Date/Time
Date(s) - 24/10/2019
7:30 pm - 9:30 pm
Prof Charles Ofria – Michigan State University
A grand challenge in evolutionary biology is to understand how populations evolve from simple, single-celled organisms to the complex plants and animals we see in the world today. Darwin himself recognized the difficulty of explaining the origins of traits of “extreme perfection and complication” such as the vertebrate eye, but provided profound insights into the process. While these long-term processes are challenging to study in nature, modern computer systems are capable of evolving large populations of “digital organisms”.
Dr. Ofria will discuss his research which studies these digital populations as they evolve new, complex traits and behaviors in their virtual environments. He will illustrate processes wherein evolution accumulates genetic information to produce simple traits that are used as building blocks for higher levels of biological complexity. In the natural world, of course, ecological factors also facilitate diversity and complexity. He will discuss how various types of organism interactions promote rapid complexity growth, and explain the steps that they are taking to build artificial life systems that are as rich and open-ended as nature, even exhibiting major evolutionary transitions such as the origin of multicellular life.
Dr. Charles Ofria is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University and President of the International Society for Artificial Life. He is also the director of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, a $50 million NSF Science and Technology Center. His research lies at the intersection of Computer Science and Evolutionary Biology, developing a two-way flow of ideas between the fields, with the primary goal of understanding how evolution produces complex traits, behaviors, and intelligent processes. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1994 from SUNY Stony Brook with a triple major in Pure Math, Applied Math, and Computer Science. In 1999, he received a Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems from the California Institute of Technology, followed by a three-year postdoc in the Center for Microbial Ecology at MSU. Dr. Ofria is the architect of the Avida Digital Evolution Research Platform, which has been used in hundreds to evolution research studies.