Luis M. Rocha is the George J. Klir Professor of Systems Science at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science, Binghamton University (State University of New York). He has been director of the NSF-NRT Complex Networks and Systems graduate Program in Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He is also director of the Center for Social and Biomedical Complexity, between Binghamton University and Indiana University, Bloomington, a Fulbright Scholar, and Principal Investigator at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia, Portugal. His research is on complex systems and networks,[1][2][3][4] computational and systems biology,[1][5][6][7][8] biomedical complexity and digital health,[9][10][11][12] and computational intelligence (including Artificial Life and Embodied Cognition).[13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]
He was born in Luanda, Angola, moving to Lisbon, Portugal in his teens and completing an Licentiate (B.A. plus M.S.) in Mechanical and Systems Engineering at the Instituto Superior Técnico. He received his Ph.D in Systems Science in 1997 from the Binghamton University. From 1998 to 2004 he was a staff scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he founded and led a Complex Systems Modeling Team during 1998-2002, and was part of the Santa Fe Institute research community. He has been the director of the NSF-NRT Interdisciplinary Training Program in Complex Networks and Systems, and Professor of Informatics in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University, where he was a member of the advisory council of the Indiana University Network Science Institute, and core faculty of the Cognitive Science Program. From 2005 to 2015 he was the director of the Computational Biology Collaboratorium and in the Direction of the PhD program in Computational Biology at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia, where he remains a Principal Investigator. He has organized the Tenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (Alife X)[22] and the Ninth European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2007).[23]
Dr. Rocha studies the systems properties of natural and artificial systems which enable them to adapt and evolve. He has approached this general topic by investigating how information and redundancy are fundamental for controlling the behavior and evolutionary capabilities of complex systems,[1][15][16][17] as well as abstracting principles from natural systems to produce adaptive information technology.[18][19][21]
Rocha is a proponent of embodied and situated cognition and has defended the grounded epistemological stance of evolutionary constructivism. He is a proponent of the view that the threshold of complexity required for open-ended evolution requires an interplay between symbolic memory and dynamical machinery, i.e. a strict genotype-phenotype separation. This idea has been labeled semiotic closure[28] and is generally understood to fit in the area of biosemiotics. He has defended that this principle of organization is at play in cognition and human collective behavior, having developed web technology to implement the principle.[13][14][2][15][18] In addition to scientific work often mentioned in the media, he regularly publishes opinion articles in the popular media to disseminate scientific thinking.[29]
^M.E. Wall, A. Rechtesteiner, and L. M. Rocha, Singular Value Decomposition and Principal Component Analysis "A Practical Approach to Microarray Data Analysis". D. P. Berrar, W. Dubitzky, and M. Granzow (Eds.). Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 91-109. 2003
^ abcL.M. Rocha, Selected Self-Organization and the Semiotics of Evolutionary Systems. "In: Evolutionary Systems: Biological and Epistemological Perspectives on Selection and Self-Organization." S. Salthe, G. Van de Vijver, and M. Delpos (eds.). Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 341-358. 1998
^ abRocha, Luis M. and Johan Bollen. "Biologically Motivated Distributed Designs for Adaptive Knowledge Management". In: Design Principles for the Immune System and other Distributed Autonomous Systems. L. Segel and I. Cohen (Eds.) Santa Fe Institute Series in the Sciences of Complexity. Oxford University Press, pp. 305-334, 2001
