Stephanie Forrest

About

Stephanie Forrest is a Professor at Arizona State University, directing the Biodesign Center for Biocomputation, Security and Society within the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence. Her research focuses on the biology of computation and the computation of biology, including computational immunology, computer security, automated software repair, evolutionary computation, and biological modeling.

Research topics

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Communication
• Psychology
• Data science
• Social psychology
• Cognitive science
• Biology
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution: A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities

  Artificial Life · 2020 · 177 citations

  process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution can provide examples of how their evolving algorithms and organisms have creatively subverted their expectations or intentions, exposed unrecognized bugs in their code, produced unexpectedly adaptations, or engaged in behaviors and outcomes, uncannily convergent with ones found in nature. Such stories routinely reveal surprise and creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, b…

  DOI

• Challenges in cybersecurity: Lessons from biological defense systems

  Mathematical Biosciences · 2023-06-01 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access

  Defending against novel, repeated, or unpredictable attacks, while avoiding attacks on the 'self', are the central problems of both mammalian immune systems and computer systems. Both systems have been studied in great detail, but with little exchange of information across the different disciplines. Here, we present a conceptual framework for structured comparisons across the fields of biological immunity and cybersecurity, by framing the context of defense, considering different (combinations o…

  PublisherDOI

• Automated segmentation of porous thermal spray material CT scans with predictive uncertainty estimation

  Computational Mechanics · 2023-05-31 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Thermal sprayed metal coatings are used in many industrial applications, and characterizing the structure and performance of these materials is vital to understanding their behavior in the field. X-ray computed tomography (CT) enables volumetric, nondestructive imaging of these materials, but precise segmentation of this grayscale image data into discrete material phases is necessary to calculate quantities of interest related to material structure. In this work, we present a methodolog…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Automated Program Repair: Emerging Trends Pose and Expose Problems for Benchmarks

  ACM Computing Surveys · 2025-02-19 · 4 citations

  reviewSenior author

  Machine learning (ML) pervades the field of Automated Program Repair (APR). Algorithms deploy neural machine translation and large language models (LLMs) to generate software patches, among other tasks. But, there are important differences between these applications of ML and earlier work, which complicates the task of ensuring that results are valid and likely to generalize. A challenge is that the most popular APR evaluation benchmarks were not designed with ML techniques in mind. This is espe…

  PublisherDOI

• Encrypted data-sharing for preserving privacy in wastewater-based epidemiology

  The Science of The Total Environment · 2024-05-17 · 4 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• SGER: Reconstructing Information from Database Fragments Via Negative Partial Match Detection

  NSF · $100k · 2003–2004

• SHF: Small: Collaborative Research: Understanding and Evolving Search-based Software Improvement

  NSF · $250k · 2019–2022

• CICI:UCSS:Improving the Privacy and Security of Data for Wastewater-based Epidemiology

  NSF · $500k · 2021–2025

Frequent coauthors

• Westley Weimer

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  60 shared

• Alan S. Perelson

  44 shared

• Melanie Moses

  University of New Mexico

  44 shared

• Steven Hofmeyr

  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

  40 shared

• Ben Edwards

  Australian National University

  23 shared

• Fernando Esponda

  Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México

  19 shared

• Claire Le Goues

  Carnegie Mellon University

  18 shared

• Derek J. Smith

  17 shared

Education

• B.A.

  St. John's College

• M.S., Computer Science

  The University of Michigan

• Ph.D., Computer Science

  The University of Michigan

Awards & honors

• SFI Stanislaw Ulam Memorial Lectures (2013)
• UNM Annual Research Lecture (2012)
• ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award (2011)
• Presidential Young Investigator Award (1991)
• Fellow of the IEEE

Similar researchers at Arizona State University

• Upmanu Lallh-75
• Sara Walkerh-47
• Manfred Laubichlerh-43