Hi, I’m Alican.

I’m an evolutionary roboticist. I recently finished my PhD at the University of Vermont, working at the intersection of evolutionary computation, deep learning, and artificial life. A lot of AI research takes the agent apart — a brain here, a body there, an environment it happens to sit in. I find it more interesting to keep them together: an agent is shaped by its body, its history, and the world it evolved in, and I think you have to account for all of that to understand what it’s really doing. Most of my work is some version of that idea.

My earlier research was in computer vision, where I reframed relative depth estimation as a ranking problem and developed novel methods for multi-label ranking. I’ve also spent a good deal of time on applied, collaborative work: point cloud processing for cultural heritage preservation with architects, complex system modelling of land use with urban planners, and air quality forecasting with atmospheric scientists.

My work won the Virtual Creatures Competition at ALIFE 2025, was nominated for the Best Paper award at EuroGP 2024 — where I was also named Outstanding Student — and earned the University of Vermont Computer Science Graduate Award. Behind these are 17 journal and conference publications at venues including GECCO, ALIFE, EuroGP, ECAI, and 3DV, and in journals such as Digital Signal Processing and Computers & Graphics, with over 300 citations — 93% from papers I first-authored. I have also been a main contributor to three NSF-funded projects. The full record is in my CV.

This site is where I keep my publications, occasional blog posts, and side projects. I built the whole thing from scratch, mostly as an excuse to learn how the web works.