Cognizant AI Lab wins Humies Gold for RHEA at GECCO 2025

Celebrating AI research that outperforms human-designed models through evolution. 

How can AI move beyond simply mimicking expert decisions, and instead build on diverse human insight to generate entirely new solutions?

That question led to the development of RHEA (Realizing Human Expertise through AI), a framework from Cognizant AI Lab that uses evolutionary methods to combine, refine, and evolve expert-designed solutions for complex, real-world problems. This week, RHEA was awarded Humies (Human-Competitive Awards) Gold at the 2025 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), one of the field’s most respected honors in evolutionary computation.

The Humies recognize results that are competitive with or exceed what human experts alone can achieve. RHEA’s win reflects its core insight: that AI can help realize the latent potential of collective human expertise.

From pandemic policy to general framework

RHEA was first applied to the XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge, where 102 teams from 23 countries submitted models aimed at balancing public health outcomes with the economic and social costs of COVID-19 interventions. Each model reflected different priorities, assumptions, and methodologies — from statistical models to machine learning, heuristics, and domain knowledge.

Rather than selecting a single winning approach, RHEA distilled all 169 submitted models into neural representations. Using evolutionary algorithms, it then recombined and evolved these models to search for strategies that outperformed any individual submission, ultimately discovering improved policy strategies that balanced case reduction with intervention cost more effectively than any single model on its own.

Zoom image will be displayed

In many cases, models that had underperformed in isolation contributed critical elements to the final solutions, demonstrating RHEA’s ability to uncover and reuse valuable structure from across the full range of expert input.

A moment of thanks

We’re honored to receive this award, and see it as a meaningful recognition of the research we’re doing at Cognizant AI Lab: advancing AI systems that maximize human potential and support real-world decision-making.

The paper was authored by Elliot Meyerson, Olivier Francon, Darren Sargent, Babak Hodjat, and Risto Miikkulainen. We’re grateful to the GECCO and Humies committees, to the broader evolutionary AI community, and to all collaborators who helped make this work possible.

We’re excited to continue developing RHEA and exploring its applications in new domains where diverse expertise meets high-impact decisions.

Read the full paper.