http://www.sigevolution.org

The issue features:

• Computational Intelligence Marketing by Arthur Kordon
• Pyevolve: a Python Open-Source Framework for Genetic Algorithms by Christian S. Perone
• Calls & calendar

The newsletter is intended to be viewed electronically.

Pier Luca Lanzi (EIC)

More information on the TwEETI initiative is availabe at the TwEETI tab of the www.apie2.org website, but the idea is to encourage more engineering educators and friends of engineering education to start using twitter to share and vet interesting innovations and deveopments in engineering education.

Existing twitter accounts can join by simply following @apie2.  aPIE2 will itself follow accounts with significant engineering education content or information of interest to educators and friends of engineering education.  Those not on twitter who would like to participate can sign up by following the instructions here.

For more information contact Dave Goldberg (deg@illinois.edu or (@deg511).  @aPIE2, @deg511, and @iFoundry will twitter IEEE FIE live and others attending the conference are invited to join in.  The hash tag for FIE will be #fie09.

2009 marks not only the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth but also publication of the first evolutionary theory, Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique.  “Lamarckian evolution” is usually distinguished from “Darwinian evolution” by its reliance on the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and as such, is usually dismissed as lacking a sound biological basis.  However, there is increasingly compelling evidence for a variety of molecular mechanisms that can support Lamarckian modes of evolution.  In this talk, I will discuss our recent work with pond organisms, known as ciliates, demonstrating an extraordinary new role for the molecule RNA.  Normally thought of as a conduit in gene expression, in ciliates, RNA can provide both an organizing role in DNA rearrangements and a template for transmitting mutations to the next generation.  Understanding how information is encoded to reorder genome fragments highlights the deep connections between computational and genomic processes.  I explain how a transiently-expressed cache of non-coding RNAs may provide the programming instructions for genome remodeling and transmit heritable information.  The occasional transfer of point mutations from these RNA templates to rearranged DNA molecules supplies a viable mechanism for stable inheritance of acquired characters. This mechanism for inheritance beyond the conventional DNA genome can pass information across multiple generations, hinting at the power of RNA molecules to reshape genome information.

http://www.ieee-cig.org/cig-2009/Proceedings/

The new issue of SIGEVOlution is now available for you to download from:

http://www.sigevolution.org

The issue features:

The issue features:

• An Interview with Hans-Paul Schwefel with an introduction by Günter Rudolph
• Memetic Algorithms by Natalio Krasnogor
• Learning From Failures in Evolutionary Computation @ GECCO-2009
• new issues of journals
• calls & calendar

George Dyson, historian and philosopher of science and author of “Darwin Among Machines” will present two talks as a part of the Colloquium Series “Biology and Beyond”.

On September 29^th at 7:00p.m. Dyson will present Darwin Among Machines: From Zoomania to Artificial Life, at Loomis 141.

The next day, September 30^th 4:00 p.m. he will present Von Neumann’s Universe: Computers and Beyond at 100 Gregory Hall.

The poster can be found here.

The 2010 Forum for Philosophy, Engineering & Technology (fPET-2010) to be held 9-10 May 2010 (Sunday Evening-Monday) at the Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO USA has issued its first call for papers.

Abstracts (500-750 words) are due by 28 December 2009 (Monday) using the fPET-2010 submissions page on the the webpage www.philengtech.org/submission.  The call for papers may be viewed online here or downloaded as a PDF file here.

For more information about the forum contact Diane Michelfelder (michelfelder@macalester.edu) or Dave Goldberg (deg@illinois.edu).

More information is available at the fPET-2010 website at www.philengtech.org.

See other iLaunch materials on the iFoundry website www.ifoundry.illinois.edu.

Philosophical reasoning was important to the writing of The Design of Innovation and DoI author David E. Goldberg is one of FPET-2010’s organizers. More information is available at www.philengtech.org.