Elias Najarro

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I'm a Ph.D. fellow at the Creative AI Lab, IT University of Copenhagen; advised by Sebastian Risi. My background is in physics and computational neuroscience.
I'm currently working on applying ideas from Self-Organization and Bio-Inspired systems to machine learning. Particularly, how they can be utilised for Meta-Learning, Open-Endedness and scientific applications.

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.

My interests are broad and I'm always keen on collaborating with other researchers
—notably if from a different discipline. If you have an idea for a potential collaboration you'd like to discuss, feel free to reach out.

Publications

    2023

  1. MarioGPT: Open-Ended Text2Level Generation through Large Language Models
    S Sudhakaran, M González-Duque, C Glanois, M Freiberger, E Najarro, S Risi
    Pre-print
    Open access paper Twitter thread Code Press coverage

    2. 2022

  2. Disentangling Dimensions of Animacy in Human Brain and Behaviour
    Kamila M Jozwik, Elias Najarro, JF van den Bosch, Ian Charest, Radoslaw M Cichy, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
    Peer-reviewed paper Cognitive Neuroscience Communications Biology
    Open access paper Twitter thread
  3. HyperNCA: Growing Developmental Networks with Neural Cellular Automata
    Elias Najarro, Shyam Sudhakaran, Claire Glanois, Sebastian Risi
    Peer-reviewed paper RL Self-organization ICLR From Cells to Societies Workshop, 2022
    Open access paper Talk Code Twitter thread
  4. Goal-Guided Neural Cellular Automata: Learning to Control Self-Organising Systems
    Shyam Sudhakaran, Elias Najarro, Sebastian Risi
    Peer-reviewed paper RL Self-organization ICLR From Cells to Societies Workshop, 2022
    Open access paper Talk Code Twitter thread
  5. A Unified Substrate for Body-Brain Co-evolution
    Sidney Pontes-Filho, Kathryn Walker, Elias Najarro, Stefano Nichele, Sebastian Risi
    Peer-reviewed paper Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, GECCO Companion 2022
    Open access paper Talk Code Twitter thread

    6. 2021

  6. Growing 3D Artefacts and Functional Machines with Neural Cellular Automata
    Shyam Sudhakaran, Djordje Grbic, Siyan Li, Adam Katona, Elias Najarro, Claire Glanois, Sebastian Risi
    Peer-reviewed paper Self-organization Artificial Life Conference Proceedings, 2021
    Open access paper Twitter thread Talk Code Press coverage
  7. EvoCraft: A New Challenge for Open-Endedness
    Djordje Grbic, Rasmus B Palm, Elias Najarro, Claire Glanois, Sebastian Risi
    Peer-reviewed paper Applications of Evolutionary Computation — EvoStar, 2021
    Open access paper Code
  8. 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

    9. 2020

  9. Meta-learning Through Hebbian Plasticity in Random Networks
    Elias Najarro, Sebastian Risi
    Peer-reviewed paper RL NeurIPS, 2020
    Open access paper Video summary Twitter thread Code Press coverage
  10. Testing the Genomic Bottleneck Hypothesis in Hebbian Meta-Learning
    Rasmus B Palm, Elias Najarro, Sebastian Risi
    Peer-reviewed paper RL Pre-registration workshop NeurIPS, 2020
    Open access paper Talk Code