles Hard Townes, Nobel Laureate in physics (1964) and recipient of Templeton Prize (2005) Gomatam also teaches graduate students in this program Graduates of this program have gone on to do further studies at distinguished institutions, including Harvard, Leeds and Utrecht universities Consciousness Studies is a developing, interdisciplinary scientific field, which Gomatam has particularly reconceived in a novel, original fashion, as a new way of studying matter Gomatams own field of research is foundations of quantum mechanics, wherein he is introducing a few new ideas, including those of Objective, Semantic Information and a notion of Relational Properties that is different from that of Rovelli and others His new ideas have received notice for their potential He has related research interests in semantic computation, systems sciences, artificial intelligence, philosophy of science and philosophy of language