Hi, I'm Iliya — a PhD student at Sofia University, a Senior Research Engineer at Redis and Conference Chair for ERA — the student group of the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL).

I build interactive, visual things and research how local rules give rise to life-like behaviour. The things I work on most are neural cellular automata, self-organizing systems and artificial life. You can also read my résumé.

Posts

• 🪼

  Field Life Aug 22, 2026

  Particle life as a grid of concentrations
• 🐜

  Neural Ants (NAnts) Aug 07, 2026

  NAnts are to Langton's ant what NCAs are to cellular automata: the rule is learned rather than written by hand.
• 🧫

  Embodied Classification with Neural Cellular Automata Mar 27, 2026

  An NCA that classifies by routing activation across a grid
• 🧮

  Self-organized boolean computation Oct 30, 2025

  Neural cellular automata usually grow and repair shapes — this one computes

• VAE in 3D Nov 13, 2020

  Visualizing and inspecting the computation graph of a VAE with Efemarai

• 1D GAN Oct 26, 2020

  Interactive explanation of GANs in single dimension

• Emergent structures in noisy channel message-passing Oct 6, 2020

  Neural networks generate visual language for communication

• Transition representations Jan 4, 2020

  Parallelizing recurrent nets during training

• Generating random art with neural networks Nov 15, 2019

  Visualizing and animating the smoothness of neural networks

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