Rate My Professor Sean Luke

Sean Luke is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University, where he has been teaching since 2000. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park. Currently, he serves as Associate Director of the Center for Social Complexity at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study and heads both the Autonomous Robotics Laboratory and the Evolutionary Computation Laboratory (ECLab) at George Mason University. His research specializations encompass stochastic optimization and metaheuristics, evolutionary computation, multi-agent systems and multi-agent learning, autonomous robotics and robot swarms, and simulation development. Luke has secured funding from the National Science Foundation, including grants for projects such as NRI: Small: Online Training of Hierarchical Multirobot Teams (2013-2016), NSF Supplement Request for Cooperative Coevolutionary Design and Multiagent Systems (2013-2014), and CI-P: Workshop on Enhancing a Large-scale Multiagent Simulation Tool (2012-2013).

Luke is the author of the book Essentials of Metaheuristics (2009), an open-access resource on optimization algorithms. He has developed influential open-source software packages widely adopted in academia, including the MASON multi-agent simulation environment and the ECJ evolutionary computation toolkit. Key publications include "Cooperative multi-agent learning: The state of the art" with Liviu Panait (2005, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems), "MASON: A multiagent simulation environment" with Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, Liviu Panait, Keith Sullivan, and Gabriel Balan (2005, Simulation), "MASON: A new multi-agent simulation toolkit" (2004, SwarmFest Workshop), "Ontology-based web agents" with Lee Spector, David Rager, and James Hendler (1997, Autonomous Agents Conference), "Genetic programming needs better benchmarks" with James McDermott and others (2012, GECCO), "SHOE: A knowledge representation language for internet applications" with Jeff Heflin and James Hendler (1999), "Lexicographic parsimony pressure" with Liviu Panait (2002, GECCO), and "A comparison of bloat control methods for genetic programming" with Liviu Panait (2006, Evolutionary Computation). These works have significantly influenced research in artificial intelligence, robotics, and computational modeling through their theoretical contributions and practical tools.