My Scientific Interests

I am eager to get a better scientific understanding about pretty much everything in the World, from the tiniest subatomic scales up to the complexity of the human society and the vastness of the Universe.

Some keywords: Artificial Life, Artificial Intelligence, emergence, complex adaptive systems, adaptation, adaptivity.

Probably the most important underlying interests, already since secondary school, have been the ideas of Artificial Life and (friendly) Superhuman Artificial Intelligence. I still remember how big an impression the Karl Sims' video "Evolved Virtual Creatures" left on me when I happened to see it during the organized chill-out activities of some Estonian National Physics Olympiad in the nineties.

Even though I haven't really explicitly worked much on ALife and SAI yet, they have been the guiding factors of my scientific endeavors. For example, my Bachelor's thesis (2003) was "Project MyANN — An Educational Software Package about Artificial Neural Networks", my Master's thesis (2005) was "Using Multiagent Systems for Representing the Inner Processes of a Bacterial Cell, a DnaA Titration Model Based Agent Model as an Example", and currently my main research focus (and the topic of my PhD thesis) is adaptivity — what it is and how to facilitate it in artificial systems.

The main reason I'm currently interested in the concept of adaptivity is that it seems to be one of the key characteristics of both life and intelligence, and thus a better understanding of it may be highly valuable in constructing ALife and SAI. Additionally, adaptation has a considerable importance in a large number of other areas as well: business (how to make companies survive and flourish in the ever more turbulent markets), psychology, military, computer and software engineering, and so forth, therefore exploring it serves perfectly the interdisciplinarity of my interests.