I am an Artificial Intelligence expert with 30+ years of experience. I work as a full professor on the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam where I lead the Computational Intelligence Group and as a visiting professor on the University of York, UK. My research lies in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, Adaptive Collective Systems. My approach to AI is based on Evolutionary Computing. Throughout my carreer I worked on a diverse set of topics from theoretical foundations to artificial societies, multi-sexual reproduction, and applications in health, finance, and traffic management.
I have publications in top journals including Nature, Science Robotics, and Nature Machine Intelligence. I also appreciate the importance of outreach. I have exhibited my Escher style evolutionary art system in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag and have given many lectures for the general public, including a TED talk, a keynote on hub.berlin, and a special lecture in Paradiso, the iconic music venue of Amsterdam (Dutch with English subtitles). My work has been covered by TV stations (NOS, VPRO, RAI Uno, ARTE), popular magazines (Wired, New Scientist, Techcrunch), and professional periodicals like The Communications of the ACM.
Lately I am active in the field of Embodied AI, specifically in Evolutionary Robotics. The fundamental insight behind my research is:
Given the fact that evolution can produce intelligence, it is plausible that artificial evolution can produce artificial intelligence.
In short, I am working on evolving and learning machines that reproduce, improve themselves, and develop intelligence over time. My most prominent endevours in this direction are the Robot Baby Project and the Autonomous Robot Evolution Project.