Dr. Martijn C. Schut - "Introduction"

My research activities concern the emergence of organisational dynamics in distributed multi-agent systems. Firstly, my research concentrates on evolutionary mechanisms that enable the emergence of organisational dynamics in terms of communication, cooperation and network formation. Secondly, my research considers organisational dynamics from a formal point of view of organisation modelling, design and analysis.

Prof. dr. A.E. (Guszti) Eiben - "Evolutionary methods"

My professional interests include evolutionary computing and data mining. Within core evolutionary computing I study multi-parent reproduction, self-tuning algorithms, and constraint handling. Evolutionary economy and evolutionary art are two related areas I am involved in. My data mining and data warehousing acivities are primarily parctical: projects, rather than publications.

Dr. Ir. E.D. (Edwin) de Jong - "Co-evolution"

Edwin de Jong received the MSc from Delft University of Technology in 1996, and did his PhD with Prof. Luc Steels in Brussels. In 2000, Edwin went to Jordan Pollack's DEMO Lab at Brandeis University on a Fulbright scholarship, where the novel paradigm of Pareto-coevolution happened to be gestating. Enthused by the prospects of this new view on coevolution, he joined the ongoing research effort aimed at understanding coevolution. Edwin's contributions include his work on the DELPHI algorithm, which introduced the notion of underlying objectives, and several algorithms that guarantee reliable progress for coevolutionary solution concepts (IPCA, LAPCA, and MaxSolve). Edwin served as chair of the GECCO-05 coevolution track, and enjoys talking about how coevolution may be developed further.

Gerald de Jong - "AI + IA: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Augmentation"

Gerald de Jong researches the evolution of dynamic geometrical structures on a software platform that he has written in Java. The software, called Fluidiom, goes back to the simplest first principles of spatial structuring, Elastic Interval Geometry, where the only forces are push and pull. A straightforward genetic algorithm has shown itself capable of discovering muscle coordination that quickly leads to surprisingly compelling forms of locomotion, and the demonstration of this won the top prize at the BNAIC-20005 conference.
Currently he is working on rolling out a new version of this software with a different emphasis, but the same basis. Fluidiom will be set up to capture the intuitions of the people who interact with it, externalizing the fitness function to involve human opinion, asking: Which do you think is the better runner? Once experiments have been done to explore the effectiveness of this approach, the next phase will be to implement and research the combination of mechanical and opinion-based fitness functions to see if human intuition can be utilized in overcoming local maxima.

Dr. W.F.G. (Pim) Haselager - "Embodied embeddedness of cognition"

Pim Haselager is assistant-professor at the department of Artificial Intelligence / Cognitive Science at the Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information (NICI), Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, since 1997. Since 2000 he is also a visiting professor at the dpt. of Philosophy at UNESP, Marilia, SP, Brazil. He is particularly interested in the integration of empirical work (i.e. psychological experiments, computational modeling, and robotics) with philosophical issues regarding knowledge and intelligent behavior. He analyzed the debate between proponents of classical cognitive science and connectionism on the nature of representation, in relation to the inability of computational models to deal with the frame problem (interpreted as related to abduction and common sense knowledge and reasoning).

Dr. Paul Vogt - "Evolutionary linguistics"

Dr Paul Vogt was born in Groningen, where he received an M.Sc.(`doctoraal') in Cognitive Science and Engineering (currently Artificial Intelligence) from the University of Groningen (NL). For this degree he did his thesis work at the AI Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, where he also received his Ph.D. on the thesis ` Lexicon grounding in mobile robots'. He is currently a research fellow at the Induction of Linguistic Knowledge group at Tilburg University (NL) and a visiting research fellow at the Language Evolution and Computation research unit at the University of Edinburgh (UK), where he previously held a Marie Curie Fellowship. His research focuses on language evolution and acquisition, particularly on those aspects related to symbol grounding.

Dr. Charlotte Hemelrijk - "Social Organisation"

Our research is about self-organization and evolution of social systems. Our main interest concerns phenomena that arise unexpectedly by interaction among individuals or between individuals and their physical environment. Many of these are discussed in the class on self-organization of biological phenomena. We are working on models related to behavior of fish, starlings and primates.

Ir. William Veerbeek - "Self-organizing urban planning"

William Veerbeek (1970) holds a Master of Architecture from the Technical University at Delft. In order to address a new domain within the large-scale planning and land use, he established DIN_arch in 2002. DIN_arch focuses on the effects of decentralization, globalization and the increase of complexity in contemporary urban analysis and planning. Currently William Veerbeek is a resarch fellow for Dura Vermeer Business Development where he is developing an dynamic urban model which simulates the effects of flooding on the development of cities. William Veerbeek is teaching and visiting critic at several institutes and universities. He is also lecturer and instructor at several international workshops, most notably in Argentina and Russia.