Riccardo Poli is a Professor

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

 in the Department of Computing and Electronic Systems of the University of Essex

University of Essex

The University of Essex is a British campus university whose original and largest campus is near the town of Colchester, England. Established in 1963 and receiving its Royal Charter in 1965...

. He started his academic career with a Laurea

Laurea

In Italy, the laurea is the main post-secondary academic degree.-Reforms due to the Bologna process:Spurred by the Bologna process, a major reform was instituted in 1999 to introduce easier university degrees comparable to the bachelors...

 an electronic engineer from the University of Florence

University of Florence

The University of Florence is a higher study institute in Florence, central Italy. One of the largest and oldest universities in the country, it consists of 12 faculties...

 in 1989. He then did a PhD in biomedical image analysis (1993) at the same university. He later became an expert in the field of Evolutionary Computation

Evolutionary computation

In computer science, evolutionary computation is a subfield of artificial intelligence that involves combinatorial optimization problems....

 working as a Lecturer

Lecturer

Lecturer is an academic rank. In the United Kingdom, lecturer is a position at a university or similar institution, often held by academics in their early career stages, who lead research groups and supervise research students, as well as teach...

 and then a Reader

Reader (academic rank)

The title of Reader in the United Kingdom and some universities in the Commonwealth nations like Australia and New Zealand denotes an appointment for a senior academic with a distinguished international reputation in research or scholarship...

 at the University of Birmingham

University of Birmingham

The University of Birmingham is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Birmingham Medical School and Mason Science College . Birmingham was the first Redbrick university to gain a charter and thus...

 from 1994 until 2001, when he moved to Essex as a professor.

Prof Poli has published around 240 refereed papers and two books (Langdon and Poli, 2002; Poli, Langdon, McPhee, 2008) on the theory and applications of genetic programming

Genetic programming

In artificial intelligence, genetic programming is an evolutionary algorithm-based methodology inspired by biological evolution to find computer programs that perform a user-defined task. It is a specialization of genetic algorithms where each individual is a computer program...

, evolutionary algorithms, particle swarm optimisation, biomedical engineering

Biomedical engineering

Biomedical Engineering is the application of engineering principles and design concepts to medicine and biology. This field seeks to close the gap between engineering and medicine: It combines the design and problem solving skills of engineering with medical and biological sciences to improve...

, brain-computer interfaces, neural networks

Neural Networks

Neural Networks is the official journal of the three oldest societies dedicated to research in neural networks: International Neural Network Society, European Neural Network Society and Japanese Neural Network Society, published by Elsevier...

, image analysis

Image analysis

Image analysis is the extraction of meaningful information from images; mainly from digital images by means of digital image processing techniques...

, signal processing

Signal processing

Signal processing is an area of systems engineering, electrical engineering and applied mathematics that deals with operations on or analysis of signals, in either discrete or continuous time...

, biology

Biology

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

 and psychology

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

.

He is a Fellow of the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (now ACM's SIGEVO special interest group)(2003–), a recipient of the EvoStar award for outstanding contributions to this field (2007), and an ACM

Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

 SIGEVO executive board member (2007–2013). He was co-founder and co-chair of the European Conference on GP (EuroGP) (1998–2000, 2003). He was general chair (2004), track chair (2002, 2007), business committee member (2005), and competition chair (2006) of ACM’s Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, co-chair of the Foundations of Genetic Algorithms Workshop (FOGA) (2002) and technical chair of the International Workshop on Ant Colony Optimisation and Swarm Intelligence (2006).

Prof Poli is an associate editor of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, Evolutionary Computation and the International Journal of Computational Intelligence Research. He is an advisory board member of the Journal on Artificial Evolution and Applications and an editorial board member of Swarm Intelligence.

He is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College, an EU expert evaluator and a grant-proposal referee for Irish, Swiss and Italian funding bodies.