Stefano Nichele

he is a member of the scientific/program committee of the most important conferences on evolutionary computation. He authored and co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed articles on international journals or conferences, with more than 20 coauthors.

information extraction. He won the silver medal at the 13th Human-Competitive Awards, 2016, for Human-Competitive Results produced by Genetic and Evolutionary Computation. He serves as reviewers for many international journals closely related to his research interests;

and is the co-founder and co-head of the Machine Learning Lab. His research activities include evolutionary computation, artificial life, and the application of machine learning techniques to engineering and computer security problems (e.g., mobile malware analysis and detection)

Eric Medvet is an Associate Professor in Computer Engineering at the Department of Engineering and Architecture of University of Trieste, Italy. He founded and leads the Evolutionary Robotics and Artificial Life lab (ERALlab)

and outline open questions and potentially interesting research opportunities.

be tackled building on the recent advancements in learning representations and multi-agent systems. The talk will present VSRs, describe how they can be simulated, and discuss ongoing attempts to physically build them. It will cover recent research results involving VSRs

study for reasoning about the interaction between development and evolution, two sorts of change that occurs to a lifeform on different time scales. Being aggregations of simple elements, VSRs pose also interesting challenges concerning modularity and reconfigurability that might

can be successfully achieved by means of optimization (e.g., evolutionary computation and reinforcement learning). Indeed, VSRs optimization has been used for investigating various research topics, well beyond optimization and robotics. For example, VSRs have been used as a case

Abstract: Voxel-based soft robots (VSRs) are aggregations of many simple soft blocks (voxels) that can perform complex tasks by varying the volume of single blocks. The design of the body and the brain of a VSR for performing a given task is challenging, if tackled by hand, but