Senior Staff Scientist

Dr. Sevan Ficici recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in computer science at Harvard University, where he worked on probabilistic computational models of human decision making in games with Avi Pfeffer and computational game theory with Avi Pfeffer and David Parkes. Sevan also co-taught a course on multi-agent systems at Harvard in 2008 with Kobi Gal. Prior to Harvard, Sevan received his Ph.D in computer science from Brandeis University working on coevolutionary learning, multi-agent systems, robotics, and evolutionary game theory with Jordan Pollack. Sevan also holds a Master's degree in music theory from the Eastman School of Music, where he researched computer analysis of music with Aleck Brinkman.

His work has been cited in journals such as Nature, PNAS, Journal of Theoretical Biology, Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, Evolution, Artificial Life, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Trans. on Evolutionary Computation, and IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics-Part B, among others.

Sevan has been a regular reviewer for the journals Artificial Life and IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation. He was a program committee member for AAMAS 2008, and chaired of the coevolution track at GECCO 2006. He also co-organized the 2007 and 2008 ACM GECCO workshops on Evolutionary Computation and Multi-Agent Systems and Simulation (ECoMASS) with Bill Rand. Sevan has also presented tutorials at GECCO 2006-2008, as well as the 2007 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games.

Selected Publications

Ficici S, Liu E, Fogel GB (2012) "Evolutionary Algorithms for Supertree Search," 2012 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, Brisbane, Australia, accepted.

Ficici, SG, Parkes, DC, and Pfeffer, A (2008) "Learning and Solving Many-Player Games through a Cluster-Based Representation," 24th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI).

Ficici, SG and Pfeffer, A (2008) "Modeling how Humans Reason about Others with Partial Information," Seventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS).

Ficici, SG and Pfeffer, A (2008) "Simultaneously Modeling Humans' Preferences and their Beliefs about Others' Preferences," Seventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS).

Ficici, SG (2008) "Multi-Objective Optimization and Coevolution," In J. Knowles, D. Corne and K. Deb (eds.), Multi-Objective Problem Solving from Nature: From Concepts to Applications. Springer, 2008.

Ficici, SG and Pollack, JB (2007) "Evolutionary Dynamics of Finite Populations in Games with Polymorphic Fitness-Equilibria," Journal of Theoretical Biology, 247(3), pp. 426-441.

Ficici, SG (2006) "A Game-Theoretic Investigation of Selection Methods in Two-Population Coevolution," 2006 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, ACM Press.

For more information please see the NSI Publications Library or email Dr. Sevan Ficici at: sficici [at] natural-selection.com

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