Mark A. Bedau is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Reed, as well as Adjunct Professor of Systems Science at Portland State University, and Editor-in-Chief of the MIT Press journal Artificial Life, and he directs the artificial life laboratory at Reed. Reed is collaborating with PACE by encouraging PhD and undergraduate student exchange with PACE partners and by granting Bedau leave to concentrate on the project.
Bedau has been a pioneer in the field of quantifying and comparing the adaptive activity in different (artificial and natural) evolving systems [M. A. Bedau and C. Titus Brown. 1999. Visualizing Evolutionary Activity of Genotypes, Artificial Life 5: 17-35; M. A. Bedau, et al. 1997. A Comparison of Evolutionary Activity in Artificial Evolving Systems and the Biosphere. In P. Husbands and I. Harvey, Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL97, pp. 125-134.], and he has developed novel methods for quantifying the environment for adaptation in evolving systems [J. Fletcher, M. Zwick, M. A. Bedau. 1996. Dependence of Adaptability on Environmental Structure in a Simple Evolutionary Model. Adaptive Behavior 4: 283-315; M. A. Bedau. 2001. Dynamics of the environment for adaptation in static resource models. In J. Kelemen and P. Sosik (Eds.), Advances in Artificial Life, pp. 76-85.]. Because he combines training in analytical philosophy with over a decade of experience in artificial life, he is internationally recognized as a uniquely qualified expert in the philosophical foundations of complex adaptive systems [M. A. Bedau. 1997. Weak Emergence. Philosophical Perspectives 11, pp. 375-399; M. A. Bedau. 1997. Emergent Models of Supple Dynamics in Life and Mind. Brain and Cognition 34: 5-27]. His current work includes unifying principles of adaptation in living, intelligent, and social systems, and the social and cultural implications of synthesizing these systems [A. Skusa and M.A. Bedau. 2002. Towards a comparison of evolutionary creativity in biological and cultural evolution. In R. Standish et al., eds., Artificial Life VIII, pp. 233-242; M. A. Bedau. 2003. Objectifying values in science: A case study. In P. Machamer and G. Wolters, eds., Science, Values, and Objectivity].