Abstract:

In 1954 the Norwegian-Italian scientist Nils Aall Barricelli published one of the first works on artificial life, titled "Esempi numerici di processi di evoluzione" (translated in 1957 as "Symbiogenetic evolution processes realized by artificial methods").
His work represents a pioneering example of artificial life and evolutionary algorithms, conducted on some of the earliest electronic computers.
Over 70 years since these initial publications, this talk will revisit Barricelli’s discoveries, his aspirations for future advancements, and whether these hopes have been realized through subsequent decades of research. After such a span of time, does Barricelli's work still offer inspiration today?

Biography:

Luca Manzoni is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Trieste and head of the Natural Computing Laboratory (NaCL). He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Milano-Bicocca in 2013, where he also obtained his master in 2009. During his career he was a visiting students or a postdoc in Lisbon, Birmingham, Nice, and Osaka.

He published more than 150 scientific papers in international conferences and journals. In 2022 he received the SIGEVO impact award, recognizing seminal papers in evolutionary computations published 10 years before. He is currently involved as PI or unit leader in multiple national and international projects.

His interest are in the fields of evolutionary computation, natural computing models, and applications of AI techniques to the natural sciences.