Robot Evolution

Agoston E. Eiben is Professor of Computational Intelligence at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is a world-leading expert in evolutionary computing and evolutionary robotics, and (co-)author of the best-selling Introduction to Evolutionary Computing . His current research explores robots that can reproduce, evolve, and learn. He has published in leading venues such as Nature , Science Robotics , and Nature Machine Intelligence , and his work has received extensive international media coverage in more than ten countries. His long-term goal is to show how artificial evolution can yield physical artificial intelligence, and to deepen our understanding of the interplay between the body and the brain.

Karine Miras is an Assistant Professor of Computational Intelligence at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, working at the intersection of Evolutionary Robotics and Artificial Life. Her research has the goal of advancing autonomous systems and also deepening our understanding of biological evolution. At the core of her work is exploring how environments shape the traits of evolving creatures, and how developmental processes can be embedded directly into the genetic architectures of artificial life forms. "I'm interested in understanding what allows for the evolution of complex life through the study of artificial life".

Emma Hart is a Professor of Computational Intelligence at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland, UK. Her research interests lie in the cross-cutting areas of evolutionary robotics, artificial intelligence, and optimisation, with a particular focus on combining methods from evolutionary computing and machine-learning to develop systems that learn autonomously over time and improve their own performance with experience, whether in robotics or in solving real-world optimisation problems. She is Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and a Senior Member of ACM.