Welcome to the website of Wolfgang Banzhaf
John R. Koza Chair in Genetic Programming
The menu above should allow you to find more information. If you have trouble finding what you look for, please contact me.
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. Recently he has become more involved with network research as it applies to natural and man-made systems.
Prof. Banzhaf is currently treasurer and a member of the Executive Board of SPECIES, the society for the promotion of Evolutionary Computation in Europe and Surroundings. 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. 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 is on the ISAL board again since 2019. 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 is a Senior Fellow of the former International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (ISGEC) and has received the EvoStar Award for Outstanding Achievements in Evolutionary Computation in Europe. He has recently received the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Society for Artificial Life. In 2010 he has been appointed University Research Professor at Memorial University for sustained contributions to research, the highest honour Memorial University bestows on an academic.
People
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.
.Publications
Newer publications and more details are listed here.Apr 1, 2019
"Artificial Genetic Regulatory Networks - A Review", our OPEN-ACCESS review paper on ARNs is finally out at Artificial Life.
Apr 30, 2019"Continuous Long-Term Evolution of Genetic Programming", joint paper with Bill Langdon was accepted at ALIFE 2019.
July 15, 20193 papers published at GECCO 2019.
Dec 14, 2019Proofs are ready for "Toward Better Evolutionary Program Repair: An Integrated Approach", joint paper with Yuan Yuan to be published in ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 29.
Jan 13, 2020"A Network Perspective on Genotype-Phenotype Mapping in Genetic Programming", joint paper with Ting Hu and Marco Tomassini was accepted at GPEM.
News
Events
The first Genetic Programming - Theory and Practice workshop was held 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.
Program available here.Group Photo in the inner court of the College of Engineering, MSU
