Jason Yoder

I enjoy working with students on research and am happy to help advise students in areas I am either familiar with or am interested in learning more about. Broadly speaking I am interested in evolutionary and adaptive systems, especially work that involves building biologically plausible models which may offer insight into understanding natural phenomena. My greatest research focus lies within neuroevolution (evolving artificial neural networks), which I have experience combining with adding biologically plausible mechanisms. An advantage of this approach is that it allows an evolutionary process to discover solutions to problems that we, as humans, might not anticipate, which in turn can suggest new hypotheses about the mechanisms supporting adaptive behaviors. While there are a wide range of learning/training models for artificial neural networks, I am most interested in doing research involving biologically plausible learning mechanisms and models. Most recently, I have been interested in developmental models and would be very interested in pursuing research building minimal models of development for artificial neural networks, bodies, or a combination of both. If you have interest in work that falls into the above areas, feel free to send me an email (yoder1 at rose-hulman [dot] edu) explaining a bit about your own interests, and we can then set up an appointment to discuss possibilities further.