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.
Shahrzad et al. win GECCO Best-Paper Award
7/17/2026
Hormoz Shahrzad, Niharika Gajawelli, Kaitlin Maile, Manish Saggar (NNRG PhD 2011), and Risto Miikkulainen received the Best-Paper Award in the Real-World Applications track at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) for Evolution with Purpose: Hierarchy-Informed Optimization of Whole-Brain Models. This paper shows how evolutionary optimization can be used to configure dynamic brain models to fit fMRI data. Surprisingly, when brain structure is used to guide the optimization process, the resulting models not only fit to the fMRI data, but can also predict the subject's behavioral abilities. The paper results from a collaboration of NNRG, Brain Dynamics lab at Stanford, and Cognizant AI Lab. See also the summary blog post and the presentation video.