Risto Miikkulainen is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and AVP of Evolutionary Intelligence at Cognizant AI Labs. He received an M.S. in Engineering from the Helsinki University of Technology (now Aalto University) in 1986, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA in 1990. His current research focuses on methods and applications of neuroevolution, evolutionary computation, machine learning, cognitive science as well as neural network models of natural language processing and vision; he is an author of over 450 articles in these research areas. In 2016, he was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for contributions to techniques and applications for neural and evolutionary computation.