Participants

Denis Walsh is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science, and Department of Ecology and evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. He is a Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto, and a co-Pi in the Agency in Living Systems projec, currently funded by JTF. His recent research investigates the phenomenon of agency in the natural world, and in particular its implications for the theory of evolution.

Dr Richard Watson studies evolution, learning, cognition and society and their unifying algorithmic principles. He studied Artificial Intelligence and Adaptive Systems at Sussex University, then PhD Computer Science at Brandeis in Boston. His current work deepens the unification of evolution and learning - specifically, with connectionist models of learning and cognition, familiar in neural network research – to address topics such as evolvability, ecological memory, evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs), phenotypic plasticity, the extended evolutionary synthesis, collective intelligence and 'design'. He has also developed new computational methods for combinatorial optimisation (deep optimisation), exploiting a unification of deep learning and ‘deep evolution’ (i.e. ETIs). He is author of "Compositional evolution" (MIT Press), was featured as "one to watch in AI” in Intelligent Systems magazine, and his paper “How Can Evolution Learn” in TREE, attracted the ISAL award 2016. He is now Associate Professor at the University of Southampton.