Risto Miikkulainen

Risto Miikkulainen (born 16 December 1961) is a Finnish-American computer scientist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also an AVP of Evolutionary AI at Cognizant. In 2023, he was elected an AAAI Fellow "for significant contribution to neuroevolution techniques and applications", and in 2016, named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) "for contributions to techniques and applications for neural and evolutionary computation". He was elected a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2023. Born in Helsinki, Finland, Miikkulainen has lived in the United States since 1986.