Keynote speakers

Keynote title: Parasites, Complexity, Evolvability, and the Nature of Digital Evolution!

Using digital evolution, our lab is trying to understand the many affects of coevolution on the dynamics of adaptation. I’ll talk about some old and some exciting new work on evolvability, but I’m also interested in understanding what position digital evolution and artificial life have within the boundaries of evolutionary biology. Are these biological, computational, or computational biology experiments?

Keynote title: Do you see what I see? Teaching and Assessing with Visuals.

Now, perhaps more than ever, it is essential to convey data clearly. From COVID-19 to Climate Change, iconic graphs are used to make the case for action. But how well do visuals both capture and display knowledge, not just for the ‘public’, but among developing scientists? This talk will share tools effective in quickly analyzing college student knowledge and skills via visual media. We will look first at how graphs can reveal what students know (or don’t) as visualizations of experimental data. We’ll then turn to software approaches to analyze changes in student content knowledge and structure via concept maps. While example cases will be rooted in biology, the potential applications will be presented in intentionally broadly-applicable ways; the main goals are to use visuals to increase learning, promote equity, and save instructors time, particularly in remote instruction.

Keynote title: Bird:Jet :: Evolution:?"

Humanity demonstrated our mastery of the principles of flight through engineering flying machines with capabilities far beyond natural example, through means highly divergent from natural example. By this standard, we have yet to demonstrate our mastery of the principles of biological evolution: An open challenge in the study of evolution is to isolate the engineering principles of unceasing open-ended inventiveness. This talk will describe a series of algorithms that explore different abstractions of open-ended creativity, highlighting deep open questions that may be gating further progress.