Experience & Background
Risto Miikkulainen is the VP of AI Research at Cognizant AI Lab and a Professor of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin.
His research focuses on methods and applications of AI in decision-making, particularly neuroevolution and generative AI, as well as neural network approaches to natural language processing and computer vision. At Cognizant AI Lab, he works to translate these advances into practical applications at scale. Previously, as Chief Technology Officer of Sentient Technologies, he helped apply evolutionary and machine learning approaches to complex real-world problems.
An author of more than 500 publications, Risto is a Fellow of AAAI, IEEE, and the International Neural Network Society (INNS). His contributions have been recognized with the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award, the INNS Gabor Award, and the International Society for Artificial Life’s Outstanding Paper of the Decade Award.
Risto received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA and his M.S. in Engineering from Helsinki University of Technology, now Aalto University.
Areas of Expertise
- Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
- Neuroevolution & Evolutionary Computation
- Generative AI & Decision-Making
- Neural Networks & Deep Learning
- Natural Language Processing & Computer Vision
- Biologically Inspired AI
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