Cyber-evolution: How computer science is harnessing the power of Darwinian transformation

From a pair of simple principles of evolution—chance mutation and natural selection—nature has constructed an almost unfathomable richness of life around us. Despite our scientific sophistication, human design and engineering

Once regarded as merely cast-off waste products of cellular life, bacterial membrane vesicles (MVs) have since become an exciting new avenue of research, due to the wealth of biological information

More than half of the human body is not actually human: The body hosts approximately 100 trillion microbes. These bacteria, yeast and viruses, which make up the human microbiome, affect

Stephanie Forrest presented on complexity, privacy and the pandemic to the Applied Complexity Network, a collaboration group of firms, governments and nonprofit organizations facilitated by the Santa Fe Institute. In this July talk, Forrest, who is the director of the Biodesign Center for Biocomputing, Security and Society, discussed how biological mechanisms can inspire and inform computer algorithms that help us address privacy concerns, such as those that arise in a

The Pulse of AI Podcast host Jason Stoughton spoke with Stephanie Forrest and Risto Miikkulainen about evolutionary artificial intelligence. The podcast walks listeners through what evolutionary AI is, how it is used and the challenges and opportunities it offers. The podcast episode is titled “Deep Dive into Evolutionary AI.” Forrest, director of the Biodesign Center of Biocomputing, Security and Society, is an expert on biological computation, including work on computational

The Biodesign Center for Biocomputing, Security and Society extends a warm welcome to three exciting new faculty who have joined the Biodesign Center for Biocomputing, Security and Society. Collectively, they bring new expertise, reinforcing the team’s existing strengths in computational biology and cybersecurity. The newest faculty include: Heewook Lee, Jed Crandall and Ni Trieu. Heewook Lee is an assistant professor with expertise in computational biology. He

The global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus has affected nearly every aspect of daily life in Arizona and across the nation, putting many summer activities on pause in the

In 1996, Stephanie Forrest, director of the Biodesign Center for Biocomputing, Security and Society, co-authored the first paper to present a practical approach to automatically detecting cyber attacks against executing computer systems. Twenty-four years later, co-authors of the landmark paper—Steven Hofmeyr, Anil Somayaji, Thomas Longstaff along with Forrest—received the Test of Time Award at the virtual 41st IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The paper, titled A Sense of Self for.

Many countries are turning to cell phones and other personal data for tracking social contacts and locations during the pandemic. These efforts potentially pose a threat to digital privacy and anonymity of individual citizens and can easily be used for other purposes than protecting public health. In a recent article, computer scientist Stephanie Forrest argues that relevant public health data can be collected in privacy-preserving ways, both by using immunology-inspired algorithms and

Athena Aktipis could be called a “Renaissance woman.” After all, she’s a psychologist, evolutionary biologist, cancer biologist and studies conflict and cooperation. She crosses boundaries and colors outside the lines

Growing up, we are told that eating a balanced diet is pivotal to our health. After all, food is what supplies our body with the energy we need day to