Information
Current Position
I am a Research and Tutorial Fellow with the Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems Group at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics (CCNR), an interdisciplinary lab that is associated with both the informatics and biology departments at the University of Sussex.
I teach the MSc level course Artificial Life and the Level-2 course Acquired Intelligence and Adaptive Behaviour.
Research Interests
Aritificial autonomy, cybernetics, complex systems, theoretical biology, computational modelling, synthetic biology, protocells, evolution and the origins of life, cell-organization and metabolism, artificial chemistries, cognitive science, adaptive behaviour, philosophy of biology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science.
DPhil Thesis
In my thesis, I explored the relationship between metabolism, adaptive behaviour and evolution. The metabolic organisation of self-production has been proposed by many to be a fundamental property of life. In my DPhil thesis, I use computational models of protcells, bacteria and artificial chemistries to explore what autopoietic (self-producing) systems are capable of that allopoietic systems (such as conventional robots) are not.
The work connects with empirical work on metabolism-based chemotaxis, providing a new explanation for previously unexplained asymmetric distributions of bacteria. It also has led to our work on 'Behavioural Metabolution', an synergistic interaction between metabolism, behaviour and evolution that can scaffold or facilitate adaptive evolution through a variety of effects.
Contact
Dr Matthew D. Egbert
Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems Group,
Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics,
University of Sussex,
Falmer, BN1 9QJ, UK
email: mde@matthewegbert.com
Mobile Phone: +44 (0)7794-319-429
Office Phone: +44 (0)1273 67 8431