Archive for 2006
GECCO 2007 Deadline
29 December 2006GECCO 2007 is approaching. The deadline for paper submission is January 17. You can find more instructions on how to format and submit the papers on the GECCO 2007 papers’ page.
Challenging lectures on-line at TED
18 December 2006Yesterday I was having dinner with a friend. He mentioned that he had become addicted to the lectures posted on the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) web site. I found this interesting description of TED on their site:
TED is all about connections. The connections of ideas and the connections of people. It is based on the insight that to truly understand anything, you need to understand a little bit of everything that surrounds it. And that by allowing ourselves to be exposed each year to a diverse group of some of the most remarkable people on the planet, we transplant ourselves out of the one-dimensional mind-set of much of our working lives and into fertile country that will allow us - actually, almost force us - to grow.
TED also is a valuable source of ideas about innovation and creativity. A quick glance at the list of short lectures just mesmerizes you. It is hard to point one out, I am just going trough them right now, but my first pick was Dan Dennett—most famous for his books, Consciousness Explained (1991) and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995). I still recall sitting in the lecture he gave at the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park more than four years ago. Mesmerizing.
Observer-Invariant Histopathology using Genetics-Based Machine Learning
13 December 2006by Xavier Llorà, Anusha Priya, and Rohit Bhargava (2006).
To appear in the Special Issue on Learning Classifier Systems of the Natural Computing Journal. Also as IlliGAL TR No. 2006027. Link to the PDF.
Delineating Topic and Discussant Transitions in Online Collaborative Environments
13 December 2006by Noriko Imafuji Yasui, Xavier Llorà, and David E. Goldberg (2006).
Illinois Technical Report No. 2006025. Link to the PDF.
Adaptable Extraction of Key Elements from Weblogs
13 December 2006by Xavier Llorà, Noriko Imafuji Yasui, David E. Goldberg (2006).
Illinois Technical Report No. 2006024. Link to the PDF.
The new DISCUS site is up
29 November 2006The new site is here! Besides moving it to Wordpress, we have been working to engineer a site that will allow us to demonstrate some of the human-centered analytic technologies the DISCUS project has created. For each post, now you can analyze it with a single click using the links provided on the left-hand side. The first analytics tool released is based on KeyGraph techniques. Other DISCUS analysis techniques are already on the pipe and will reach the site soon.
We have not stopped at reengineering the DISCUS site. We have also created an extension for Firefox that allow you to analyze the web page you are currently viewing. All DISCUS capabilities integrated in your browser. The DISCUS Firefox extension adds a DISCUS toolbar, some entries on the tools menu and in the right-click contextual menu. Hope you find it useful. Following the site, this toolbar will also grow and incorporate new features and human-centered analytic tools.
Human-Centered Analysis and Visualization Tools for the Blogosphere
29 November 2006by Xavier Llorà, Noriko Imafuji Yasui, Michael Welge, David E. Goldberg (in press, 2007).
To apper in the Proceedings of the Digital Humanities 2007 Conference.Also as IlliGAL TR No. 2006023. Link to the PDF.
Metadata, RDF, and the browsers
28 November 2006Recently I have been playing on implementing some extension for Firefox. When I started working on it, I was not aware on how far they have taken the use of metadata—I blogged before on metadata stores here. Actually, now you can query RDF data sources, which contain information ranging from your browsing history or bookmarks—to mention a few. But what makes it more exiting is that when you are writing extensions you can use java script to get that information stored by the browser using the RDF interface to do something useful. For instance, DISCUS is using it to provide on-the-fly analytics for the current page currently viewing. DISCUS will soon release a demo version of such a toolbar. If you want to read more about it, I would recommend the XULplanet.com.
Photo shoot at The Point
26 October 2006
The photo above is a snake preview of the 2007 The Point Calendar. This year the calendar has moved into the full-fledge digital era. Digital cameras and Mac were flying everywhere. Stay tuned, because this one is going to be very different from the 2005 and 2006 ones 
E2K: Evolution to knowledge
21 October 2006Evolution to Knowledge (E2K) is a set of Data to Knowledge (D2K) modules and itineraries that perform genetic algorithms (GA) and genetics-based machine learning (GBML) related tasks. The goal of E2K is to fold: simplify the process of building GA/GBML related tasks, and provide a simple exploratory workbench for the evolutionary computation community to help users to interact with evolutionary processes. It can help to create complex tasks or help the newcomer to get familiarized and trained with the evolutionary methods and techniques provided. Moreover, due to its integration into D2K, the creation of combined data mining and evolutionary task can be effortlessly done via the visual programming paradigm provided by the workflow environment and also wrap other evolutionary computation software.
E2K targets the creation of a common shared framework for the evolutionary computation community. E2K allows users to reuse evolutionary components and, using a visual programming paradigm, connect them to create applications that fulfill the targeted needs. E2K is a project built around the D2K framework developed by the Automated Learning Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. D2K’s dataflow architecture provides users with a simple workbench where they can rapidly create applications visually by just dragging and connecting components (modules) together. E2K modules provide simple computation activities—such as evaluation, selection, and recombination mechanism—that when combined together create complex evolutionary computation algorithms. Due to the module standardization in D2K, it can act as integrator of evolutionary techniques and library—for instance wrapping ECJ or Open BEAGLE components—and also take advantage of the data mining techniques provided with the D2K.