About the Speaker: Melanie Mitchell received a a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 1990. Her dissertation work with Douglas Hofstadter was on cognitive modeling of high-level perception and analogy-making. In 1990 she was awarded a Fellowship in the University of Michigan Society of Fellows. Since then she has been Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and a staff scientist in the Biophsics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She is currently Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the OGI School of Science & Engineering at Oregon Health & Science University.
She is the author of two books, Analogy-Making as Perception (MIT Press, 1993) and An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms (MIT Press, 1996), and co-editor of two books: Adaptive Individuals in Evolving Populations: Models and Algorithms (Addison-Wesley, 1996), and Perspectives on Evolution, Adaptation, and Complex Adaptive Systems (Oxford University Press, in press). She is currently working on a book about the past and future of the sciences of complexity, to be published by Oxford University Press.