Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory

As I am recovering from the long return trip (weather problems), I thought I would post a few words on my visit to GECCO-2005.
I attended a number of interesting talks, tutorials, and workshops. Most of all, I enjoyed EDA (estimation of distribution algorithms) sessions and the workshop OBUPM-2005. I am happy that our EDA track […]

Last day in GECCO. Wednesday is always as intense as any other day in the conference. Last minute discussions, hugs with friends that we won’t see till next year if we are lucky, business cards exchanging at an incredible pace. Today my post is going to be short. I spent most of the time talking […]

This morning in the business meeting of SIGEVO, Riccardo Poli announced the winners of the 2005 Human-Competitive Results Competition (the “Humies”). A previous post discussed the contest, and over 20 applicants vied for $10,000 in prize money. The judges selected two Gold Medalists, Randy Bartels for using GAs to shape laser pulses […]

After a very interesting keynote speech by Dr. Joshua Epstein, I attended the EDA session in the morning, where four interesting papers were presented.
Claudio Lima gave a wonderful presentation on hybridization of competent recombination and mutation operators. Alden Wright presented a very interesting paper on combining factorization distribution algorithm with linkage detection method. Of course, […]

Today I was chairing GA-7 session, and one of the paper quickly drew my attention. The paper is entitled “Schema disruption in tree-structured chromosome” by William Greene. Basically, it’s a sequel of his paper in GECCO 2004: “Schema disruption in chromosomes that are structured as binary trees.” I suspect some theories […]

I am sitting on some of the EDA sessions and I can help thinking about a discussion I had with Tian-Li Yu when I was preparing the papers about the compact classifier system. The discussion was about the main differences of DSMGA when compared to eCGA or BOA. DSMGA, unlike eCGA and BOA, provides a […]

At long last I arrived at GECCO yesterday afternoon. Saturday was the lil penguin’s Bar Mitzvah, and he did a wonderful job. On Sunday, we drove the older penguin to Northwestern University for the NHSI program on journalism (the famed “cherub” program). On Monday, an exhausted father, scraped himself up, drove to […]

Phew! I finished all my presentations today! Yesterday, I had to give a presentation in the OBUPM-2005 workshop and then a tutorial on efficiency enhancement, for which I was preparing the first two days. I had my final presentation in the morning on sub-structural niching and then it was time to finally attend differen talks […]

In one of today’s GECCO sessions, I run into a talk by Doug Newell founder of Genalytics. First I wasn’t sure what he would cover, but in the end it was a very interesting talk. He covered several topics. He started talking about direct marketing. The bottom line, direct marketing is still using mail as […]

In one of the GA session (GA-3) that I attended, two paper (entitled “Improvements to Penalty-Based Evolutionary Algorithms for the Multi-Dimensional Knapsack
Problem Using a Gene-Based Adaptive Mutation Approach” and “Adaptive Isolation Model using Data Clustering for Multimodal Function Optimization”) proposed a similar scheme of GAs: they both try to speed up the convergence, and then […]