Dr. Charles Ofria

Dr. Charles Ofria

Professor of Computer Science & Engineering
Core Faculty in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior
Michigan State University

Director, MSU Digital Evoltuion Laboratory (Devolab)
Director, BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action
Former President, International Society for Artificial Life

Publications (from Google Scholar)
ofria @ cse.msu.edu
@CharlesOfria

Charles Ofria is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University and the director of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action. His research lies at the intersection of Computer Science and Evolutionary Biology, developing a two-way flow of ideas between the fields, with a goal of understanding how evolution produces complex traits, behaviors, and intelligent processes.

Dr. Ofria received a bachelor’s degree in 1994 from SUNY Stony Brook with a triple major in Pure Math, Applied Math, and Computer Science. In 1999, he received a Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems from the California Institute of Technology, followed by a three-year postdoc in the Center for Microbial Ecology at MSU. He has been a professor at MSU since 2002.

Dr. Ofria is the architect of the Avida Digital Evolution Research Platform, which is use in research and education at hundreds of universities around the world. He is broadly interested in studying an harnessing evolutionary dynamics.

Research Interests

Evolution is a powerful force capable of finding elegant solutions to challenges faced by living systems. It has produced a wide variety of complex structures such as intricate gene-regulatory networks, distributed societies of cooperating eusocial insects, and sophisticated forms of intelligence including the human brain. Yet all of this evolution comes from a single instance of life, with common ancestry and a basis in DNA, RNA, and proteins. How much of the evolutionary process that we see on Earth is, in fact, universal?

One way to explore this idea is to build new forms of living systems that possess the basic capacity for evolution (with replication, heritable variation, and selection), but are otherwise distinct from life on Earth. I conduct research with many such artificial living systems, where digital organisms are composed of self-replicating computer programs or other computational systems. These artificial organisms allow us to simultaneously learn more about life as it is on Earth as we also explore “life as it could be”.

Some specific topics that I am interested in include:

The evolutionary origins of biological complexity. Computational evolutionary systems are unable to produce anywhere near the same level of complexity as what is seen in nature. Most of my research, in one way or another, revolves around understanding natural evolutionary dynamics and applying them to computational systems. I take many different approaches, including using information theory or releated techniques to measure complexity, novelty, and open-endedness exhibited by a system.

The early evolution of intelligent behaviors. Human intelligence is arguably the most complex evolutionary traits ever evolved; it is no surprise that developing human-level AIs has been such a challenge. Even so, the large-language models favored today use very different techniques than humans to answer questions or solve problems. Human intelligence was built using the materials available (cells), while computers have very different materials (logic circuits). My goal is to understand how early building blocks formed the first components of natural intelligence and to duplicate these efforts using circle-like structures that are more natural for a computational environment. As these pieces come together, they provide a roadmap for continued development.

Major evolutionary transitions. Some of the most profound evolutionary changes alter what it means to be an "individual" organism. One of the most profound of these was the evolutionary transition from single cells to multi-cellular organisms. While impressive advancements are being made in wet labs to understand these transitions, the slow nature of evolution makes such studies difficult, especially when looking at broad environmental conditions that allow for a major transition. Digital systems allow us to investigate more broadly how such transitions occur, and can even given insights on coordination and cooperation and how they can be applied back to solve computational problems. (see next!)

The evolution of coordination and cooperative behaviors. As Moore's Law has slowed dramatically, improvements in computational power have shifted from ever smaller and faster CPUs to simply using more and more CPUs. Unfortunatley, the distributed code needed to take advantage of such architectures tends to not be especially intuitive. Furthermore, as the number of CPUs employed increases exponentially, so too does the chance of a single core failing, bringing down the whole system. Biological organisms have proved incredibly robost on both of these fronts, and thus understanding more about how evolution produces cooperative behaviors can also allow these same techniques to be used for computational problem solving.

Interactions between ecological and evolutionary dynamics.

Open-ended evolutionary computation.

See also my list of Software Projects for other major activities in the lab.

Software Projects

In addition to a broad range of reseach projects, the Digital Evolution Lab develops and maintains a broad range of academic software. These include:

Avida Logo The Avida Digital Evolution Research Platform. Avida is a free, open source scientific software platform for conducting and analyzing experiments with self-replicating and evolving computer programs. It provides detailed control over experimental settings and protocols, a large array of measurement tools, and sophisticated methods to analyze and post-process experimental data.
Avida Logo The Empicial Scientific Software Library. Empirical is a C++ library of tools for developing useful, efficient, reliable, and web-accessible scientific software. The provided code is header-only simple to incorporate into existing projects.
MABE Logo The Modular Agent-Based Evolver (MABE) v2.0. MABE 2.0 is a framework for building evolutionary computation or artificial life software systems useful for studying evolutionary dynamics, solving complex problems, comparing evolving systems, or exploring the open-ended power of evolution. MABE is being re-built using the Empirical library. Our goal is to allow for more modular control, flexible agents, faster run times and portability to the web.
Emperfect Logo Emperfect. Emperfect is a C++ unit test framework geared toward a classroom setting. Student compiled code can be tested for I/O capabilities, or individual functions can be tested. Feedback can be customized to provide full details (including compilation errors, timeouts, crash reports, etc) and test cases can be made "secret".
QBL Logo The Question-Bank Language (QBL) QBL (pronounced "Quibble") manages a repository of multiple choice questions that can be used to generate exams in a desired format. Questions can be picked completely at random, or following guidelines provided in tags (e.g., to limit categories, ensure only one question of a given type, etc). Questions can also have many possible answers that are carefully selected based on configuration.

Students

To Be Added

Blog

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