Vassilis Vassiliades

Biography

Vassilis Vassiliades leads the "Learning Agents and Robots" (LEAR) research group at the CYENS Centre of Excellence (formerly known as RISE) and is also an associate research fellow at the University of Cyprus (UCY). He received a BSc in Computer Science from UCY (2007), an MSc in Intelligent Systems Engineering from the University of Birmingham, UK (2008), and a PhD in Computer Science from UCY (2015). During his PhD studies, he investigated approaches for adaptation in dynamic environments, spanning the fields of single- and multiagent reinforcement learning, as well as neuroevolution, neural plasticity and neuromodulation in artificial neural networks. He held post-doctoral and research engineer positions at Inria Nancy, France (2015-2018) under the ResiBots ERC project and the supervision of Jean-Baptiste Mouret, working on algorithms for efficient damage recovery in robotics. He was a research associate at UCY (2015-2019) and RISE (2019) before forming the LEAR group.

Vassilis has won scholarships for his studies, and has contributed in attracting ~1M euros in funding. He serves as a programme committee member for the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO; Evolutionary Machine Learning track) and as a reviewer for various journals and conferences. His research interests lie in the areas of artificial intelligence and robotics, currently focusing on creating software agents and robots that acquire, retain and improve a diversity of skills. He has published in major journals and conferences on topics related to neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, robot learning, reinforcement learning, multiagent learning, and machine learning applications.