Welcome to the Neural Networks Research Group web site.
The group is directed by Prof. Risto Miikkulainen and is located at the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.
Meyerson et al. Win the Humies
7/18/2025
The NeurIPS 2024 paper by Elliot Meyerson (2018 NNRG PhD), Risto Miikkulainen, and collaborators won the Human-Competitive Results Competition at the GECCO 2025 conference. The competition showcases evolutionary computation results that are not only academically interesting, but competitive with the work done by creative and inventive humans. Using the response to the COVID-19 pandemic as an example, this paper demonstrates that while human experts can have good ideas, they are not always good at taking advantage of them. AI can be used to realize the latent potential of those ideas, resulting in better solutions than either humans or AI could create alone. For a quick intro, check out the 10-min competition presentation prepared by Elliot and given by Risto.