Risto Miikkulainen is VP of AI Research at the Cognizant AI Lab and a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on AI methods for decision-making, neuroevolution, generative AI, and neural network models for natural language processing and vision, and he is the author of over 500 articles in these areas. He earned an M.S. in Engineering from Helsinki University of Technology (now Aalto University) in 1986 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA in 1990.