His interests include computational intelligence in games, neuroevolution, deep learning, evolutionary robotics and human computation. Risi completed his PhD in computer science from the University of Central Florida. He has won several best paper awards at GECCO, EvoMusArt, IJCNN, and the Continual Learning Workshop at NIPS for his work on adaptive systems, the HyperNEAT algorithm for evolving complex artificial neural networks, and music generation. He was a co-founder of FinchBeak, a company that focused on casual social games enabled by AI technology and is a research consultant for Uber AI labs. Recently he co-founded modl.ai, a company that develops AIs that decide and respond like humans in a wide range of specific situations.