Thorsten Schnier

Thorsten Schnier is a research fellow at CERCIA. He gained his Ph.D. at the Key Centre for Design Computing, University of Sydney, looking at the role of representations in creative evolutionary design. Thorsten has taught 'internet programming' 'evolutionary computation' and 'nature inspired design'. In CERCIA, his focus is applications of natural computation in design, but he is also involved in CERCIA activities in other areas, including evolvable hardware, and energy management.

I've put up some evolutionary art pictures of a project student of mine into a gallery

Im an interested in many nature-inspired algorithms. The following are two topics I suggested for this network:

Design by Populations of Individuals
From termite mounds to cities, a large number of designs is the product of interaction between the actions of many individuals. For this topic, we would look at the different mechanisms involved, and how they can be used in artistic and engineering design. For example:

• how does the environment influence the final design
• how do the choices of individuals influence the final design,
• how can the genetic code influence the final design

Self-adaptive designs
Self-adaptive designs are designs that are not static, but are able to adapt to change in environment, use, damage, etc. This is an idea that has been looked at in the field of evolvable hardware, where the availability of reconfigurable hardware, combined with a demand for extremely flexible and reliable hardware in unaccessble places (e.g. space exploration) makes this a very attractive model. Intelligent buildings, intelligent fabrics,... are examples from other areas, even if the scope for self-adaptation is a lot more limited and pre-planned. This workshop would look at different aspects of self adaptive design:

• what other reconfigurable fabrics are available
• how do you design reconfigurable designs
• how is the reconfiguration/self adaptation controlled

Thorsten to add: Emergent Design, Cross-domain crossover?

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