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
The State University of New York at Binghamton (Binghamton University or SUNY Binghamton) is a public research university with campuses in Binghamton, Vestal, and Johnson City, New York. It is one of the four university centers in the Stat ...
(
State University of New York
The State University of New York (SUNY, , ) is a system of public colleges and universities in the State of New York. It is one of the largest comprehensive system of universities, colleges, and community colleges in the United States. Led by ...
). He has been director of the NSF-NRT Complex Networks and Systems graduate Program in Informatics at
Indiana University, Bloomington
Indiana University Bloomington (IU Bloomington, Indiana University, IU, or simply Indiana) is a public research university in Bloomington, Indiana. It is the flagship campus of Indiana University and, with over 40,000 students, its largest campu ...
, USA. He is also director of the Center for Social and Biomedical Complexity, between Binghamton University and Indiana University, Bloomington, a
Fulbright Scholar
The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people o ...
, and Principal Investigator at the
Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia, Portugal. His research is on complex systems and networks,
[A.J. Gates, R.B. Correia, X. Wang, L.M. Rocha.]
The effective graph reveals redundancy, canalization, and control pathways in biochemical regulation and signaling
''PNAS'', 118(12): e2022598118. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0055946. 2013[T. Simas, R.B. Correia, and L.M. Rocha.]
The distance backbone of complex networks
" ''Journal of Complex Networks'', 9 (6): cnab021, DOI:10.1093/comnet/cnab021, 2021[A. Kolchinsky, M. P. Van Den Heuvel, A. Griffa, P. Hagmann, L.M. Rocha, O. Sporns, J. Goni.]
Multi-scale Integration and Predictability in Resting State Brain Activity
. ''Frontiers in Neuroinformatics'', 8:66. doi: 10.3389/fninf.2014.00066, 2014[Gates, A. and L.M. Rocha.]
Control of complex networks requires both structure and dynamics
. ''Scientific Reports.'', 6:24456. doi: 10.1038/srep244564, 2016 computational and systems biology,
[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[A. Kolchinsky, A. Lourenço, H. Wu, L. Li, L.M. Rocha.]
Extraction of Pharmacokinetic Evidence of Drug-drug Interactions from the literature
PLoS ONE 10(5): e0122199. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0122199. 2015.[A. Lourenco, M. Conover, A. Wong, A. Nematzadeh, F. Pan, H. Shatkay, and L.M. Rocha]
A Linear Classifier Based on Entity Recognition Tools and a Statistical Approach to Method Extraction in the Protein-Protein Interaction Literature
"BMC Bioinformatics.12(Suppl 8):S12." 2011[A. Abi-Haidar, J. Kaur, A. Maguitman, P. Radivojac, A. Retchsteiner, K. Verspoor, Z. Wang, and L.M. Rocha,]
Uncovering protein interaction in abstracts and text using a novel linear model and word proximity networks
"Genome Biology. 9(Suppl 2):S11" 2008 biomedical complexity and digital health,
[R.B. Correia, L. Li, L.M. Rocha]
Monitoring potential drug interactions and reactions via network analysis of Instagram user timelines
. ''Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing.'', 21:492-503. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2022598118, 2021[I.B Wood, P.L. Varela, J. Bollen, L.M. Rocha, J. Gonçalves-Sá]
Human Sexual Cycles are Driven by Culture and Match Collective Moods
. ''Scientific Reports.'', 7:17973. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-18262-5, 2017[R.B. Correia, I.B Wood, J. Bollen, L.M. Rocha]
Mining social media data for biomedical signals and health-related behavior
. ''Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science.'', 3(1): 433-458. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-biodatasci-030320-040844, 2020.[R.B. Correia, L.P. de Araújo, M.M. Mattos, L.M. Rocha ]
City-wide Analysis of Electronic Health Records Reveals Gender and Age Biases in the Administration of Known Drug-Drug Interactions
. ''npj Digital Medicine.'', 2: 74. DOI: 10.1038/s41746-019-0141-x, 2029. and computational intelligence (including Artificial Life and Embodied Cognition).
[L.M. Rocha. and W. Hordijk]
Material Representations: From the Genetic Code to the Evolution of Cellular Automata
"Artificial Life. 11 (1-2), pp. 189 - 214" 2005[L.M. Rocha]
Evolution with material symbol systems
"Biosystems. Vol. 60, pp. 95-121." 2001[L.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[L.M. Rocha]
Adaptive Recommendation and Open-Ended Semiosis
"Kybernetes. Vol. 30, No. 5-6." 2001[C. Huang, J. Kaur, A. Maguitman, L.M. Rocha]
Agent-Based Model of Genotype Editing
"Evolutionary Computation, 15(3): 253-89." 2007[L.M. Rocha]
Evidence Sets: Modeling Subjective Categories.
"In: International Journal of General Systems. Vol. 27, pp. 457-494." 1997[A. Abi-Haidar and L.M. Rocha.]
Collective Classification of Textual Documents by Guided Self-Organization in T-Cell Cross-Regulation Dynamics
. ''Evolutionary Intelligence''. 4(2):69-80, 2011
Biography
He was born in
Luanda
Luanda () is the capital and largest city in Angola. It is Angola's primary port, and its major industrial, cultural and urban centre. Located on Angola's northern Atlantic coast, Luanda is Angola's administrative centre, its chief seapo ...
,
Angola
, national_anthem = "Angola Avante"()
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, capital = Luanda
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, religion_year = 2020
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, moving to
Lisbon
Lisbon (; pt, Lisboa ) is the capital and largest city of Portugal, with an estimated population of 544,851 within its administrative limits in an area of 100.05 km2. Lisbon's urban area extends beyond the city's administrative limits w ...
,
Portugal
Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of th ...
in his teens and completing an Licentiate (B.A. plus M.S.) in Mechanical and Systems Engineering at the
Instituto Superior Técnico
Instituto Superior Técnico MHSE • MHIP (IST, also known colloquially as Técnico, and stylized TÉCNICO LISBOA) is a public school of engineering and technology, part of University of Lisbon. It was founded as an autonomous school in 1911 ...
. He received his Ph.D in Systems Science in 1997 from the
Binghamton University
The State University of New York at Binghamton (Binghamton University or SUNY Binghamton) is a public research university with campuses in Binghamton, Vestal, and Johnson City, New York. It is one of the four university centers in the Stat ...
. From 1998 to 2004 he was a staff scientist at the
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...
, where he founded and led a Complex Systems Modeling Team during 1998-2002, and was part of the
Santa Fe Institute
The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, inclu ...
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
Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana.
Campuses
Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI.
*Indiana Universi ...
, 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)
[L.M. Rocha (Editor), L. S. Yaeger (Editor), M. A. Bedau (Editor), D. Floreano (Editor), R. L. Goldstone (Editor), A. Vespignani (Editor)]
"Artificial Life X: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (Bradford Books)."
2006 and the Ninth European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2007).
[F. Almeida e Costa ]
"Advances in Artificial Life: 9th European Conference, ECAL 2007, Lisbon, Portugal, September 10–14, 2007, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in Computer Science / Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence)."
2007
Research
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
A complex system is a system composed of many components which may interact with each other. Examples of complex systems are Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, infrastructure such as power grid, transportation or communication sy ...
,
as well as abstracting principles from natural systems to produce adaptive information technology.
Accepting
Von Neumann's principle of self-replication and
Turing's universal computation as a general principle for generating open-ended complexity that encompasses
Natural Selection
Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Cha ...
, Dr. Rocha has developed the work of
Howard Pattee,
[Rocha, Luis M. (Ed.]
''The Physics and Evolution of Symbols and Codes: Reflections on the Work of Howard Pattee''
. ''BioSystems'' 60 (1-3), 2001. Sydney Brenner
Sydney Brenner (13 January 1927 – 5 April 2019) was a South African biologist. In 2002, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with H. Robert Horvitz and Sir John E. Sulston. Brenner made significant contributions to work ...
,
[Brenner, Sydney. "Turing centenary: Life’s code script." ''Nature'' 482 (7386) (February 22): 461-461, 2012.] and others who regard computation and information as fundamental to understanding life, cognition and other complex systems (
a good overview is Gleick's Book). From this viewpoint, he has approached several questions: how do cells and collectives of cells compute?
Is language an evolutionary system operating under the same principle?
Can artificial systems implement the same principle?
Namely, can collective intelligence on the web become a super-organism implementing this principle?
[Rocha, 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][G.L. Ciampaglia, P. Shiralkar, L.M. Rocha, J. Bollen, F. Menczer, A. Flammin]
Computational fact checking from knowledge networks.
''PLoS One''. 10(6): e0128193. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0128193, 2015. From these questions, he has worked on various specific research projects ranging from
Biomedical Literature Mining and
Social Media Mining to understanding redundancy, robustness, modularity and control in
Complex Networks
Complex Networks is an American media and entertainment company for youth culture, based in New York City. It was founded as a bi-monthly magazine, ''Complex'', by fashion designer Marc (Ecko) Milecofsky. Complex Networks reports on popular ...
,
Collective Intelligence
Collective intelligence (CI) is shared or group intelligence (GI) that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. The term appears in sociobiology, politi ...
on the Web and in Social Systems,
and
Agent-based models
An agent-based model (ABM) is a computational models, computational model for computer simulation, simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous agents (both individual or collective entities such as organizations or groups) in order to un ...
of Evolutionary Systems such as
RNA Editing and
Artificial Immune System In artificial intelligence, artificial immune systems (AIS) are a class of computationally intelligent, rule-based machine learning systems inspired by the principles and processes of the vertebrate immune system. The algorithms are typically mode ...
s.
Philosophical views
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
[Pattee, H.H]
"The Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiotics."
''Journal of Biosemiotics''. 1:281-301, 2005. and is generally understood to fit in the area of
biosemiotics
Biosemiotics (from the Greek βίος ''bios'', "life" and σημειωτικός ''sēmeiōtikos'', "observant of signs") is a field of semiotics and biology that studies the prelinguistic meaning-making, biological interpretation processes, p ...
. 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.
[ Clark, A.br>Natural-Born Cyborgs:Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence.]
Oxford University Press, 2003.[ Stark, D.br>The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life.]
Princeton University Press, 2011. In addition to scientific work often mentioned in the media, he regularly publishes opinion articles in the popular media to disseminate scientific thinking.
[Luis M. Rocha in the News and Media](_blank)
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References
External links
Prof. Rocha profile in Google Scholar, including list of publications
Prof. Rocha page at Indiana University
NSF-NRT Interdisciplinary Training in Complex Networks and Systems
Indiana University, Bloomington
Indiana University Network Institute
Cognitive Science at Indiana University
Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia, Portugal
Prof. Rocha research group at the Gulbenkian Science Institute in Portugal
Computational Biology PhD Program at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia, Portugal
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Santa Fe Institute
Semiotic Closure
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rocha, Luis M.
Living people
Portuguese scientists
American computer scientists
Portuguese computer scientists
American people of Portuguese descent
Indiana University faculty
Binghamton University alumni
1966 births
Researchers of artificial life