Wolfgang Banzhaf, Ph.D.
Memorial University of Newfoundland
October 10, 2012
12:50 - 1:35 pm
001 Kalkin Hall
Attendees are welcome to meet with Dr. Banzhaf in 322 Votey following the talk for further discussion.
Summary
Emergence and its accompanying phenomena are widespread in Nature. Despite its prominence, there is no agreement in the Sciences about the concept and how to define or measure emergence. One of the most contentious issues discussed is that of top-down (or downward) causation as a defining characteristic of systems with emergence. In this talk I shall look at a sub-area of Bio-inspired Computing -- Genetic Programming -- and discuss how it relates to emergence.
Speaker Bio
Wolfgang Banzhaf is a professor in the Department of Computer Science of Memorial University of Newfoundland He served as head of department there from 2003 to 2009. Prof. Banzhaf received a "Diplom in Physik" degree in Physics (equivalent to a M.Sc.) from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. He received his Dr.rer.nat (PhD) from the Department of Physics of the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe, now Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Prof. Banzhaf was postdoctoral research associate at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Stuttgart, Visiting and Senior Researcher at the Central Research Lab, now the Advanced Technology R&D Center of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation in Japan and at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge, MA, USA. From 1993 to 2003 he was Associate Professor for Applied Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science of the Technical University of Dortmund.
Prof. Banzhaf's research interests are in the field of bio-inspired computing, notably evolutionary computation and complex adaptive systems. Studies of self-organization and the field of Artificial Life are also of very much interest to him. Recently he has become more involved with network research as it applies to natural and man-made systems. Prof. Banzhaf serves as Chair of the Executive Committee of ACM-SIGEVO, the Special Interest Group for Evolutionary Computation of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). He is member of the Executive Board of the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL) and serves on the board of two private companies. He has founded the scholarly journal "Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines", published quarterly by Springer and is editorial board member of a number of journals: Artificial Life, Intl. Journal of Natural Computing Research, Applied Soft Computing, Theory in Bioscience, Computational Intelligence. He is lead author of the first textbook on Genetic Programming (see below), and has co-founded the European Conference series on Genetic Programming. Prof. Banzhaf if a senior fellow of the former International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (ISGEC) and has received the EvoStar Award for Outstanding Achievements in Evolutionary Computation in Europe. He has been appointed University Research Professor (2010-2015) at Memorial University for sustained contributions to research, the highest honour Memorial University bestows on an academic.
For additional information, see: www.cs.mun.ca/~banzhaf/