Thomas Helmuth ’09

Thomas Helmuth ’09 focuses his research on genetic programming, a subfield of artificial intelligence that borrows ideas from biological evolution to artificially evolve populations of computer programs. His work examines the use of genetic programming for program synthesis, the generation of programs similar to those that humans write. This work has explored the effects of different methods of selecting which programs will reproduce on problem-solving performance and population diversity.

Helmuth earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science and math from Hamilton and his master’s and doctorate in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. During the two years before he returned to Hamilton to teach, he worked as an assistant professor of computer science at Washington and Lee University.

Recent Courses Taught

Introduction to Computer Science
Genetic Programming

Research Interests

Genetic programming, evolutionary computation, program synthesis from examples, search-based software engineering

Select Publications

• Thomas Helmuth, Lee Spector, and James Matheson. "Solving uncompromising problems with lexicase selection." IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 19(5):630-643, October 2015.
• Thomas Helmuth, Nicholas Freitag McPhee, Edward Pantridge, and Lee Spector. "Improving generalization of evolved programs through automatic simplification." In GECCO '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Berlin, Germany, 2017. ACM. Nominated, Best Paper Award, Genetic Programming Track.
• Thomas Helmuth, Nicholas Freitag McPhee, and Lee Spector. "The impact of hyperselection on lexicase selection. In GECCO '16: Proceedings of the 2016 conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, pages 717-724, Denver , USA, 20-24 July 2016. ACM. Nominated, Best Paper Award, Genetic Programming Track.
• William La Cava, Thomas Helmuth, Lee Spector, and Kourosh Danai. "Genetic programming with epigenetic local search." In GECCO '15: Proceedings of the 2015 conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, pages 1055-1062, Madrid, Spain, 11-15 July 2015. ACM. Nominated, Best Paper Award, Genetic Programming Track.
• Thomas Helmuth and Lee Spector. "General program synthesis benchmark suite." In GECCO '15: Proceedings of the 2015 on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, pages 1039-1046, Madrid, Spain, 11-15 July 2015. ACM.

Appointed to the Faculty

Educational Background

Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst
M.S., University of Massachusetts Amherst
B.A., Hamilton College

Dissertation