Fernando Rosas works on the fundamental principles behind intelligence and consciousness in biological and artificial systems. In particular, he studies the distributed computations that enable complex multi-partite systems to become more than the sum of their parts, performing tasks collectively that couldn’t be achieved individually, and even give rise to novel features that were not predefined beforehand. To do this, he has developed various frameworks to operationalise the notions of synergy (information that is held by a set of variables jointly but not by any subset of them) and emergence (collective phenomena that cannot be well-explained from their microscopic constituents).