Kenneth Stanley is Senior Vice President of Open-Endedness at Lila Sciences, where he leads the development of methods for continual, open-ended discovery and creativity in AI systems. Ken is the creator of the Neuroevolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) and novelty search algorithms, widely recognized as foundational contributions to evolutionary computation and open-ended AI.
Prior to LILA, he led the Open-Endedness team at OpenAI and co-founded Geometric Intelligence, an AI and machine learning firm acquired by Uber and rebranded as Uber AI Labs, where he led core research. Earlier, he served as a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida. Ken is the author of Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, which examines how the pursuit of open-ended exploration — rather than fixed objectives — is the true catalyst for breakthrough innovation.
He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania.
