Emma Hart

Educator/Teacher, Parent, Scientist

After gaining an undergraduate degree in Chemistry from the University of Oxford, I switched fields to study Artificial Intelligence, studying for an MSc and then a PhD at the University of Edinburgh before eventually becoming a Professor at Edinburgh Napier University. For over 15 years I’ve led a group at that undertakes research in Nature-Inspired Intelligent Systems, working on turning ideas gleaned from nature – and in particular evolution - into algorithms that can solve practical problems that are too difficult to solve by more standard mathematical approaches in reasonable timescales. My work has been applied in a wide variety of applications, ranging from optimising vehicle routes to reduce carbon emissions to finding low-cost layouts for infrastructure such as buildings or pipe networks. In 2016, I was appointed as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press), its first female Editor, while I also sit on a number of global committees such as the ACM Special Interest Group on Evolutionary Computation and the IEEE Task Force on Evolutionary and Developmental Robotics. Much of my current work focuses on evolution and learning applied to robotics. More generally, I am interested in how artificial evolutionary mechanisms can be used to co-evolve the body and brain of a robot, and how the interplay between evolution and individual learning over a life-time shapes how populations of robots adapt over generations. My work in evolutionary robotics has attracted significant media attention, reported in the New Scientist, the Guardian, Telegraph and the Conversation.

Artificial Intelligence, Robotics