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
  • 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)
  • 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

 

Conference Organising Activity

  • Senior Program Committee Member AAAI-19
  • Track Chair: Complex Systems @ GECCO 2017
  • General Chair of PPSN 2016, Edinburgh
  • Technical chair of IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computing (CEC), 2009
  • Workshop co-chair: ALIFE 2016, 2nd Workshop on Steering Complex Systems (Cancun, Mexico)
  • 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 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
  • 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)

 

Editorial Activity

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

 

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

 

Media Activity

  • FOCAS project featured in EU FET newsletter
  • 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

 

Research Degree External Examining

  • PhD Examiner: University of Cardiff (School of Mathematics)
  • Phd External Examiner Queen Mary University
  • PhD Examiner: Robert Gordon 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

 

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Date


161 results

A hybrid method for feature construction and selection to improve wind-damage prediction in the forestry sector

Conference Proceeding
Hart, E., Sim, K., Gardiner, B., & Kamimura, K. (2017)
A hybrid method for feature construction and selection to improve wind-damage prediction in the forestry sector. In GECCO '17 Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. , (1121-1128). https://doi.org/10.1145/3071178.3071217
Catastrophic damage to forests resulting from major storms has resulted in serious timber and financial losses within the sector across Europe in the recent past. Developing r...

On Constructing Ensembles for Combinatorial Optimisation

Journal Article
Hart, E., & Sim, K. (2018)
On Constructing Ensembles for Combinatorial Optimisation. Evolutionary Computation, 26(1), 67-87. https://doi.org/10.1162/evco_a_00203
Although the use of ensemble methods in machine-learning is ubiquitous due to their proven ability to outperform their constituent algorithms, ensembles of optimisation algori...

An investigation of environmental influence on the benefits of adaptation mechanisms in evolutionary swarm robotics

Conference Proceeding
Steyven, A., Hart, E., & Paechter, B. (2017)
An investigation of environmental influence on the benefits of adaptation mechanisms in evolutionary swarm robotics. In GECCO '17 Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. , (155-162). https://doi.org/10.1145/3071178.3071232
A robotic swarm that is required to operate for long periods in a potentially unknown environment can use both evolution and individual learning methods in order to adapt. How...

Hybridisation of Evolutionary Algorithms through hyper-heuristics for global continuous optimisation

Conference Proceeding
Segredo, E., Lalla-Ruiz, E., Hart, E., Paechter, B., & Voß, S. (2016)
Hybridisation of Evolutionary Algorithms through hyper-heuristics for global continuous optimisation. In P. Festa, M. Sellmann, & J. Vanschoren (Eds.), Learning and Intelligent Optimization: 10th International Conference, LION 10, Ischia, Italy, May 29 -- June 1, 2016 (296-305). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50349-3_25
Choosing the correct algorithm to solve a problem still remains an issue 40 years after the Algorithm Selection Problem was first posed. Here we propose a hyper-heuristic whic...

Hybrid parameter control approach applied to a diversity-based multi-objective Memetic Algorithm for frequency assignment problems

Conference Proceeding
Segredo, E., Paechter, B., Hart, E., & Gonz´alez-Vila, C. I. (2016)
Hybrid parameter control approach applied to a diversity-based multi-objective Memetic Algorithm for frequency assignment problems. In 2016 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC)https://doi.org/10.1109/CEC.2016.7743969
In order to address the difficult issue of parameter setting within a diversity-based Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA), we recently proposed a hybrid control sche...

Understanding Environmental Influence in an Open-Ended Evolutionary Algorithm

Conference Proceeding
Steyven, A., Hart, E., & Paechter, B. (2016)
Understanding Environmental Influence in an Open-Ended Evolutionary Algorithm. In Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XIV; Lecture Notes in Computer Science. , (921-931). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45823-6_86
It is well known that in open-ended evolution, the nature of the environment plays in key role in directing evolution. However, in Evolutionary Robotics, it is often unclear e...

Analysing the performance of migrating birds optimisation approaches for large scale continuous problems

Conference Proceeding
Lalla-Ruiz, E., Segredo, E., Voss, S., Hart, E., & Paechter, B. (2016)
Analysing the performance of migrating birds optimisation approaches for large scale continuous problems. In Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XIV. , (134-144). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45823-6_13
We present novel algorithmic schemes for dealing with large scale continuous problems. They are based on the recently proposed population-based meta-heuristics Migrating Birds...

Artificial Immunology for Collective Adaptive Systems Design and Implementation

Journal Article
Capodieci, N., Hart, E., & Cabri, G. (2016)
Artificial Immunology for Collective Adaptive Systems Design and Implementation. ACM transactions on autonomous and adaptive systems, 11(2), 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1145/2897372
Distributed autonomous systems consisting of large numbers of components with no central control point need to be able to dynamically adapt their control mechanisms to deal wi...

A hyper-heuristic ensemble method for static job-shop scheduling.

Journal Article
Hart, E., & Sim, K. (2016)
A hyper-heuristic ensemble method for static job-shop scheduling. Evolutionary Computation, 24(4), 609-635. https://doi.org/10.1162/EVCO_a_00183
We describe a new hyper-heuristic method NELLI-GP for solving job-shop scheduling problems (JSSP) that evolves an ensemble of heuristics. The ensemble adopts a divide-and-conq...

Improving survivability in environment-driven distributed evolutionary algorithms through explicit relative fitness and fitness proportionate communication.

Conference Proceeding
Hart, E., Steyven, A., & Paechter, B. (2015)
Improving survivability in environment-driven distributed evolutionary algorithms through explicit relative fitness and fitness proportionate communication. In Proceedings of the 2015 on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference - GECCO '15, (169-176). https://doi.org/10.1145/2739480.2754688
Ensuring the integrity of a robot swarm in terms of maintaining a stable population of functioning robots over long periods of time is a mandatory prerequisite for building mo...

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