Welcome to Heaton Research, the site that contains my projects and books. My name is Jeff Heaton; I am a computer scientist whose work covers artificial intelligence, software development, and simulation, and an adjunct instructor at Washington University, where I teach graduate courses in deep learning and generative AI. I am known for my AI books, Kickstarter projects, YouTube videos, and open source projects.

I am most active on GitHub, YouTube, and LinkedIn. If you would like to keep up to date on my projects, just follow me:

Dynaface

Dynaface is an open-source platform that I develop in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University for AI-assisted facial symmetry research. It is available as a free mobile app, and research using Dynaface has appeared in medical journals and been covered in the media.

MergeLife

I also have an interest in Artificial Life and created MergeLife, a family of cellular automata. Each member of this family is represented by a hexadecimal encoding, such as E542-5F79-9341-F31E-6C6B-7F08-8773-7068, that represents a MergeLife update rule. You can watch different MergeLife update rules run in the online viewer. Other than a random starting grid, these update rules are completely deterministic. MergeLife rules are discovered using a Genetic Algorithm. You can think of MergeLife as a utility to create entirely new Cellular Automata that are similar to Conway's Game of Life. Complete implementations of MergeLife in Java, Python, and JavaScript are provided on GitHub.