Michael Emmerich

Science, Art, and Photography

Michael Emmerich – Personal Homepage

Welcome to my personal website. Tervetuola!

Slides of my recent talk:

Michael Emmerich: Shaping Expected Hypervolume and R2 Improvement
for Preference-Guided Bayesian Optimization Exact Integration, Pareto Compatibility, and Variance Monotonicity, Intl. Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making, Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany, May 25th 2026. (Slides PDF)

I am Michael Emmerich, Professor of Intelligent Computing at the Faculty of Information Technology, PostScriptum Fellow, at the University of Jyväskylä and a Guest Scientist at Leiden University, The Netherlands. I am living with my family in Jyväskylä, Central Finland. In the past, I served as the Lead AI Scientist at silo.ai in Finland and worked as Associate Professor at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Moreover, I conducted research at various institutes and universities in US, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, and Germany.

My research interest is multiobjective optimization and decision analysis.
I am also conducting active research in Machine Learning and AI, in particular in Gaussian Process Regression, Optimal Model Ensembles, and Alpha Zero Style Deep Reinforcement Learning. On the more theoretical side, I like to explore metric geometry and mathematically motivated measures of diversity and explore connections of multiobjective optimization with computational geometry. On the application side, my research covered a broad range of applications, including chemical technology, engineering design optimization, medicinal chemistry, epidemiology and network science, sustainable forest management, and operational research.

I am an advocate of the responsible use of AI and in particular I share the view of computer science pioneer Fred Brooks to develop AI not to replace humans but to amplify human intelligence and use it to the benefit of humans in solving challenging problems, such as solving healthcare challenges, the quest to create a sustainable future for humans and our planet, or tackling complex design problems in engineering and chemistry. This quest is where I see a great potential of multiple criteria optimization and analysis, as it involves and powerfully assists human decision makers in navigating complex decision spaces.

My free introductory book you can find here “Multicriteria Optimization and Decision Making” (Reader) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.00359


Check out our recent springer book, highlighting result and challenges in the emerging area of optimization with a larger number of objectives:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-25263-1
My brief tutorial (pdf) on AI “What makes computing intelligent?” can be found here.

Alongside my professional endeavors, I engage in amateur nature photography, painting, and recreational math/computer programming. This website provides links to some of my projects and blogs: