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Christof Teuscher Winner of the Cor Baayen Award 2004
Christof Teuscher from Switzerland was presented the 5,000 Euro Cor Baayen Award for his research on unconventional biologically-inspired machines during a ceremony at the ERCIM fall meetings in Malaga, Spain on 3 November 2004.
Well before getting his master's degree, Christof Teuscher participated very actively in some of his lab's research projects and published several papers. His promising graduation thesis on neural networks earned him several awards. During his PhD work at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Christof Teuscher published 47 scientific papers. Based on the very promising and excellent work proposed in his PhD as well as on the recommendation of his PhD supervisor Prof. Daniel Mange from EPFL (as member of SARIT, the Swiss Association for Researchers in Information Technologies (http://www.sarit.ch) nominated Christof Teuscher as their candidate for the 2004 Cor Baayen Award.
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In addition to his scientific research, Christof Teuscher was also exceptionally active in all kinds of other activities: for instance, he initiated and successfully organized several international workshops, such as the 5th International Workshop on Information Processing in Cells in Tissues, was publicity chair of the First International Workshop on Biologically Inspired Approaches for Advanced Information Technology. He also published a book on Turing's connectionist ideas and edited an impressive definitive collection of commemorative essays on Alan Turing's life and legacy.
His main research interests are mostly related to biologically inspired computation and machines, and cover a wide variety of interdisciplinary research topics like emergence, complexity, artificial intelligence, information theory, novel hardware and reconfigurable architectures, smart and ubiquitous computation and computational modelling of cognitive phenomena. The gradual process of developing and self-generating lifelike artefacts by which complex adaptive behaviours emerge from the interaction of simple processing elements was a central piece of his PhD work. In his thesis he also investigated inventive approaches which materialized within the 'Biowall' (http://lslwww.epfl.ch/biowall).
Christof Teuscher is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Department of Cognitive Science, and with this award, ERCIM acknowledges the excellence of his scientific achievements and wishes him a very successful scientific career at the borders of technical and life sciences.
See also his article 'The Quest for Novel Computational Paradigms and Machines' in this issue.