I’m an Incident Analyst at Indeed Technologies Japan, a PhD student at The University of Tokyo under Takashi Ikegami, and external researcher at Cross Labs. I’m also an independent author, musician, artist, and developer. Most importantly, I’m a husband, father, and disciple of Jesus Christ.

My research intersts include collective intelligence, artificial life (and death), adaptive capacity, resilience, cultural evolution, evolvability, risk taking, decision making under uncertainty, and philosophy of science.

Evolvability and Meta-Evolution

A fitness landscape, created by Baku_89

The study of life is very often tied to the study of evolution and by association the study of fitness. Creatures which more successfully survive and reproduce give rise to progeny which follow suit - up to certain limits. Changes in the environment may make populations which were once fit no longer so, and their future fitness will be determined by their evolvability. Somewhat related, creatures can obtain new attributes, skills, or tools over the course of their lives in a way which modifies their own personal fitness function. We seek to explore these concepts, examining fitness in dynamic environments changed by external and “internal” forces.

Neural Cellular Automata in Games

While there have been some variations depending on genre or “character type”, we find that most games converge to a similar representation of “life” within their mechanics. Neural Cellular Automata, being from the same family of concepts as Conway’s Game of Life (one of the first zero-player games), represent a way to more fully express life within video game settings and innovate new game mechanics or gameplay loops.

Artificial Death and Inter-Generational Information Transmission

Death goes hand-in-hand with mortal life, and in many cultures and conceptions is defined by it. In order to understand artificial life, then, we must understand artificial death and its implications. First and foremost worth considering are the effects of death on the collective. Sharing stories about danger and death is fundamental to many cultures, and indeed promotes survival and exploration in future generations. This conceptual foundation allows us to explore the legacy of an agent and its enduring effects on the collective once it is gone.

Cognitive Studies of Incident Response

Incident response in online software environments is an excellent example of system expertise and adaptive capacity applied to complex, dynamic environments. By studying how responders prepare, adapt, and reflect, we can tease out patterns and more universal principles. This is extended when considering responders as a system themselves, comprising not just human agents but also tools, automation, artificial intelligence, and other digital technologies. Such considerations can also be expanded from collaboration across agents to collaboration across time and across abstraction layers.

Recent News

August ‘23: I’ve finished my whirlwind conference tour for this summer, which spanned SE Asia, North America, Southern Europe, and Northern Japan. I gave 2 talks and separately 2 of my papers were presented. I managed to mix in some visits home to family (and a track day at Road Atlanta) as well! A good end to the first year of a new era.