Associate Professor Geoff Nitschke

Evolutionary Machine Learning Researcher, Department of Computer Science

Research Interests

I am the head of the Evolutionary Machine Learning group and an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, School of Information Technology, University of Cape Town. I have been working in research on biologically inspired computational intelligence for over 15 years with over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings and edited volumes. This research has been supported by grants totaling approximately 20 million ZAR from national and international funding agencies. I am a strong proponent of evolutionary computation and robotics, consistently presenting at key conferences such as Artificial Life, Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation and the IEEE Symposium series on Computational Intelligence. I am also associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, Adaptive Behavior and Frontiers in Robotics and AI journals, and participate in numerous international research visits.

Post-doctoral research includes a National Research Foundation funded position at the Computational Intelligence Research Group, University of Pretoria, South Africa (2009-2011) and a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) funded position at Ikegami Lab, University of Tokyo, Japan (2011-2012). Sabbatical and research visits include invitations to the Computational Intelligence Group, VU Amsterdam, Netherlands (2017), Earth Life Sciences Institute, Tokyo, Japan (2017-2018), Robotics and Autonomous Systems Group, CSIRO, Brisbane, Australia (2019-2020), School of Computing, Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom (2022, 2024), Department of Information Sciences, Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, Japan (2023), the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Okinawa, Japan (2024), Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China (2025) and the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany (2025). 

Research Areas

Cognitive and Behavioural Neuroscience • Computational Neuroscience • Social Neuroscience