Career award for Professor Riccardo Poli

Artificial intelligence and biomedical engineering expert Professor Riccardo Poli has been honoured for his outstanding contribution to the field of evolutionary computation.

This area of computer science mimics the process of natural evolution to get computers to solve hard and important problems.

He received the SIGEVO Outstanding Contribution Award 2023 at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference in Lisbon in acknowledgement of his role as one of the founders of evolutionary algorithms.

Professor Poli, who is co-director of the Essex Brain Computer Interfaces and Neural Engineering (BCI-NE) laboratory in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, was a leader in the fields of evolutionary computation and genetic programming, before deciding to switch his research focus several years ago.

“I didn’t expect to receive this honour,” explained Professor Poli, “I effectively left the field of evolutionary algorithms over ten years ago, to pursue research on brain-computer interfaces. It was amazing to find out that my friends and the community in that field had not forgotten me and my work. I’m extremely honoured to receive this award.”

The BCI-NE lab was founded at Essex by Professors Poli, Francisco Sepulveda, Luca Citi, John Gan and Dr Caterina Cinel in 2004 and is now one of the largest in the world and one of the best for non-invasive interfaces and cognitive augmentation.