Alexander Klyubin

I am currently a PhD student at the University of Hertfordshire (UK) and member of the Adaptive Systems Research Group. My principal supervisor is Daniel Polani. My second supervisor is Chrystopher Nehaniv.

Research Interests

I am interested in systems consisting of large numbers of relatively simple locally interacting components -- cellular systems. Understanding how such systems emerge and adapt not only provides theoretical basis for developing novel applications, but also sheds more light on the existing, mostly biological, systems. The potential for applications lies in such diverse areas as micro- and nanorobotics, space exploration, neural computation, neuroscience, medicine, agriculture, etc.

The primary research direction of my PhD is sensor evolution. I am trying to understand and quantify the tradeoffs between agent morphology, sensors and processing of sensory information. Information theory, biology, thermodynamics and general physics intersect and combine here. So far I have been applying ideas from the Information Theory to adaptive behavior, viewing agents and their environment as a web of spatially and temporally extended information channels communicating information.

My pre-PhD research concentrated on individual-based discrete simulations. These include predator-prey population dynamics with fixed-length genotype in prey, pheromone diffusion based clustering of non-adaptive non-reproducing agents with amounts of different pheromones globally conserved, simplistic particle-based simulations partly inspired by quantum electrodynamics. The primary goal in all of the above simulations was to investigate the kinds of global adaptive dynamics emerging and their evolution, as well as to understand what prevents systems from exhibiting higher levels of adaptation or evolution. In all of these simulations systems hit a "complexity plateau" without exhibiting open-ended evolution. That is why now I am trying to gain more generalized theoretical understanding of organization, adaptive behavior, etc.

Publications

The publications are available here.

Brief CV

I was born on January 1st, 1980 in Tallinn, Estonia. I obtained my BSc and MSc in Computer Science from the Tallinn Technical University (Estonia) in 2000 and 2002 respectively. My MSc thesis is "An Organization-Centric Approach To Viewing Adaptation in Complex Adaptive Systems" (PostScript, PDF).

Contact Information