AAAI Selects UT Professor of Computer Science as a Fellow

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) has selected Risto Miikkulainen as one of 11 fellows for 2023.

​Founded in 1990, AAAI's Fellows Program seeks to highlight the individuals who contribute greatly to the field of AI. Miikkulainen was honored for "significant contributions to neuroevolution techniques and applications." 

Miikkulainen studies methods and applications of neuroevolution, as well as neural network models of natural language processing and vision. He seeks to understand biological information processing in addition to developing AI systems that can learn and adapt through observing their surroundings.

Some of Miikkulainen's other recent awards include his 2020 IEEE CIS Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award and his Gabor Award from the International Neural Network Society in 2017. Additionally, he received the Outstanding Paper of the Decade Award from the International Society for Artificial Life. The IEEE selected him as a 2016 Fellow and as Computational Intelligence Society Distinguished Lecturer.

In addition to being a professor of computer science at UT Austin, Miikkulainen is also assistant vice president of Evolutionary AI, a team that does basic research and builds applications using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques within the IT services and consulting company Cognizant. 

Last year, AAAI selected Inderjit Dhillon, another computer science faculty member, for the award, as well.