Emma Hart
Emma Hart

Prof Emma Hart

Professor

 0131 455 2783

  E.Hart@napier.ac.uk

  

Biography

Prof. Hart gained a 1st Class Honours Degree in Chemistry from the University of Oxford, followed by an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Her PhD, also from the University of Edinburgh, explored the use of immunology as an inspiration for computing, examining a range of techniques applied to optimisation and data classification problems. 

She moved to Edinburgh Napier University in 2000 as a lecturer, and was promoted to a Chair in 2008 where she leads a group in Nature-Inspired Intelligent Systems, specialising in optimisation and learning algorithms applied in domains that range from combinatorial optimisation to robotics. Her work mainly involves development of algorithms inspired by biological evolution to discover novel solutions to challenging problems.

She was appointed as Editor-in-Chief of Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press) in 2017. She has been invited to give keynotes at major international conferences including CLAIO 2020, IEEE CEC 2019, EURO 2016 and UKCI 2015 and was General Chair of PPSN 2016, and as a Track Chair at GECCO for several years. She is an elected member of the Executive Board of the ACM SIG on Evolutionary Computation.

More broadly, she invited member of the UK Operations Research Society Research Panel, and in Scotland, co-leads the Artificial Intelligence theme within SICSA. She was appointed as a panel member for REF2021 (UoA11 Computer Science). In 2020 she was appointed to the Steering Committee that developed Scotland's AI Strategy published in 2021 . She has a sustained track record of obtaining funding from the EU, EPSRC and of engaging with industry via KTP projects and consultancy, and participates enthusiastically in public-engagement activity, e.g Pint of Science.

Her work in evolutionary robotics has attracted significant media attention, e.g. in New Scientist, the Guardian, Telegraph and the Conversation. In 2021, she gave a TED Talk on Evolutionary Robotics, available online

School

Research Groups

Themes

Research Areas

News

Events

Esteem

Advisory panels and expert committees or witness

  • Scottish Government Steering Committee: AI Strategy
  • Royal Society’s International Networks Committee
  • Elected to the Executive Board of the ACM Special Interest Group SIGEVO
  • Invited to join the IEEE CIS Evolutionary Computation Technical Committee for 2012
  • Appointed to the UK Operational Research Society Research Panel
  • Invited to co-lead SICSA Research Theme on Artificial Intelligence
  • Member of Royal Society delegation of UK scientists in UK-Russia Frontiers of Science Symposium (Kazan)

 

Conference Organising Activity

  • Senior Program Committee Member AAAI-19
  • Track Chair: Complex Systems @ GECCO 2017
  • General Chair of PPSN 2016, Edinburgh
  • Co-chair and organiser, Dagstuhl Seminar on Artificial Immune Systems, 2011
  • Workshop co-chair: Steering Complex Adaptive Systems, ECAL 2015: 12th International Conference on Artificial Life
  • Program Chair of the ninth IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self- Organizing Systems (2015)
  • Workshop Chair: IEEE SASO, 2nd Workshop on Fundamentals of Collective Systems, London,
  • Workshop Chair: IEEE SASO 2011, 1st Workshop on Self-Awareness in Autonomic Computing USA
  • Workshop Chair, Real-World-Optimisation @ GECCO 2013
  • Workshop Chair: 2nd Awareness workshop at IIEEE SASO 2012 : Challenges for Achieving Self-awareness in Autonomic Systems
  • Technical chair of IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computing (CEC), 2009
  • Workshop co-chair: ALIFE 2016, 2nd Workshop on Steering Complex Systems (Cancun, Mexico)
  • Technical Chair BioNETICS 2009, Avignon
  • General Chair: 9th International Conference on Artificial Immune Systems at Edinburgh Napier
  • Technical Chair of Bionetics 2011, York, UK
  • Chair of Workshop in Self-Organisation in Pervasive Adaptive Systems, at IEEE SASO 2010, Budapest. 28th September 2010
  • Track Chair: Artificial Immune Systems at GECCO 2014, an ACM SIGEVO Conference.
  • Track Chair: Artificial Immune Systems and Biological and Medical Applications, Genetic & Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO 2016
  • Track Chair. Real-World Applications of Optimisation at GECCO 2015 (ACM)
  • Workshop Chair: • ECAL 2013, 1st Workshop on Fundamentals of Collective Systems, Italy

 

Editorial Activity

  • Editor-in-Chief of Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press)
  • Editor of the ACM SIGEVO newsletter
  • Editorial Board: International Journal Metaheuristics
  • Guest Editor: Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience (Special Issue on Collective Adaptive Systems)
  • Guest Editor: Swarm Intelligence: (Special Issue on Artificial Immune Systems) 2010
  • Associate Editor of the Journal of Evolutionary Computation (MITPress)
  • Guest Editor: Special Issue of J. Evolutionary Intelligence on Aspects of Artificial Immune Systems

 

Fellowships and Awards

  • Leverhulme Research Fellowship

 

Grant Reviewer

  • Grant reviewer: Carnegie Trust
  • Grant reviewer: Leverhulme Trust
  • Re-elected to EPSRC peer review college

 

Invited Speaker

  • Invited Talk: Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico
  • Invited Talk: University of St Andrews (Computer Science)
  • AHDB Smart Agriculture Conference (Invited Speaker)
  • Invited Seminar: University of Aberystwyth: Seminar, Life Long Learning in Optimisation
  • University of Stirling: Research Seminar
  • University of Nottingham Research Seminar
  • Invited Speaker: Women@GECCO workshop, GECCO 2015
  • Keynote Speaker at 28th European Conference on Operational Research in Poznan in July 2016
  • Keynote: 15th UK Conference on Computational Intelligence (UKCI 
2015
  • Inivited Talk: Mathematical Modelling of Wind Risk, Arcachon, France. Optimisation for Forestry

 

Media Activity

  • The PerAda project hosted a public debate "Emotion as Interface" at Edinburgh International Science Festival, chaired by Emma Hart, with panel guests Prof Kevin Warwick, Prof Nikola Serbedzija, ad Dr Jenny Tillotson
  • FOCAS project featured in EU FET newsletter

 

Research Degree External Examining

  • PhD Examiner: University of Cardiff (School of Mathematics)
  • PhD Examiner: Robert Gordon University
  • Phd External Examiner Queen Mary University
  • PhD Examiner University of Edinburgh
  • PhD Examiner: University of York
  • PhD Examiner: University of Hong Kong
  • PhD Examiner: University of Aberytwyth
  • PhD Examiner: Manchester Metropolitan
  • PhD examiner, University of Pretoria, South Africa
  • PhD Examiner University of Kent Canterbury
  • PhD Examiner University of YorK (Computer Science)
  • PhD Examiner: Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
  • PhD at the University of Cardiff, in the School of Computer Science and Informatics
  • PhD examiner at the University of York
  • PhD examiner, University of Nottingham
  • PhD external examiner at Hong Kong Polytechnic University

 

Filter by

Date


161 results

Can justice be fair when it is blind? How social network structures can promote or prevent the evolution of despotism

Conference Proceeding
Perret, C., Powers, S. T., Pitt, J., & Hart, E. (2018)
Can justice be fair when it is blind? How social network structures can promote or prevent the evolution of despotism. In T. Ikegami, N. Virgo, O. Witkowski, M. Oka, R. Suzuki, & H. Iizuka (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Artificial Lifehttps://doi.org/10.1162/isal_a_00058
Hierarchy is an efficient way for a group to organize, but often goes along with inequality that benefits leaders. To control despotic behaviour, followers can assess leaders'...

A new rich vehicle routing problem model and benchmark resource

Conference Proceeding
Sim, K., Hart, E., Urquhart, N. B., & Pigden, T. (2018)
A new rich vehicle routing problem model and benchmark resource. In Advances in Evolutionary and Deterministic Methods for Design, Optimization and Control in Engineering and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89988-6_30
We describe a new rich VRP model that captures many real-world constraints, following a recently proposed taxonomy that addresses both scenario and problem physical characteri...

Creating optimised employee travel plans

Conference Proceeding
Urquhart, N., & Hart, E. (2019)
Creating optimised employee travel plans. In Advances in Evolutionary and Deterministic Methods for Design, Optimization and Control in Engineering and Sciences. , (489-502). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89988-6_29
The routing of employees who provide services such as home health or social care is a complex problem. When sending an employee between two addresses , there may exist more th...

A novel similarity-based mutant vector generation strategy for differential evolution

Conference Proceeding
Segredo, E., Lalla-Ruiz, E., & Hart, E. (2018)
A novel similarity-based mutant vector generation strategy for differential evolution. In H. Aguirre (Ed.), Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2018https://doi.org/10.1145/3205455.3205628
The mutant vector generation strategy is an essential component of Differential Evolution (DE), introduced to promote diversity, resulting in exploration of novel areas of the...

Evolution of a Functionally Diverse Swarm via a Novel Decentralised Quality-Diversity Algorithm

Conference Proceeding
Hart, E., Steyven, A. S. W., & Paechter, B. (2018)
Evolution of a Functionally Diverse Swarm via a Novel Decentralised Quality-Diversity Algorithm. In GECCO '18 Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, (101-108). https://doi.org/10.1145/3205455.3205481
The presence of functionality diversity within a group has been demonstrated to lead to greater robustness, higher performance and increased problem-solving ability in a broad...

Automatic Generation of Constructive Heuristics for Multiple Types of Combinatorial Optimisation Problems with Grammatical Evolution and Geometric Graphs

Conference Proceeding
Stone, C., Hart, E., & Paechter, B. (2017)
Automatic Generation of Constructive Heuristics for Multiple Types of Combinatorial Optimisation Problems with Grammatical Evolution and Geometric Graphs. In Applications of Evolutionary Computation, 578-593
In many industrial problem domains, when faced with a combinatorial optimisation problem, a “good enough, quick enough” solution to a problem is often required. Simple heurist...

On the performance of the hybridisation between migrating birds optimisation variants and differential evolution for large scale continuous problems

Journal Article
Voß, S., Segredo, E., Lalla-Ruiz, E., Hart, E., & Voss, S. (2018)
On the performance of the hybridisation between migrating birds optimisation variants and differential evolution for large scale continuous problems. Expert Systems with Applications, 102, 126-142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2018.02.024
Migrating Birds Optimisation (mbo) is a nature-inspired approach which has been shown to be very effective when solving a variety of combinatorial optimisation problems. More ...

For Flux Sake: The Confluence of Socially- and Biologically-Inspired Computing for Engineering Change in Open Systems

Conference Proceeding
Pitt, J., & Hart, E. (2017)
For Flux Sake: The Confluence of Socially- and Biologically-Inspired Computing for Engineering Change in Open Systems. In 2017 IEEE 2nd International Workshops on Foundations and Applications of Self* Systems (FAS*W),. https://doi.org/10.1109/fas-w.2017.119
This position paper is concerned with the challenge of engineering multi-scale and long-lasting systems, whose operation is regulated by sets of mutually-agreed, conventional ...

Emergence of hierarchy from the evolution of individual influence in an agent-based model

Conference Proceeding
Perret, C., Powers, S. T., & Hart, E. (2017)
Emergence of hierarchy from the evolution of individual influence in an agent-based model. In Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Artificial Life 2017, (348-355
The sudden transition from egalitarian groups to hierarchical societies that occurred with the origin of agriculture is one of the most striking features of the evolution of h...

Impact of selection methods on the diversity of many-objective Pareto set approximations

Journal Article
Martí, L., Segredo, E., Sánchez-Pi, N., & Hart, E. (2017)
Impact of selection methods on the diversity of many-objective Pareto set approximations. Procedia Computer Science, 112, (844-853). ISSN 1877-0509
Selection methods are a key component of all multi-objective and, consequently, many-objective optimisation evolutionary algorithms. They must perform two main tasks simultane...

Current Post Grad projects

Previous Post Grad projects