Speaker: Lisa Soros, Cross Labs
Talk title: Evolutionary Creativity and Artificial Life
The seminar will be available for in-person and Zoom participation. If you would like to receive the Zoom link, please register using the “Register” button above.
Biological evolution has displayed immense creativity, resulting in a diverse richness of form in the natural world. This talk will cover innovations in the fields of evolutionary computation and artificial life, which seek to capture the unrivaled generative potential of evolution in computational processes and simulations. A brief introduction to evolutionary algorithms will be given, followed by a discussion about what kinds of artificial environments foster the kind of richness necessary for innovation, with a focus on video games as a testbed for experiments on phenomena related to open-ended evolution.
Lisa Soros completed her PhD in 2018 at the University of Central Florida, where she was a member of the Evolutionary Complexity Research Group. She then spent two years as an Assistant Professor at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, before completing a postdoc at the Game Innovation Lab at New York University. She is currently is a postdoctoral research fellow at Cross Labs, which is an institute in Kyoto, Japan dedicated to understanding intelligent processes through computational means.