2026 Sebastian Risi: Computer Science Researcher – H-Index, Publications & Awards

Discipline name	D-Index	World Ranking	Current World Ranking	National Ranking	Current National Ranking	Publications	Citations
Computer Science	31	13669	13255	66	64	206	4094

Overview

Sebastian Risi is affiliated with the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Their research spans numerous areas within computer science, with a particular emphasis on artificial intelligence and its applications in gaming, robotics, and neural computing.

The scientist's primary fields of study include:

Computer Science

Within this main field, their work further focuses on subfields such as:

Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Mechanical Engineering
Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Computational Theory and Mathematics

Sebastian Risi's research covers a variety of topics, including but not limited to:

Artificial Intelligence in Games
Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
Cellular Automata and Applications
Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence
Video Analysis and Summarization
Advanced Memory and Neural Computing

The following are selected recent papers authored or co-authored by Sebastian Risi, highlighting the breadth and nature of their research contributions:

"Biological underpinnings for lifelong learning machines," 2022, published in Nature Machine Intelligence
"Deep learning for procedural content generation," 2020, published in Neural Computing and Applications
"Bootstrapping Conditional GANs for Video Game Level Generation," 2020, presented at the 2020 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG)
"Finding Game Levels with the Right Difficulty in a Few Trials through Intelligent Trial-and-Error," 2020, available on arXiv (Cornell University)
"MarioGPT: Open-Ended Text2Level Generation through Large Language Models," 2023, available on arXiv (Cornell University)

Sebastian Risi frequently publishes in certain academic venues where they have multiple contributions, including:

arXiv (Cornell University)
Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion
2020 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG)
KI - Künstliche Intelligenz

Collaboration is a recurring aspect of their work. Some frequent co-authors include:

Rasmus Palm
Elias Najarro
Joachim Winther Pedersen
Shyam Sudhakaran
Erwan Plantec

Best Publications

Explainable AI for Designers: A Human-Centered Perspective on Mixed-Initiative Co-Creation

Jichen Zhu;Antonios Liapis;Sebastian Risi;Rafael Bidarra

266
Citations
Evolving mario levels in the latent space of a deep convolutional generative adversarial network

Vanessa Volz;Jacob Schrum;Jialin Liu;Simon M. Lucas

266
Citations
Deep Learning for Video Game Playing

Niels Justesen;Philip Bontrager;Julian Togelius;Sebastian Risi

251
Citations
Illuminating Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning through Procedural Level Generation

Niels Justesen;Ruben Rodriguez Torrado;Philip Bontrager;Ahmed Khalifa

175
Citations
Neuroevolution in Games: State of the Art and Open Challenges

Sebastian Risi;Julian Togelius

174
Citations
Born to learn: The inspiration, progress, and future of evolved plastic artificial neural networks

Andrea Soltoggio;Kenneth O. Stanley;Sebastian Risi

141
Citations
Indirectly encoding neural plasticity as a pattern of local rules

Sebastian Risi;Kenneth O. Stanley

109
Citations
How novelty search escapes the deceptive trap of learning to learn

Sebastian Risi;Sandy D. Vanderbleek;Charles E. Hughes;Kenneth O. Stanley

106
Citations
Deep Learning for Procedural Content Generation

Jialin Liu;Sam Snodgrass;Ahmed Khalifa;Sebastian Risi

105
Citations
An enhanced hypercube-based encoding for evolving the placement, density, and connectivity of neurons

Sebastian Risi;Kenneth O. Stanley

101
Citations
Evolving plastic neural networks with novelty search

Sebastian Risi;Charles E Hughes;Kenneth O Stanley

97
Citations
Learning macromanagement in starcraft from replays using deep learning

Niels Justesen;Sebastian Risi

85
Citations
Increasing generality in machine learning through procedural content generation

Sebastian Risi;Julian Togelius

81
Citations
Combining search-based procedural content generation and social gaming in the Petalz video game

Sebastian Risi;Joel Lehman;David B. D'Ambrosio;Ryan Hall

80
Citations
Evolving policy geometry for scalable multiagent learning

David B. D'Ambrosio;Joel Lehman;Sebastian Risi;Kenneth O. Stanley

78
Citations
Deep Interactive Evolution

Philip Bontrager;Wending Lin;Julian Togelius;Sebastian Risi

72
Citations
A unified approach to evolving plasticity and neural geometry

Sebastian Risi;Kenneth O. Stanley

68
Citations
MetaCompose: A Compositional Evolutionary Music Composer

Marco Scirea;Julian Togelius;Peter Eklund;Sebastian Risi

64
Citations
Script- and cluster-based UCT for StarCraft

Niels Justesen;Balint Tillman;Julian Togelius;Sebastian Risi

61
Citations
Bootstrapping Conditional GANs for Video Game Level Generation

Ruben Rodriguez Torrado;Ahmed Khalifa;Michael Cerny Green;Niels Justesen

57
Citations
Petalz: Search-Based Procedural Content Generation for the Casual Gamer

Sebastian Risi;Joel Lehman;David B. D'Ambrosio;Ryan Hall

52
Citations
Player-AI Interaction: What Neural Network Games Reveal About AI as Play

Jichen Zhu;Jennifer Villareale;Nithesh Javvaji;Sebastian Risi

47
Citations
Creative Generation of 3D Objects with Deep Learning and Innovation Engines.

Joel Lehman;Sebastian Risi;Jeff Clune

44
Citations
Flora Robotica - Mixed Societies of Symbiotic Robot-Plant Bio-Hybrids

Heiko Hamann;Mostafa Wahby;Thomas Schmickl;Payam Zahadat

42
Citations
{ Mixed Societies of Symbiotic Robot-Plant Bio-Hybrids

Heiko Hamann;Mostafa Wahby;Thomas Schmickl;Payam Zahadat

0
Citations
GECCO ’14: Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation

C Igel;DV Arnold;C Gagne;E Popovici

0
Citations

Frequent Co-Authors

Julian Togelius New York University

Kenneth O. Stanley University of Central Florida

Joel Lehman OpenAI

Georgios N. Yannakakis University of Malta

Simon M. Lucas Queen Mary University of London

Mike Preuss Leiden University

Jeff Clune University of British Columbia

Hod Lipson Columbia University

Josh Bongard University of Vermont

Jean-Baptiste Mouret University of Lorraine

External Links

Personal website of Sebastian Risi

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