Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), University of Southampton
Electronics and Computer Science (ECS)
Dr Richard A. Watson
ECS, Faculty of Physical and Applied Sciences
University of Southampton
Southampton, United Kingdom. SO17 1BJ
Position: Academic staff in Agents, Interaction and Complexity
Extension: 22690
Telephone: Work (Voice): +44 (0)23 8059 2690
Fax: Work (Fax): +44 (0)2380 59 9179
Email: raw@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Homepage: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~raw/
URI: http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/6310 [browse]
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Interests: artificial life, coevolution, collective intelligence, collective robotics, connectionism, dynamical systems, epigenetics, evolution, evolutionary algorithms, evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory, evolutionary robotics, evolvability, genetic algorithms, hopfield networks, life sciences interface, major evolutionary transitions, modularity, multi-objective optimisation, network science, networks, pareto coevolution, population genetics, sexual recombination, symbiosis
Biography
Richard A. Watson is a senior lecturer in the natural systems research group at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science. He received his BA in AI from the University of Sussex in 1990 and then worked in industry for about five years. Returning to academia, he chose Sussex again for an MSc in knowledge-based systems, where he was introduced to evolutionary modeling. His PhD in computer science at Brandeis University (2002) resulted in 22 publications and a dissertation addressing the algorithmic concepts underlying the major transitions in evolution. A postdoctoral position at Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology provided training to complement his computer science background. He now has over 50 journal and conference publications on topics spanning artificial life, robotics, evolutionary computation, population genetics, neural networks and computational biology. At Southampton, he's building his research programme and leading preparation of a new MSc in complexity science. He is the author of Compositional Evolution: The Impact of Sex, Symbiosis, and Modularity on the Gradualist Framework of Evolution (MIT Press, 2006). Contact him at raw@ecs.soton.ac.uk.
Qualifications
PhD "Compositional Evolution" Brandeis University 2002
MSc "Knowledge Based Systems" Sussex University 1996
BA "Computing with Artificial Intelligence" Sussex University 1990