Dr. Renato Ricardi Del Nero

The NERO Video Game

In the NeuroEvolving Robotic Operatives (NERO) game, the player trains a team of virtual robots for combat against other players’ teams. The virtual robots learn in real time through interacting with the player. Since NERO was originally released in June, 2005, it has been downloaded over 50,000 times, appeared on Slashdot, and won several honors. A significant update was released in November, ...

Renato Dulbecco: A Renaissance Scientist

Renato Dulbecco died on February 19, 2012, three days shy of his 98th birthday. He had a remarkable career in science that spanned over 60 years. In 1948 he published, with Salvador Luria, his first real scientific paper in Genetics on bacteriophage genetics and in 2008 published his last paper in PNAS on breast cancer tumor-initiating cells. In the intervening years, Dulbecco helped to deciphe...

Burchan Bayazit , Chair Renato Feres Volkan

OF THE DISSERTATION Connectivity Maintenance and Task Allocation for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks by Hasan Nüzhet Atay Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science Washington University in St. Louis, 2008 Research Advisor: Professor Burchan Bayazit Autonomous robot coordination has several real-world applications where effective usage of robots can provide significant increase in efficiency, red...

Supplementary notes for Math 495 Renato Feres

The NERO Real-time Video Game

In most modern video games, character behavior is scripted; no matter how many times the player exploits a weakness, that weakness is never repaired. Yet if game characters could learn through interacting with the player, behavior could improve as the game is played, keeping it interesting. This paper introduces the real-time NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (rtNEAT) method for evolving ...