MEDAL Blogging

The new issue of SIGEVOlution is now available for you to download from http://www.sigevolution.org. For me, the main highlight of the issue is the interview with John H. Holland with an introduction by Lashon Booker.

John H. Holland will give a keynote speech at GECCO-2009 on July 12, 2009 (Sunday), 10:40am-11:40am. The talk is entitled Genetic Algorithms: Long Ago [Past] and Far Away [Future] and the abstract of the talk follows:

It was in the mid-50’s of the 20th century when I realized that Fisher’s fundamental theorem could be extended from individual alleles to co-adapted sets of alleles, without linearization. That led to a realization that recombination, rather than mutation, was the main mechanism providing grist for the natural selection mill. There was little theory concerning recombination in those days, but now recombination is a standard explanation for biological innovations, such as swine flu.

Much later, in the early 1990’s, GA’s provided the “adaptive” part of rule-based models of complex adaptive systems (CAS), such as the artificial stock market pioneered at the Santa Fe Institute. Tag-based signal processing occurs in systems as different as biological cells, language acquisition, and ecosystems. CAS models offer a unified way to study the on-going co-evolution of boundary and tag networks in these systems.

Another keynote speaker at GECCO-2009 is Demetri Terzopoulos, who will give the talk Artificial Life Simulation of Humans and Lower Animals: From Biomechanics to Intelligence on July 11 (Saturday) at 4.10pm-5.50pm. As if this wasn’t enough, GECCO-2009 will also feature an invited talk of Hans-Paul Schwefel at the Learning from Failures in Evolutionary Computation (LFFEC) Workshop, which is entitled Failures as stepping stones to success or per aspera ad astra.

More details can be found on GECCO-2009 webpage.

Pier Luca Lanzi just posted a few video highlights from the Simulated Car Racing Competition at CEC-2009. The winner of the competition was Thies Lonneker and Martin Butz. Congratulations!

Here’s one of the posted videos:

See also Pier Luca’s post at IlliGAL Blogging.

TiME student Nick Barbuto interviews author David Goldberg about his book Entreprenurial Engineer:

The talk is NOT about genetic algorithms :-)

Later today Uday Chakraborty is giving a talk on flow-shop scheduling as part of the weekly colloquium series at our department. The talk will be given at 4:00pm in room 320 CCB at UMSL. The abstract follows:

The flow shop scheduling problem, or the problem of assignment of times to a set of jobs for processing through a series of machines, is NP-complete and has long received the attention of researchers in operations research, engineering, and computer science. Over the past several years, there has been a spurt of interest in “intelligent” heuristics and metaheuristics for solving this problem — ranging from genetic algorithms to tabu search to complex hybrid techniques. This talk discusses some of the newest approaches to this problem, their shortcomings, and directions for future research.

I just found out that Hans-Paul Schwefel, one of the evolutionary computation pioneers, is going to give a talk at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2009) in Montreal, Canada (July 8-12, 2009). The talk will be part of the Learning from Failures in Evolutionary Computation (LFFEC) Workshop.

The title of the talk is failures as stepping stones to success or per aspera ad astra. The abstract follows:

The implicit thesis of this talk’s title will be underpinned with some examples from (my) real life. A first example leads back to the 1960s, when I simulated the (1+1)-ES with discrete mutations on a two-dimensional parabolic ridge by means of a Z23 computer. The result - getting stuck in certain search directions - led to making use of Gaussian variations. The second example comes from experimental investigations to determine the shape of a hot water flashing nozzle, the water being really hot and not simulated on a computer. In search for a multimembered evolutionary algorithm with effective self-adaptation of the mutation strengths, a couple of failures occurred. These, however, rendered deep insight into basic prerequisites to achieve the goal. And finally, some theory will be re-presented about the optimal failure rate in two black-box situations.

Of course, GECCO-2009 will feature many other interesting presentations, workshops, and other events and for more information about this conference, you should visit its web page here. GECCO is organized by ACM SIGEVO (Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation).

Marcelo De Brito of Genetic Argonaut reports on the genetic algorithm implementation of a genetic algorithm on a Playstation PSP. The implementation is called Pyevolve. More can be found here.

The simulated car racing competition organized at GECCO-2009 is part of the 2009 Simulated Car Racing Championship, an event joining the three competitions held at CEC-2009, GECCO-2009, and CIG-2009. Pier Luca Lanzi reports on the first contest in this competition (Contest 1: Learning to Drive) here. The deadline for the submissions to this contest is July 1, 2009.

Click here for another related post at IlliGAL Blog. The photo is due to SPYDERMAN360 (wikipedia).

According to the estimated impact factor, GECCO (Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference) ranks 11th in computer science conferences on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and human-computer interaction. The source: http://www.cs-conference-ranking.org/conferencerankings/topicsii.html.

GECCO-2009 deadline for submission of regular papers was extended to Wednesday, January 28, 2009!