Group Members

Academic Staff

Dr David Walker

David Walker is a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Plymouth. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Exeter, where he conducted work on the visualisation of the mutually non-dominating sets generated by many-objective evolutionary algorithms. During his postdoctoral work he conducted research on the development of novel hyper-heuristics and interactive methods for solving optimisation problems. He joined the Plymouth in 2018, and is a member of both the Centre for Robotic and Neural Systems and Big Data Group. His research focuses on improving user understanding of nature-inspired algorithms using visualisation techniques, and incorporating humans as components of nature-inspired approaches using interactive evolution. He has organised a GECCO workshop on visualisation for the last eight years, and is active in reviewing for a range of journals.

Dr Matthew Craven

Matthew Craven is a Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the University of Plymouth. His research interests lie in AI, simulation, cryptology, high performance computing, and visualisation. He has been involved with collaborative projects in the UK, Germany and Japan, regularly contributing to top-tier conferences such as GECCO and EVOSTAR. He is the PI for the Plymouth GPU Research Center, and extensively utilises the High Performance Computing facility at the university.

PhD Students

We have a number of PhD students working on various projects related to evolutionary computation and optimisation.
  • Tahani Alotaibi
  • Mathew Walter
  • Pawel Manikowski
  • Rahul Soni

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New PhD Students: Pawel Manikowski and Rahul Soni

We're very pleased to welcome two new PhD students to the group this week. Pawel Manikowski will be investigating the optimisation of floating offshore wind farms, and is supported by an EPSRC DTP fellowship. His work will be looking at modelling the movement of these floating structures, as well as optimising their placement of individual turbines within a floating wind farm. Floating wind farms are a nascent technology that holds the promise of greatly expanding renewable energy generation. Rahul Soni will be working on a project investigating the use of hyper-heuristics, combining machine learning with optimisation, to solve multi-objective portfolio optimisation problems and exploring novel algorithms in this area. We are looking forward to sharing the results of their research with you soon!
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New PhD Student: Mathew Walter

This week we welcomed our latest PhD student to the group. Mathew Walter is going to be working on visualising the processes that are used to generate solutions in evolutionary algorithms with the aim of making optimisation processes more explainable. Mathew joins us having graduated from Plymouth with a degree in Mathematics, and is supervised by David Walker and Matthew Craven. We look forward to sharing the outputs from his research with you soon.
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