Welcome to the website of Wolfgang Banzhaf
John R. Koza Chair in Genetic Programming
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Contact Info
✉ Email: banzhafw .at. cse.msu.edu
☎ Phone: 517-353-6963
☇ Office: Engineering Building, Room 3267
✍ Mailing Address:
428 S. Shaw Lane, Room 3115
East Lansing, MI 48824
Brief Professional Biography
Wolfgang Banzhaf is the John R. Koza Chair for Genetic Programming in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was a University Research Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland, where he served as head of department from 2003 to 2009 and from 2012 to 2016.
Prof. Banzhaf received a "Diplom in Physik" degree in Physics (equivalent to a M.Sc.) from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. He received his Dr.rer.nat (PhD) from the Department of Physics of the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe, now Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Prof. Banzhaf was postdoctoral research associate at the 1. Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Stuttgart, Visiting and Senior Researcher at the Central Research Lab, now the Advanced Technology R&D Center of Mitsubishi Electric Corporation in Japan and at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge, MA, USA. From 1993 to 2003 he was Associate Professor for Applied Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science of the Technical University of Dortmund.
Prof. Banzhaf's research interests are in the field of bio-inspired computing, notably evolutionary computation and complex adaptive systems. Studies of self-organization and the field of Artificial Life are also of very much interest to him.
Prof. Banzhaf has most recently served as treasurer and a member of the Executive Board of SPECIES, the society for the promotion of Evolutionary Computation in Europe and Surroundings, from its foundation to 2022. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of ACM-SIGEVO, the Special Interest Group for Evolutionary Computation of the Association of Computing Machinery and has served as its Chair from 2011-2015 after having served as SIGEVO's treasurer 2005-2011. From its foundation, he was member of the Executive Board of SIGEVO from 2005-2021, and of the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL) from 2009 to 2015, and from 2019 to today. He also served on the board of private companies.
He has founded the scholarly journal "Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines", published quarterly by Springer and is editorial board member of a number of journals: Artificial Life, Applied Soft Computing, Computational Intelligence, Theoretical Computer Science - C (TCS-C), Intl. J. of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems, the open-access journal PeerJ Computer Science, and the ACM journal Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization. He is lead author of the first textbook on Genetic Programming (see other menu points), and has co-founded the European Conference series on Genetic Programming.
Prof. Banzhaf was named a Senior Fellow of the former International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (ISGEC) in 2003 and has received the EvoStar Award for Outstanding Achievements in Evolutionary Computation in Europe in 2007. In 2022 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Society for Artificial Life. In 2023 he received the ACM SIGEVO Outstanding Contribution Award in recognition of significant and sustained contributions to the field of Evolutionary Computation and its community. At university level, he has been appointed University Research Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2010, for sustained contributions to research, the highest honour Memorial University bestows on an academic. After he left for Michigan, he was appointed Honorary Research Professor for the period 2018-2023.
People
Jul 1, 2023Dr. Jorden Schossau (PhD, MSU) has left us and joined another research project at MSU, directed by Prof Chris Adami in the department of Microbiology.
March 15, 2023Kenneth Reid (PhD Univ of Stirling, UK) has left us and joined the Michigan Data Science Institute (MIDAS) at the University of Michigan as a staff scientist.
January 1, 2023Mark Kocherovsky (MSCS Lawrence Technological University, MI) has joined our group as PhD student and will start working in the NIH research project with Professor Assaf Gilad from September.
Sep 1, 2022Dr. Nicolas Scalzitti (PhD, University of Strasbourg) has joined as postdoctoral fellow. He has joined our NIH research project with Professor Assaf Gilad.
Sep 1, 2022Postdoc Dr. Stephen Kelly (PhD, Dalhousie University) has joined faculty at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada as Assistant Professor in Computer Science.
Aug 15, 2022Honglin Bao (MS, MSU) has left us after his graduation to pursue a PhD in Social Computing at Harward University. He now lives in Boston.
Apr 1, 2022Postdoc Dr. Stephen Kelly (PhD, Dalhousie University) has joined Google Brain as a Visiting Scientist.
Jan 1, 2022Dr. Jorden Schossau (PhD, MSU) has joined as postdoctoral fellow. He has joined our NIH research project with Professor Assaf Gilad.
August 16, 2021Adrian Self (MSU freshman) has joined as a professorial assistant.
August 1, 2021Postdoc Dr. Yuan Yuan (PhD, Tsinghua University) has joined faculty at Beihang University in Beijing, China as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science.
May 16, 2021Stella Li (Johns Hopkins University) has joined through a summer internship as a research assistant.
Feb 1, 2020Jacob Newsted (MS, MSU) has graduate with his MS degree and assumed a position within MSU.
August 16, 2020Tatiana Voegerl and Sophie Cleland (MSU freshmen) have joined as a professorial assistants.
Jan 1, 2019Ian Whalen (MS, MSU) has left us after his graduation to pursue a career in Consulting. He is with Quantum Black in Chicago now.
Apr 1, 2019Dr. Stephen Kelly (PhD, Dalhousie University) has joined as postdoctoral fellow. He has a fellowship support from the Canadian government under the prestigious NSERC postdoc program.
May 15, 2019Salman Ali (MS, NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Pakistan) has joined as a PhD student, jointly supervised with Dr. Cedric Gondro in Animal Science.
July 1, 2019Jacob Newsted (BS, MSU) has joined as a MS student in a BEACON project on "Genomic Trait Prediction" with Dr. Cedric Gondro in Animal Science.
August 15, 2019Eastin Block (MSU freshman) has joined as a professorial assistant.
November 15, 2019Kenneth Reid (PhD Univ of Stirling, UK) has joined as a postdoctoral fellow in a joint project sponsored by USDA, with Dr. Cedric Gondro in Animal Science.
.Most Recent Publications
More details about publications are listed here.July 15, 2023
4 papers published at GECCO 2023.
Jun 23, 2023"Iterative Genetic Improvement: Scaling Stochastic Program Synthesis", joint paper with Yuan Yuan was published by Elseviers' Journal of Artificial Intelligence. Free access for 50 days under this link
April 15, 20233 papers published at EvoStar 2023.
Mar 23, 2023"A Genetic Programming Approach to Engineering MRI Reporter Genes", joint paper of our NIH collaboration was published in ACS Synthetic Biology, vol 12.
Feb 1, 2023"Genetic Programming - Theory and Practice XIX", a collection of chapter-long contributions from the GPTP workshop 2022 in Ann Arbor, published by Springer in the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Series.
Feb 1, 2023Within this collection we published "Correlation versus RMSE Loss Functions in Symbolic Regression Tasks", authored by Nathan Haut, Bill Punch and myself.
News
Events
The 20th Genetic Programming - Theory and Practice workshop was held (a second time) at Michigan State University in 2023. It was another great success! 3 keynote speakers, 12 regular talks, 7 lightning talks and up to 50 attendees participated in the June 1-3 event at the Kellogg Conference Center.
Program available here.Group Photo on the MSU Campus
The 17th Genetic Programming - Theory and Practice workshop was held for the first time at Michigan State University in 2019. It was a huge success! 3 keynote speakers, 19 regular talks and 50+ attendees participated May 16-19 at MSU Dean of Engineering's Conference Room event.
Group Photo in the inner court of the College of Engineering, MSU
