Dr Atilim Gunes Baydin

Biography

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Hamilton Institute and the Department of Computer Science of the National University of Ireland Maynooth. My current work, with Prof. Barak Pearlmutter, involves automatic differentiation (AD) and its potential applications to machine learning. Our research aims to add exact first-class differentiation operators to the lambda calculus, allowing numeric algorithms and scientific computations to be expressed in a very clear and succinct way. We are designing and implementing languages embodying compositionality, where gradient optimization can be performed efficiently and concurrently on many nested levels in a system. I received a PhD in artificial intelligence from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), in Barcelona, Spain. My research involved analogical and commonsense reasoning and also introduced a novel graph-based evolutionary algorithm employing semantic networks, paralleling sociological theories of evolutionary epistemology and memetics. During my PhD, I had been working at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and I also had a chance to visit the Learning Research & Development Center of the University of Pittsburgh. Before my work in Spain, I received a master's degree from the Complex Adaptive Systems program at the Department of Applied Physics of Chalmers University of Technology, in Göteborg, Sweden. Working under the Programmable Artificial Cell Evolution EU project, my work involved mesoscopic molecular modeling and computational physics.

Research Interest

Evolutionary computation, artificial life, complex systems, nonlinear dynamics, and neural networks.