Luis M. Rocha

Luis M. Rocha
Born	(1966-10-05)October 5, 1966 Luanda, Angola
Residence	Portugal United States
Fields	Complex Systems Complex Networks Cognitive Science Artificial Life Informatics Computer Science Cybernetics Systems Science Biosemiotics
Institutions	Indiana University Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência
Alma mater	Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal Lic. (B.A. plus M.S.), 1990 State University of New York at Binghamton Ph.D., 1997
Thesis	Evidence Sets and Contextual Genetic Algorithms: Exploring Uncertainty, Context, and Embodiment in Cognitive and Biological Systems. SUNY Binghamton. (1997)
Academic advisors	George Klir Howard H. Pattee
Influences	John von Neumann Alan Turing Gordon Pask Howard H. Pattee George Klir Sydney Brenner Andy Clark
Website www.informatics.indiana.edu/rocha/

Luis M. Rocha is a Professor and director of the Complex Systems graduate Program in Informatics, member of the Indiana University Network Science Institute, and core faculty of the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He is also the director of the Computational Biology Collaboratorium and in the Direction of the PhD program in Computational Biology at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia, Portugal. His research is on complex systems and networks,^[1][2][3] computational and systems biology,^{[1][4][5][6][7]} and computational intelligence (including Artificial Life and Embodied Cognition).^{[8][9][10][11][12][13][14]}

Biography

He received his Ph.D in Systems Science in 1997 from the State University of New York at Binghamton. From 1998 to 2004 he was a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he founded and led a Complex Systems Modeling Team during 1998-2002, and was part of the Santa Fe Institute research community. He has organized the Tenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (Alife X)^[15] and the Ninth European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2007).^[16]

Research

Dr. Rocha studies the informational properties of natural and artificial systems which enable them to adapt and evolve. He has approached this general topic by investigating how information is fundamental for controlling the behavior and evolutionary capabilities of [complex systems],^[8][9][10] as well as abstracting principles from natural systems to produce adaptive information technology.^[11][12][14]

Accepting Von Neumann's principle of self-replication and Turing's universal computation as a general principle for generating open-ended complexity that encompasses Natural Selection, Dr. Rocha has developed the work of Howard Pattee,^[17] Sydney Brenner,^[18] and others who regard computation and information as fundamental to understanding life, cognition and other complex systems (a good overview is Gleick's Book). From this viewpoint, he has approached several questions: how do cells and collectives of cells compute?^[1] Is language an evolutionary system operating under the same principle?^[9][10] Can artificial systems implement the same principle?^[8] Namely, can collective intelligence on the web become a super-organism implementing this principle?.^[11][19][20] From these questions, he has worked on various specific research projects ranging from Biomedical Literature Mining ^[5][6][7] to understanding redundancy, robustness, modularity and control in Complex Networks,^[1][2][3] Collective Intelligence on the Web and in Social Systems,^{[2][11][13][19][20]} and Agent-based models of Evolutionary Systems such as RNA Editing^[12] and Artificial Immune Systems.^[14]

Philosophical views

Rocha is a proponent of embodied and situated cognition and has defended the grounded epistemological stance of evolutionary constructivism. He is a proponent of the view that the threshold of complexity required for open-ended evolution requires an interplay between symbolic memory and dynamical machinery, i.e. a strict genotype-phenotype separation. This idea has been labeled semiotic closure^[21] and is generally understood to fit in the area of biosemiotics. He has defended that this principle of organization is at play in cognition and human collective behavior, having developed web technology to implement the principle^{[2][8][10][11][13]}

References

External links

• Prof. Rocha profile in Google Scholar, including list of publications
• Prof. Rocha page at Indiana University
• Indiana University, Bloomington
• Indiana University Network Institute
• Cognitive Science at Indiana University
• Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia, Portugal
• Prof. Rocha research group at the Gulbenkian Science Institute in Portugal
• Computational Biology PhD Program at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia, Portugal
• Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Santa Fe Institute
• Semiotic Closure