The June edition meet-up from the Data science society & PyData meet-ups 2025 is here!

Who is the presenter?

Iliya holds a degree in Artificial Intelligence from Sofia University (FMI) and has since built a career as a Machine Learning Engineer and Researcher. He has contributed to projects at companies such as Hyperscience, MYX, and Redis, with a focus on areas including natural language processing, 3D segmentation, and object masking.

Outside of his professional work, Iliya is an active participant in the Artificial Life (ALIFE) community, regularly attending conferences and engaging with cutting-edge research. His primary interests center on differentiable self-organizing systems, particularly neural cellular automata.

 

In this session you will have the chance to learn more about:

In this talk, we’ll explore how complex, intelligent behavior can emerge from simple, local rules—through the lens of cellular automata and their modern, trainable counterparts. We’ll begin with a brief introduction to classical cellular automata such as Conway’s Game of Life, highlighting how rule-based local interactions can produce striking global patterns.

Building on this foundation, we’ll dive into neural cellular automata (NCAs), inspired by the work of Alexander Mordvintsev and collaborators, where the update rules are learned through gradient-based optimization. These systems demonstrate how self-organization can be guided toward specific goals, such as image regeneration, pattern formation, and morphogenesis. Along the way, I’ll showcase interactive visualizations and demos to illustrate these phenomena in action. The talk will conclude with a look into my own research, applying NCAs to classification and autoencoding tasks—uncovering how such systems can be repurposed for representation learning and predictive modeling.

 

Except for the MeetUp, everyone is invited to share what he/she is doing in the field of Data Science – We believe that sharing is caring! Save some time after the presentation for networking and chatting! : )

Data and Time: June 18th, 18:30-21:30 EEST Timezone

Location: Sofia , 18:30-21:30- , at SofiaLab , Serdika Str 1, Sofia

The event is open and free . Book a ticket to reserve a place and to get the materials afterwards.

Prepare your questions for the speaker and ask in the Q&A part from the event!

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Event Partners

This event is organized by Data science society & PyData Sofia

Together we focus on improving the Data Science Community and enriching everyone’s knowledge!

Bookings