Dr.Thorsten Schnier has been a Research Fellow with the University of Birmingham from 1999, and joined Cercia at its inception in January 2003. Before coming to Birmingham, Dr Schnier read Electrical Engineering (BSc, MSc) at the University of Hannover and Computer Science (PhD) at the University of Sydney. His Ph.D research at the Key Centre for Design Computing involved work on Computational Creativity, Evolutionary Design, and particularly the role of representations. Following his PhD he worked as a lecturer at the Key Centre, and was also involved in online teaching, 'virtual classrooms' and an online conference on Design Computing on the Net.
He is Principle Investigator of the 'Nature Inspired Creative Design' network, an AHRC/EPSRC sponsored 'Designing for the 21st Century' initiative. He is also chair of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society task force on 'Esthetics, Entertainment and Education'.
Thorsten is working in a number of areas, combining his Evolutionary Computation, Design, and Electrical Engineering backgrounds. In the 'evolvable hardware' area, he is working on evolving fault tolerant circuits. Design related work involves evolutionary and other nature inspired methods in design, from industrial design optimization, to creative design and mass customization.
Thorsten Schnier's personal home page
