Risto Miikkulainen, AVP of Evolutionary AI at Cognizant AI Labs and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, has been elected an AAAI Fellow by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a prestigious lifetime title recognizing his significant contributions to the field of AI.

Cognizant AI Labs helps companies apply evolutionary AI – a generative problem-solving technique inspired by biological evolution to create intelligent systems – to solve real-world problems in areas like engineering design, decision-making, and manufacturing control, with applications in healthcare, marketing, finance, retail and more.

“In addition to regularly achieving new scientific discoveries, Risto and the Cognizant AI Labs team are focused on applying the latest AI technologies to our clients’ most vexing challenges,” said Naveen Sharma, Head of Cognizant’s AI and Analytics practice. “While the world is just beginning to experience the power of generative AI, I am excited to see the transformative impact Risto’s work is starting to have on the business landscape across industries.”

Election as an AAAI Fellow is the highest honor the non-profit scientific society bestows upon its members, reserved for the small group of individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions – over the course of at least a decade – to the field of AI. Miikkulainen is the only current fellow specializing in evolutionary AI, an area of Machine Learning that focuses on creating solutions that do not already exist, as opposed to building systems that aim to duplicate human performance, as is the case for most AI today.

Much of Risto’s recent work has been focused on pushing the boundaries of evolutionary AI systems and making them reliable and intuitive in an enterprise context, with methods for estimating confidence of predictions and decisions, explaining them in terms of rules, and allowing users to explore alternatives interactively. In 2023 so far, the Cognizant AI Labs team has received 11 patents covering a range of technologies in this space.

To learn more about Risto and the work of the Cognizant AI Labs team, visit Digitally.Cognizant.