Welcome to the Neural Networks Research Group web site.
The group is directed by Prof. Risto Miikkulainen and is located at the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.
Best Dissertation Honorable Mention to Garrett Bingham
7/18/2024
Garrett Bingham's dissertation Optimizing Neural Networks through Activation Function Discovery and Automatic Weight Initialization was selected as a "honourable mention" of the 2024 ACM SIGEVO Best Dissertation Award, with the citation "This dissertation advances evolutionary machine learning by introducing methods for automating activation function discovery and optimizing weight initialization strategies for arbitrary neural networks. These contributions bring us closer to being able to evolve an agent capable of recursive self-improvement, thus taking a step towards AGI." The award was announced at the GECCO'2024 closing ceremony in Melbourne. Garrett has open-sourced much of his research, including AQuaSurF code and Act-Bench benchmark dataset for activation function search, and AutoInit for intelligent network initialization. He is currently a research scientist at Google DeepMind. Congratulations Garrett!