Former Staff
Martina Szopek
Martina Szopek was a postdoctoral researcher and project manager in HIVEOPOLIS. She did her PhD within the frameworks of the EU-funded projects ASSISIbf and HIVEOPOLIS, researching the modulation of behaviour in honeybees. The main emphasis of her work was on the investigation of swarm-intelligent behaviour in honeybees, mainly collective decision making and emerging group-level behaviours, and the influence of various physical stimuli on the bees‘ collective behaviour.
Michael Vogrin
Michael Vogrin was researching social systems in biology and psychology using agent-based models. He focused on modern forms of mating behavior in humans (dating apps) and research on opinion forming and the confirmation bias.
Stefan Schönwetter-Fuchs-Schistek
Stefan Schönwetter-Fuchs-Schistek was working as a technical assistant at the Artificial Life Laboratory.
Dajana Lazic
Dajana Lazic was conducting her Master’s Thesis in modelling the foraging behavior of honeybees and researching the effect of waggle dancing robots.
Sarah Schönwetter-Fuchs
Sarah Schönwetter-Fuchs was working on her Master thesis on temperature related behavior of honeybees at the Artificial Life Laboratory.
Matthias Becher
Matthias Becher was a PostDoc in HIVEOPOLIS, working on honeybee models.
Martin Kärcher
Martin Kärcher was the Community Manager in HIVEOPOLIS.
In the past, his key interests have been particular fields of research in social evolution, such as caste fate or worker policing, nestmate recognition, and other fields of research in the behavioural ecology of honey bees and stingless bees, respectively.
Payam Zahadat
Payam Zahadat received her Master and PhD degrees in Artificial Intelligence (Computer Science and Engineering) from Shiraz University, Iran in 2005 and 2011 respectively. For a duration of one year (2009-2010) during her PhD, she worked as a research assistant at the Modular Robotics Lab, the Maersk McKinney Moller Institute, University of Southern Denmark. She had a postdoc position at the Artificial Life Lab of the Department of Zoology, University of Graz since 2011, and for half a year (2018-2019) at the IT University of Copenhagen. Currently she is a university assistant (officially translated and loosely equivalent to assistant professor) in the University of Graz. During the last years, she has worked in the EU-funded projects florarobotica, ASSISIbf, CoCoRo, SYMBRION and REPLICATOR. Her research interests include both theoretical studies and applications in the field of swarm/multi-modular robotics and systems, self-organization, evolutionary algorithms and evolutionary robotics, and gene regulatory networks.
Bianca Pichler-Thier
Bianca Pichler-Thier earned her bachelor degree in Zoology in 2006. She was employed as Project Assistant at the Artificial Life and also provided the honeybees for the experiments in the lab.
Joshua Cherian Varughese
He worked as a PhD student on the project SubCULTron. His field of research is bio inspired swarm robotics, swarm intelligence, multi agent systems etc. He is an Electrical Engineer (B.Tech Hons.) from National Institute of Technology Jamshedpur. After having worked with painting robots at Maruti Suzuki India Limited, he did his masters from National University of Singapore (NUS) in Mechatronics.
Sibylle Hahshold
Sibylle Hahshold was a PhD-student, EU project manager and member of the scientific staff of the Artificial Life Lab. She finished her master in Biology in 2008 at the Departement of Zoology, University of Graz, Austria. She was researcher in the FWF funded project: "Temperature-induced aggregation of young honeybees: Individual behaviour vs. collective behaviour, and project manager and researcher in the EU-FP7 project "CoCoRo" and the EU-FP7 project "ASSISIbf". Her main research interests are collective behaviour and decision making in honeybees.
Michael Bodi
Michael Bodi received his masters degree in Zoology from the University of Graz in 2012. He worked on his master thesis within the framework of the EU-Project CoCoRo and conducted research in the EU-project ASSISIbf. The main emphasis of his work is on the investigation of Bio-inspired aggregation and decision-making systems.
Ziad Salem
Ziad Salem was employed as a Post-Doc researcher in the ASSISIbf Project. He received his PhD degrees in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratories, from the Systems Engineering division, Cardiff School of Engineering, Cardiff, University Cardiff, UK in 2002. During his PhD, he worked as a systems manager at the Manufacturing Engineering Centre at Cardiff University. He worked as an Associate Professor at the Aleppo University, Electrical and Electronic Engineering Faculty, Computer Engineering Department. He also worked as Associate Professor at the American university of Nigeria, computer Science department. He participated in a number of European projects such as Tempus and Erasmus. His research interests include machine learning, data mining, rules induction, evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence, information technology.
Hannes Hornischer
He received my masters degree in Physics form the Georg-August Universität in Göttingen, Germany in 2016. In his master thesis he worked on "Causal Entropic Forces: Intelligent Behaviour, Dynamics and Pattern Formation" at the Max-Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization where he investigated fundamental mechanisms underlying cognitive intelligent behavior.
He did his PhD at the Institute of Systems Sciences, Innovation and Sustainability Research in Graz and worked as a member of the project subCULTron. His academic focus is on both understanding and inducing self organization in social systems and swarms.
Nikolaus Sabathiel
He is a theoretical physicist, interested in biophysics, swarm behaviour, nonlinear dynamics and complex systems. He obtained his MSc degree in Theoretical Physics at Graz University in 2014. From January 2015 to June 2016 he was working as a scientific employee in the field of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) in g.tec medical engineering GmbH.
Daniel E. Moser
Artificial Life Laboratory
Jan Wille
In 2017 he finished his bachelor’s degree in biology at the University of Bielefeld. Currently he is studying his master in ‘Verhaltensphysiologie’ (behavioural physiology) at the University of Graz. His work in the Artificial Life Laboratory was about a modelling approach of a paper wasp population, in collaboration with Istvan Karsai.
Lukas Hanna
He studies environmental system sciences with focus on economics (USW VWL) at the University of Graz. He finished his bachelor degree in 2014 and was working on his master thesis at the artificial life lab with the topic of slime mold computing.
Jürgen Stradner
Jürgen Stradner had a PostDoc position in the projects SYMBRION and REPLICATOR. As his PhD was in the field of biology his scientific background is related with neurobiology, theoretical biology and evolution. His research and interests deal with Artificial Life in the broadest sense. There is evolution, ecology, neurobiology, neuroethology, sensory ecology and ecological evolution on the one - the biological - side. On the other side - the mathematical, interdisciplinary one - there is evolutionary robotics, evolutionary algorithms, artificial neural networks, self-organization, theoretical biology and modelling.
Heiko Hamann
Heiko Hamann received a Master’s degree in computer science from the University of Stuttgart, Germany in 2006 and a PhD in engineering (robotics) from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany in 2008. He was a PostDoc at the Artificial Life Lab Graz of the Department of Zoology, University of Graz between 2009 and 2012 working in the projects SYMBRION and REPLICATOR funded by the European Union. Now he is with the Department of Computer Science, University of Paderborn, Germany. (see also heikohamann.de)
Olga Kernbach
Olga Kernbach was a PostDoc researcher in the ASSISIbf project funded by the European Comission. In 2011 she received a PhD degree in computer science (robotics) at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. She was involved into former projects, such as SFB467 (German DFG), TFB059 (German DFG), I-SWARM (EU), Golem (EU) and REPLICATOR/SYMBRION (EU). Her main research interest is collective robotics, self-organization in artificial collective systems, collective behaviour and decision making in robotic swarms.
Christoph Möslinger
Christoph Möslingers work at the Artificial Life Lab comprised simulations and experiments with robotic swarms. He joined the Artificial Life Lab in 2005 as an internship of his study course at the University of Applied Sciences in St. Pölten, Austria. Since then he has co-authored several papers concerning simulations and experiments with swarm robots and also helped to construct, maintain and demonstrate a real robotic swarm. His research focuses on swarming behaviour, distributed sensor networks and communication-less algorithms for small and simple swarm robots. Withing the framework of the EU-project CoCoRo he developed a communication-less flocking algorithm to be used in autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs).
Daniela Kengyel
In 2005 Daniela Kengyel started at the University of Applied Sciences in St. Pölten, Austria, as a student in the field of computer simulations. She joined the Artificial Life Lab in 2008 to work for her diploma thesis in the project Thermobots . After finishing the diploma thesis in 2009, she continued to work in the field of swarm robotics and on AUV-simulations for the project CoCoRo with NetLogo-3D and worked on her PhD-thesis in the project REBODIMENT .
Thomas Kunzfeld
Thomas Kunzfeld is a student of Telematics (or "Information and Computer Engineering") at the university of technology in Graz. Before that and during his first few semesters he had multiple internships at the Artificial Life Lab until he started a steady employment there. He worked mostly with the e-Puck robots in the REBODIMENT project and developed hardware as well as software for this project.
Yannick Oswald
Yannick worked as a research assistant on the publication "Ultimate Ecology: How a Socio-Economic Game Can Evolve Into a Resilient Ecosystem of Agents". The project was about explaining the emergence of cooperation in evolutionary and life-like populations. Generally, Yannick’s research interests are the emergence of social patterns, transitions, and quantitative and computational social science. (see also yannickoswald.de)
Eva Julia Bauer
Eva Julia Bauer worked on her Bachelor Thesis which concentrated on the evolution of complex behaviour in an multi-agent system that she created with Netlogo.
Ina Höfernig
Ina Höfernig was employed as Project Assistant at the Artificial Life Lab and supported the team in administrative affairs.
Markus Dauschan
After finishing his Bachelor study "Computational Sciences" he started an interdisciplinary and individual Master Study "Computational Life Sciences". His Bachelor Thesis concentrated on an implementation of a genome based virtual embryogenesis system. He was working on the extension of this system (evolutionary computation, parameter analysis) and its application to virtual and real swarm robots provided by the SYMBRION and REPLICATOR EU projects.
Ralf Mayet
His work in the Artificial Life Lab mainly included designing algorithms, extensions and experiments for the ePuck educational robot and other robotic platforms. In addition he was responsible for the website and communication infrastructure of the CoCoRo project. Web: http://www.ralfmayet.net