Wolfgang Banzhaf

Wolfgang Banzhaf
  • John R. Koza Endowed Chair in Genetic Programming
  • Established through a gift from Dr. John R. Koza
  • Computer Science and Engineering

Bio

Wolfgang Banzhaf, John R. Koza Endowed Chair in Genetic Programming, is a world-renowned computer scientist and expert in the field of genetic programming, a technique that evolves computer programs to solve problems as they happen, such as finding and fixing bugs in software, generating new programs that control robots, or identifying financial market trends. Dr. Banzhaf is the first to hold an endowed chair in genetic programming in the United States.

A native of  Germany, Banzhaf  holds undergraduate  and advanced degrees in physics from University of Stuttgart and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, respectively, and earned a PhD in physics from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

He is one of the co-authors of “Genetic Programming: An Introduction,” a classic text in the field, as well as the sole author of “Linear Genetic Programming,” which provided a new basis to view genetic programming.

Banzhaf also served as the founding editor of the journal Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines. He currently chairs the Association for Computing Machinery’s  Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation.