Elias Najarro

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I'm a 3rd year Ph.D. fellow at the Robotics, Evolution & Artificial Life Laboratory, IT University of Copenhagen; advised by Sebastian Risi.

I work on self-organisation and AI. I explore how ideas from collective intelligence and complex systems can inform machine learning models, and in turn, how these models can be used to understand the complex systems that inspired them. Specifically, I'm interested in self-organisation as an approach to design open-ended systems, and in using self-organising AI models to understand and control emergent systems. How do individual elements of a system (cells/humans/AI agents) self-assemble into complex patterns following algorithmic rules? How does goal-directed behaviour propagate across scales? Can AI model multi-scale systems in an interpretable way?

Besides, I am Eurodoc's Open Science working group coordinator; we discuss and promote all things open-science: open-source, open-data, open-access, and open-peer-review. And I organise science communication events in the form of science slams where academics & artists come together to interact and share their work with each other and the public.

Previously, I wrote my MSc thesis on computational neuroscience at BergLab, Dept. of Neuroscience, University of Copenhagen. I hold an BSc degree in Physics from Sorbonne University and a Master in Computational Physics from the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI), University of Copenhagen.

Publications

    2025

  1. E Najarro, N Bessone, S Risi
    Self-Organisation Preprint. Under review.

  2. 2024

  3. E Nisioti, C Glanois, E Najarro, A Dai, E Meyerson, J Pedersen, L Teodorescu, Conor F. Hayes, S Sudhakaran, S Risi
    Collective intelligence LLM Artificial Life Conference Proceedings, 2024
  4. Beck Strohmer, Elias Najarro, Jessica Ausborn, Rune W. Berg, Silvia Tolu
    Computational Neuroscience Neural Computation 36, 759. 2024

  5. 2023

  6. Elias Najarro, Shyam Sudhakaran, Sebastian Risi
    Self-organization Development Artificial Life Conference Proceedings, 2023
  7. S Sudhakaran, M González-Duque, C Glanois, M Freiberger, E Najarro, S Risi
    LLM NeurIPS, 2023

  8. 2022

  9. Kamila M Jozwik, Elias Najarro, JF van den Bosch, Ian Charest, Radoslaw M Cichy, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
    Cognitive Neuroscience Communications Biology
  10. Elias Najarro, Shyam Sudhakaran, Claire Glanois, Sebastian Risi
    RL Self-organization ICLR From Cells to Societies Workshop, 2022
  11. Shyam Sudhakaran, Elias Najarro, Sebastian Risi
    RL Self-organization ICLR From Cells to Societies Workshop, 2022
  12. Sidney Pontes-Filho, Kathryn Walker, Elias Najarro, Stefano Nichele, Sebastian Risi
    Neuroevolution Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, GECCO Companion 2022

  13. 2021

  14. Shyam Sudhakaran, Djordje Grbic, Siyan Li, Adam Katona, Elias Najarro, Claire Glanois, Sebastian Risi
    Self-organization Development Artificial Life Conference Proceedings, 2021
  15. Djordje Grbic, Rasmus B Palm, Elias Najarro, Claire Glanois, Sebastian Risi
    Open-endedness Applications of Evolutionary Computation — EvoStar, 2021
  16. Machine-learning Methods Applied to Inverse Problems in Motor Neuronal Networks
    Elias Najarro. Supervised by James Avery & Rune Berg
    MSc Thesis Computational Neuroscience University of Copenhagen, 2021

  17. 2020

  18. Elias Najarro, Sebastian Risi
    RL NeurIPS, 2020
  19. Rasmus B Palm, Elias Najarro, Sebastian Risi
    RL Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 148:100-110, 2021.