Pages tagged: Evolution

Rights, trust and ethical choice with Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Ricardo Baeza-Yates is Director of Research at the Institute for Experiential AI of Northeastern University. He is also a part-time Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and Universidad de Chile in Santiago. Before he was the CTO of NTENT, a semantic search technology company based in California and prior to these roles, he was VP of Research at Yahoo Labs, based in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Sunnyvale, California, from 2006 to 2016. He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook published by Addison-Wesley in 1999 and 2011 (2nd ed), which won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award. From 2002 to 2004 he was elected to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Computer Society and between 2012 and 2016 was elected to the ACM Council.

Since 2010 he has been a founding member of the Chilean Academy of Engineering. In 2009 he was named ACM Fellow and in 2011 IEEE Fellow, among other awards and distinctions. He obtained a Ph.D. in CS from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and his areas of expertise are web search and data mining, information retrieval, bias and ethics on AI, data science and algorithms in general.

Evolution and AI with Tim Taylor

Tim works in academic research and commercial development of Artificial Life (ALife) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, with a particular interest in the foundational issues of true autonomy and open-ended creative evolution. He is also interested in the historical development of these ideas, and has recently written a book on the (very) early history of the idea of self-reproducing and evolving machines ("The Spectre of Self-Reproducing Machines: An Early History of Evolving Robots", currently under review with publisher). He holds an MA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge (specialising in Experimental Psychology), followed by a MSc (with distinction) and PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. He has held a wide variety of positions in academia and in tech companies, including work on evolutionary techniques in the games industry (MathEngine PLC, Oxford), postdoctoral research on swarm robotics (University of Edinburgh) and co-founder and CTO of a company developing continuous learning AI systems for fund management (Timberpost). He is an elected board member of the International Society for Artificial Life and an associate examiner for the University of London Worldwide.