IlliGAL Blogging

Yesterday, Chuck Karr, noted researcher in combining fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms, was named to be the University of Alabama's dean of engineering (see here). I started my academic teaching career at Alabama from 1984 to 1990, and Chuck Karr was my first PhD graduate (1989). Chuck comes to the dean's job with stints as head of Aeronautical Engineering and Mechanics and as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies. Please join me in wishing Chuck Karr heartfelt congratulations and best of luck.

The blog pessux (Pro Evolutionary Soccer at Sussex) is blogging on the development of a soccer learning and playing simulation that uses genetic algorithms and evolutionary computation. The team of developers is using a blog to document their progress, and they have been posting vigorously over the last week or so. The progress to this point is modest (getting the agents to move to one goal or the other), but some of the graphics is worth a look, and it will be interesting to follow the team's progress as the summer progresses.

This weekend is Memorial Day weekend and for my family that means that it is the beginning of sailing season on Lake Michigan. Today we board our time-share lease 33-foot Beneteau sailboat Urdragon and go sailing at Fairwind Sailing in Burnham Harbor near the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. Of course, readers of this blog are less interested in what I do in my spare time and are relentlessly interested in the world of genetic algorithms, so it is interesting that GAs are increasingly used in sailboat design, control, and navigation.

A quick Google search on yacht and genetic algorithms turns up many interesting links, but the first article on this topic I remember was some pretty cool work by Carlo Poloni. The study used multiobjective GAs and neural-net surrogate evaluation to optimize yacht design. A pdf of a 1999 presentation is here. I believe that Carlo's work on multiobjective GAs has formed the basis for design optimization software at an Italian firm called Enginsoft.

I'm blogging live from Stephen Lu's ECN Workshop (Engineering as Collaborative Negotiation) in Shanghai. Stephen has also discovered postmodern thinking (see here) & Searle (see DEG 2004 paper here and Searle post here) and its relevancy to a new kind of systems engineering. Stephen's view is that to put people appropriately in the loop that we need to think of engineering activities as a kind of negotiated process among various stakeholders. I endorse the point of view, and although negotiation may be a bit limiting as a term, the intent is spot on. The schedule is an interesting one and the discussion has been quite interesting to this point. Hod Lipson's discussion of negotiation as co-evolution was particularly stimulating. Keep an eye on ECN and Lu's work.

The COMCEV '2005 has opened its doors. A small note on my way to lunch; Thomas Stützle presented and interesting overview on stochastic local search methods. The slides will be added soon to his home page.

After a funny trip that last from 36 hours instead of the 11 intended, I finally got to Aguascalientes (México). Felipe Padilla invited me to give a talk about the role of evolutionary computation in collaborative innovation and creativity at the Second Mexican Conference on Evolutionary Computation (COMCEV’2005). This is not a déjà vu or, as Carl Jung may call it, synchronicity. Dave Golberg is currently in Shangai giving a related talk too. Check his blog entry here. CONCEV'2005 is hosted this year at the Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes. Key note speakers for the conference are Francisco Herrera, Thomas Stützle, Katya Rodríguez Vázquez, and myself. Around thirty evolutionary computation papers will be presented in the conference.

I just called home from Shanghai and talked to my older son Max. We were discussing colleges, and based on my impressions from this trip to China, I suggested that he learn Chinese (or some other Asian language) when he goes off to school. My other penguin, Zack, is hoping to sign up for Japanese at Uni High next year, and I think that was a good choice. Projections of future economic might often turn out to be wrong (projections of Japanese dominance of the world just a few years ago don't seem on the mark right now, for example), but economic growth + largest population + continuing globalization means that my children will probably be doing business in China, certainly Asia. They need to become familiar with some Asian language and they need to be comfortable in traveling in and dealing with Asian cultures.

I'm sitting in the Everbright Hotel in Shanghai listening to Stephen Lu of USC talk about Functional Innovation. He hasn't referenced Searle explicitly, but his foundation for his talk is the whole infrastructure of Searle's argument on social reality. Not a bad lineup for a small conference. Nam Suh talked about axiomatic design yesterday, and Ralph Keeney talked about decision tradeoffs today. I'm on the schedule tomorrow to talk about computational innovation and invention. Lots of presentations and papers on collaborative systems and quite a few on evolutionary computations.

The Workshop on Parameter Setting in Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithms (PSGEA-2005) will take place at the ACM SIGEVO Genetic and Evolutionary Computation COnference (GECCO-2005), in Washington D.C., on Saturday, June 25, between 8:30 and 12:30 AM.

The workshop will start with an introduction by the organizers, followed by 6 talks, and will finish with a panel discussion. Attendance to the workshop is open to all GECCO attendees.

List of talks given at the workshop:

• Population Sizing for Genetic Programming Based Upon Decision Making
  K. Sastry, U.-M. O'Reilly, and D. E. Goldberg


• Parameter Sweeps For Exploring GP Parameters
  M. E. Samples, J. M. Daida, M. Byom, and M. Pizzimenti


• Genetic Programming: Parametric Analysis of Structure Altering Mutation Techniques
  A. Piszcz and T. Soule


• Investigations in Meta-GAs: Panaceas or Pipe Dreams?
  J. Clune, S. Goings, B. Punch, and E. Goodman


• A Review of Adaptive Population Sizing Schemes in Genetic Algorithms
  F. G. Lobo and C. F. Lima


• Online Population Size Adjusting Using Noise and Substructural Measurements
  T.-L. Yu, K. Sastry, and D. E. Goldberg

The workshop is organized by Fernando Lobo and Claudio Lima, from University of Algarve, Portugal. We are looking forward to your participation.

I'm typing on a computer in the Yahoo cafe in Narita airport on my way to give a talk at the CIRP 2005 conference in Shanghai. The change in interconnectivity since I started coming to Japan is really astounding. Anyway, I may or may not be online much, so I'm depending on my other IlliGAL Blogging bloggers to pick up the slack while I'm away. If I continue to get good access, I'll try to blog every other day or so.

The DISCUS article by Trish Barker has been picked up by HPCwire. You can find a previous blog about the article here, and the HPCWire link here.

A recent article by Trish Barker in the Science Success Stories—a section of the Online Access of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) newsletters—reviews the usage of DISCUS on a real-world marketing research project. The article may be found here and the NCSA newsletters here. The experiment was also blogged on real time at the IlliGAL blog, and the post can be found here.

Hugh Hewitt was at PersonalDemocracyForum and noticed a cool innovation in audience interactivity:

but we did have the very interesting --in fact compelling—use of the projection of the forum chat room on the wall behind us. This made the audience a real participant in the conversation, especially the snarkiest of commentators. This is an evolution in conferences, and I urge its immediate adoption. If you don’t like being mocked by a live audience in real time, then don’t be a talking head. This innovation sure made for an interesting backdrop to the standard five microphones and a few hundred people in the audience panel.

Ooh, I like the idea of conference chats (and blogs?) going on during a conference, and then projecting them at the back of a panel discussion is even better. Might be a great way to spice up a GECCO workshop.

In a comment on an earlier post Nosophorus asks "What is General Engineering?" I'm glad you asked. General Engineering is my home department and the home department of the Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory (IlliGAL). General Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) goes back to 1921, when a curriculum study at the behest of Chicago-area industrialists wondered why engineering education was tilting so heavily toward technical topics and away from the business topics necessary for success. A degree program was created to balance technical topics with topics useful in business such as law and economics. Subsequently the teaching mission of a department called General Engineering Drawing was merged this degree program to form the department now known as General Engineering.

During the Cold War, the GE degree took on a systems engineering flavor, and an MS degree was added in the 70s. More recently, a PhD has been added, but a PhD in General Engineering sounded like something of an oxymoron, so the PhD offered was called Systems and Entrepreneurial Engineering (SEE). This degree is something of a cross of offerings in Management Science and Engineering (MS&E) at Stanford and the programs in the Engineering Systems Division (ESD) at MIT.

The undergraduate program in General Engineering is one of the most popular at Illinois with nearly 600 undergraduate students. The new SEE degrees have attracted applicants from around the world, and is growing rapidly. More information is available on the GE website here.

In an earlier post, I asked readers to give me their recommendations of top-5 genetic algorithm (GA) programs. A few responded, but the most interesting was a list of top five GA programs. . . in Brazil (here). I'm not sure why, but a high proportion of the readership of this blog comes from the Portugese speaking world. I've had graduate students from Portugal in my lab many occasions, and I've visited Portugal a number of times, but I've never had occasion tovisit Brazil, an apparent hotbed of GA activity.

Just read Loren Pope's Colleges that Change Lives as a follow on to reading his Looking Beyond the Ivy League (see here and here for earlier posts). CTCL lists 40 small colleges that have a record of providing transformative undergraduate experiences. Interestingly, many faculty members at Ivy League and other "top" schools choose to send their own children to the CTCL 40 or other small liberal-arts schools. The CTCL schools have banded together on this website and now cooperate to promote one another.

Unhinderedbytalent is blogging here about the Genetic Programming in Theory and Practice Workshop (GPTP-2005) held this weekend in Ann Arbor. IlliGAL's own Kumara Sastry is at the workshop, and perhaps he will blog a bit about workshop highlights.

The FEBS Journal has published the abstract of an article in which genetic algorithms (GAs) were used to study a protozoan glyoxalase pathway:

The glyoxalase pathway of Leishmania infantum was kinetically characterized as a trypanothione-dependent system. Using time course analysis based on parameter fitting with a genetic algorithm, kinetic parameters were estimated for both enzymes, with trypanothione derived substrates. A Km of 0.253 mM and a V of 0.21 µmol·min–1·mg–1for glyoxalase I, and a Km of 0.098 mM and a V of 0.18 µmol·min–1·mg–1 for glyoxalase II, were obtained.

The research was a collaboration between Portugese researchers at the University of Porto and the University of Lisbon.

Doctor Dobb's Journal has a current article in which a genetic programming (GP) code is implemented in SQL.

John Hawkins has 25 pieces of advice for bloggers here. A number of them seem more apropos to blogs on less obscure topics than genetic algorithms, although 3 seems pretty generic:

If you're going to be putting up multiple posts and then not posting for a while, put the best post on top. The number of readers drops significantly the further they have to go down the page.

So does 4:

On the week-ends, expect your traffic to drop by roughly 40% whether you post or not.

A previous post about Hugh Hewitt's book Blog has a better list for getting started I think.

Thesilog is blogging on memetic algorithms here and here. I'm not actually very fond of the term "memetic algorithms," which are really nothing more than GAs hybridized with some other sort of search. The GA learns in "evolutionary" time, and the other search learns in "cultural" time, and since culture is involved, the learning involves the exchange of "memes," hence the term "memetic" algorithms. All sounds a bit too fancy for a GA/local-search hybrid.

Having said that, I am fond of hybrids for many if not most industrial-strength GA applications. We've worked a bit on the theory of local-global hybrids (see post here and tech report here), and more needs to be done, but in practice hybrids are a good way to get the broad perspective of a GA together with the local convergence speed of a domain-appropriate local searcher.

A press release on Businesswire reports new technology by Symbiot, a maker of intelligent security infrastructure management systems:

Symbiot utilizes proprietary genetic algorithms to measure, manage and mitigate risk to your networked assets. Through Symbiot.NET, Symbiot's customers benefit from adaptive profiles defined from industry groups, and other Symbiot customers for community centric security; a new approach to mitigating risk. Symbiot provides solutions that unify your existing security infrastructure to proactively respond to business critical issues while communicating security events across your entire organization clearly and effectively.

A number of technical white papers are available here.

Although I'm not authorized to release the actual registration figures (if I tell you, I must kill you), I can say that same-time registrations for the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2005) to be held in Washington, DC, June 25-29, 2005 (Saturday-Wednesday) are up almost 20% over 2004 figures. This suggests that we may have the biggest GECCO ever, and judging by the papers, workshops, and tutorials, we already have the highest quality conference in the field lined up. With museums and attractions in DC, a large, diverse, and high quality conference, 20th year birthday party for the field of genetic and evolutionary computation, and first-time affiliation with ACM as SIGEVO, this year's GECCO should not be missed.

NuTech Solutions raised $1.5 million dollars through a private placement of stock. In the process it completed a buyout of co-founder Zbigniew Michalewicz and his son Matt (former CEO and founder). The full press release is available here. Hat tip to Julian Garcia at Evolutionary Computation.

Moneyscience has posted the announcement of the Optimization by Building and Using Probabilistic Models Workshop (OBUPM-2005) to be held at GECCO-2005 on Sunday, June 26, 2005. A fair amount of work in IlliGAL is in this area, and many IlliGAL researchers and former researcher are participating in this workshop. See the program here. Better yet, go sign up for GECCO (here), and attend OBUPM as well as the greatest GA show on earth.

El mundo de adan posted a list of schools with good programs in genetic algorithms. Here is the list with El mundo de adan's comments:

• university of rochester (not so much ga, but good ai in general, plus it's
  obviously in rochester)
• syracuse univeristy
• michigan state
• colorado state
• university of edinburgh (scotland!)

Someone wanting to stay in Rochester might talk to Al Biles at Rochester Institute of Technology. Someone wanting to stay in the States, hmmmmm (let me think about that), maybe, just maybe might consider (drum roll please) Illinois! Although IlliGAL is in a department called General Engineering, most of the PhD students are in CS, and the little ole director has an affiliates appointment in CS.

We leave it as an exercise to IlliGAL Blogging readers to add their favorite nominations for GA-friendly schools in the US and around the world. Go ahead and give your top five in the comments section.

CNN reports the results of a British study in which workers distracted by Email, phone calls, and IM suffered an IQ loss greater than that suffered by a person smoking marijuana:

In 80 clinical trials, Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King's College London University, monitored the IQ of workers throughout the day.

He found the IQ of those who tried to juggle messages and work fell by 10 points -- the equivalent to missing a whole night's sleep and more than double the 4-point fall seen after smoking marijuana.

"This is a very real and widespread phenomenon," Wilson said. "We have found that this obsession with looking at messages, if unchecked, will damage a worker's performance by reducing their mental sharpness.

This raises the unsettling possiblity that perhaps the postmodern equivalent of walking and chewing bubble gum has become IMing and smoking a joint. Hat tip to IFTF Future Now.

In an earlier post, I told the story of my college visit trip with my son Max. The saga continues, and we are in the middle of standardized testing and planning summer visits and such. To continue my education I read Loren Pope's controversial book, Looking Beyond the Ivy League: Finding the College That's Right for You. Although the book is 10-years old, and the data in the book is older than that, the author's premise that large name-brand universities are over-rated and that smaller less-well-known liberal arts schools do a better job educating at the undergraduate level is thought provoking and worth considering.

This post is not a tell-all confession by a large-university insider, but it is no secret that large research universities emphasize research. That small liberal arts schools might better educate undergraduates should come as no surprise. That statistical studies of PhD productivity and Who's Who prominence tilt in favor of a number of largely unheralded liberal arts schools were news to me.

As a result, Max and I need to get back on the road, and included in our visits will be some of these apparently life-transforming institutions. Where Max goes will be his choice, but we need to take a more informed look off the beaten track.

Franz Dill has a post over at IFTF Future Now (note IFTF FN's new address) highlighting the use of Bayesian techniques from an article in Infoweek. What caught my eye in the Infoweek quote was the following:

Some of the new AI research also falls into an emerging niche of computer science: the intersection of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction.

Exactly. Trying to balance human-computer interaction is a key goal of DISCUS. The 4-quad chart (here) captures some of the possiblities in the space of choosing and creating.

Sisu has a post relating work and genetic algorithms and genetic programming to arguments against creationism and intelligent design. Taking this subject up is probably a good way to drive more traffic to the site, but I've always thought that it was better to avoid such distractions and stick to our knitting. Work in GAs and GP can stand on its own two feet. Once we've plugged into the metaphor, we can push the envelope on how much artificial evolution and genetics can do in how short a time. I do agree with Barry Kearns of VekTor:

I've been frankly startled by the power and efficacy of the evolutionary process for solving problems, without even stating the nature of the problem itself to the solution engine. Watching powerful solutions arise out of the 'digital goo' in real time is downright spooky. And that's with relatively tiny population sizes.

But I'm not sure that anecdotal observation of GA performance is all that helpful in "settling" anything. If fossil records and increasingly detailed undestanding of genetics and cellular function down to the molecular level aren't persuasive, should we expect the caricature simulations of GAs and GP over evolutionary time scales to really turn the tide?

Having said this, understanding GA/GP time complexity, problem class appropriateness, and solution quality (see DoI) may be able to put to rest unsophisticated arguments equating natural evolution to simple random search. Moreover, these complexity arguments (with a good bit of work) might yield a detailed bound on the plausibility of the complexity of natural systems we now observe.

zmed posts an abstract on a paper by researchers at the University of Tokyo that uses parallel genetic algorithms to classify tissues.

Several machine learning approaches have been used to aid to understand the functions of genes. However, these tasks are made more difficult due to the noisy nature of array data and the overwhelming number of gene features. In this paper, we use the parallel genetic algorithm to filter out the informative genes relative to classification. By combing with the classification method proposed by Golub et al. and Slonim et al., we classify the data sets with tissues of different classes, and the preliminary results are presented in this paper.

The full text of the paper is available here.