Konstantinos Kouvaris

Position: Postgraduate Research Student
Institution: Electronics and Computer Science (FPAS)
E-mail: kk6g11@soton.ac.uk
Contact: Complete this online contact form to contact Konstantinos.

I am currently enrolled as a PhD student in the Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) for Complex Systems Simulation, under the supervision of Dr. Richard A. Watson and Dr. Markus Brede.

My educational background is in Mathematics (BSc; with a further specialisation in Computational Mathematics) and in Artificial Intelligence (MSc). My MSc dissertation, ‘Optimization of Synchronizability in Complex Networks’, focused on synchrony and spatially-optimised coupling schemes of non-identical Kuramoto oscillators.

My research interests are in complex adaptive systems; in particular, the interplay between structure and function. During the first taught year of the DTC programme, my topics of interest broadened to include social evolution and the evolution of novelty, using cooperative game theory and cognitively-inspired learning theory. My summer project, ‘The Evolution of Ontogenetic Interactions in Varying Selective Environments’, focused on how anti-overfitting techniques, commonly used in the area of neural networks (e.g., early stopping, weight decay and other forms of regularisation), can enhance evolvability.

My current research focuses on how and when fully-distributed networks of evolving entities, characterised by adaptive intra-connections and inter-connections, can give rise to emergent system-level intelligence (e.g., associative memory/recall, constraint optimisation and associative generalisation) in a decentralised manner. The aim is to utilise understanding of the underlying algorithmic principles of such systems and develop practical methods to improve the adaptive capabilities and the global efficiency of artificial complex systems, by simple distributed mechanisms of self-organisation.

My research is funded by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL).

Research Interests

Life sciences simulation: Developmental Biology, Epigenetics, Evolution, Swarm Behaviour

Socio-technological System simulation: Self Organized Networks, Social Networks, Transport

Algorithms and computational methods: Agents, Artificial Neural Networks, Cellular automata, Classification, Distributed computing, Evolutionary Algorithms, Game Theory, Graph Theory, Machine learning, Monte Carlo, Optimisation, statistical analysis

Programming languages and libraries: C, Java, Matlab, Python, R

Working with...

Markus Brede
Senior Lecturer, Electronics and Computer Science (FPAS)

Richard Watson
Senior Lecturer, Electronics and Computer Science (FPAS)