The CRI Fabelier club is proud to welcome a Special Guest, Jeff Clune from Creative Machines Lab, Cornell University
Some of you many know Jeff's work from his online project http://endlessforms.com/
In this talk, he will tell us about simulating evolution, evolving programs that control robots, as well as crowdsourcing the evolutionary process. Questions and discussion will be encouraged, as always.
Time: Wednesday, 9 November, 18:30.
Place: Room 2006, Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity, Medicine Faculty Cochin, 24 rue du Fabourg Saint Jacques
Talk abstract:
"I will describe my work with an algorithm that combines evolution with developmental biology to automatically produce complex designs. This algorithm enables the generation of complex, regular phenotypes, such as three-dimensional objects and artificial neural networks to control robots. The evolved morphologies and neural networks exhibit desirable properties found in their natural counterparts, such as symmetries and repeated motifs. I will also describe a project that combines this algorithm with crowdsourcing to allow internet users to collectively explore the evolutionary design space. At EndlessForms.com, visitors individually direct evolutionary processes similar to how breeders evolve roses or dogs. Collectively, visitors have evaluated over 2.4 million objects and have produced an interesting and diverse set of evolved objects."
Biography :
Jeff Clune is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Hod Lipson's lab at Cornell University, funded by a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology from the National Science Foundation. He studies generative encodings, which enhance evolutionary algorithms by augmenting them with concepts from developmental biology. These concepts enable the assembly of complex neural networks and other forms from compact genomes. One of Jeff's current projects is EndlessForms.com, a website for designing and printing 3D objects with such encodings. Jeff also develops evolutionary algorithms to investigate open questions in evolutionary biology, and has published work on the evolution of altruism, phenotypic plasticity, and evolvability. Jeff was the co-chair of the Generative and Developmental Systems track at GECCO, the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (2010-2011). He has a Ph.D. in computer science from Michigan State University, a master's degree in philosophy from Michigan State University, and a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Michigan. Articles about his research have appeared in news publications such as MSNBC.com, The New Scientist, The Daily Telegraph, Slashdot, MIT's Technology Review, and U.S. News & World Report.
website : http://jeffclune.com/