Kenneth Stanley is an artificial-intelligence researcher and 🏷️#author known for founding work in neuroevolution and open-ended search. He is Senior Vice President of Open-endedness at 📝Lila Sciences. He earned a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin in 2004, where his NEAT algorithm (NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies) later won the ISAL award for outstanding paper of the decade 2002–2012.
As a professor at the University of Central Florida, Stanley developed HyperNEAT, compositional pattern-producing networks and novelty search, the idea that searching for novelty can reach goals that direct pursuit of them misses. He co-wrote Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective (2015) with Joel Lehman on that thesis. He co-founded Geometric Intelligence, which 📝Uber acquired in 2016 to become Uber AI Labs, then led the Open-Endedness team at 📝OpenAI from 2020 and briefly co-founded the social network Maven before joining Lila.