IlliGAL Blogging

The renewed mission of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is cyberinfrastructure for science and engineering. If you want to learn more about it, a must-read document is the NCSA 2010: The future of NCSA, which gives a general overview of NCSA strategy for the years to come. Another interesting essay by NCSA’s director Thom Dunning can be found here. You can read about IlliGAL efforts in that direction in the DISCUS project.

Read my short review of Quinn's book Change the World over at The Entrepreneurial Engineer here. (Note to Nosophorus: yes, change can be dangerous to the status quo.)

Professor Wunsch at University of Missouri at Rolla has an essay here entitled What's Not Next in AI. The following paragraph captures the tone of the article:

So, you can expect to see future computers do things that only humans did before. You can expect them to cause huge disruptions and make many jobs obsolete. You can expect that knowledge of computational intelligence techniques will become essential professional tools, much as a variety of software tools are considered necessary for work in many professions today. But don’t expect the computer to be smarter than you are. Computers will add many new capabilities where they outperform humans, but most of these will be highly task-specific. The generality, adaptability, and flexibility of human intelligence won’t be replaced anytime soon. If you hope to see it in your lifetime, then pin your hopes on medical research providing you with a dramatically longer lifetime.

In large part I agree with this statement, although I believe that achieving greater breadth of capability has always been part of the genetic-algorithm research agenda. One of the reasons GAs and computational intelligence tools are so widely used is their breadth. Moreover, as efficiency enhancement techniques become more powerful, there will be greater speed available and these speed gains will be intimately tied up to hardware gains through effective and general parallelism. Although the most optimistic projections are likely to be wrong (again), I'm not so sure that we won't see rapid expansion of what these techniques can do and a creeping breadth of capability and competence.

Jan Drugowitsch in agreement with Tim Kovacs have team up to provide a LCS and other GBML paper database. You can access it here. You can also check the LCS and other GBML for more related information and events.

The LCS and GBML site has a new section about book. It can be found here. The section collects LCS and GBML related books. If you found that relevant LCS and GBML books are missing, please post a comment to the editors of the site and they will take care of it.

Sometimes being a researcher means having to sell your ideas. See the post here.

Ninth International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems to be held as part of the ACM 2006 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2006) at the Renaissance Seattle Hotel in Seattle, Washington, USA. IWLCS is the only event to bring together most of the core researchers in classifier systems. A free introductory tutorial on LCS will be presented at GECCO 2006.

Further information and a complete CFP for IWLCS 2006 can be found here.

I just realized that this blog passed its one year birthday on 24 January. Look here for the very first post on 24 January 2005.

AV Festival 06 is a

bi-annual international festival of digitalart, moving image, music and new media which takes place in the NorthEast of England. The second AV festival will take placeacross three cities of NewcastleGateshead, Sunderland, Middlesbroughfrom 2 - 12 March 2006.

Under the rubric Life Like, the festival will explore the interplay between technological and biological life as explored by artists. Thefestival goes beyond a mere technological exploration of life. We are interested not just in the way that silicon circuits manifestsimulations of life, or imitations of intelligence, but in the way that biological life itself has been manufactured and mutated insidelaboratories.

Genetic algorithms play an important role in the thinking that motivates the festival:

In an increasingly technologised society, we find ourselves surroundedby, and immersed in, virtual and artificial worlds. Evolutionarycomputational techniques
and genetic algorithms correlate the processesof the computer with the processes
we observe in biology. Digitaltechnology has allowed for entire environments to
be modelled within thecomputer. The internet has created a culture, where
societies of userscan inhabit these synthetic environments. Games, online
communities andimmersive interactive environments have become worlds within
worlds.

See the press release at newsmediafix here, and go to the festival website here.