At 10:31 22/02/2004 -0500, you wrote:

>We experimented around a fair amount, but this was 3 or more years
>ago, and I don't remember in detail.

Is there a group still working on it today?  I'd be very interested in
talking with them.

>ian>          Also, you state that any agent dies when it's cash drops
>ian>          below the
>ian> starting value.  It this a little harsh?  e.g. any agent which
>ian> does not act (win an auction) during the first simulation after
>ian> its birth will die instantly as it's cash-flow will be zero but
>ian> it will pay tax on the work it did deciding not to act.  That
>ian> agent might be useful in were other examples of the problem
>ian> presented, however.  Did you try letting them live until they
>ian> dropped below 90% of their start-level?
>
>My philosophy is this. I don't mind being harsh to software agents,
>they aren't people, I don't have any moral responsibility to prove
>beyond a reasonable doubt they are guilty before axing :^)

Right but imagine a situation where the input problems have more
variety.  E.g. we might randomly choose between block-problems where the
target is in (A) column#1 or (B) column#4.  In this case, there may be
agents which only come into play for A or B.  These agents might need to
survive through a number of whole instances without making any bids, before
they encounter the situation where they can demonstrate improving the
solution.  In this case, granting them some leeway would help them last
long enough to prove their worth.

Of course, in this case the parent would get less money back when the child
went bankrupt, but if start-up capitol came from somewhere else (for
example a fund filled with taxes and the remaining assets of bankrupt
agents) then there would be no need to play fair by the parent in that
case.  (That's for systems with no "creator" agents -- was that your term
-- in ones with creators, then the creator's finances and IP payments serve
this function)

That sounds reasonable to me, but I'm sure your experience has more to say
about it...

          Ian B


Living@Home - Open Source Evolving Organisms -
http://livingathome.sourceforge.net/

Dear Moderator

Thanks for finding a win-win solution.

Regards

G.Loganathan





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CALL FOR PANEL PROPOSALS

KDD-2004
THE TENTH ACM SIGKDD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
ON KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY AND DATA MINING

August 22-25, 2004
Seattle, Washington, USA

http://www.acm.org/sigkdd/kdd2004
Panels Chair:
Raghu Ramakrishnan
University of Wisconsin-Madison
raghu [at] cs.wisc.edu

IMPORTANT DATES:

Panel proposals due: March 26, 2004

Notification of acceptance/rejection: May 21, 2004

Camera-ready panel description due: June 04, 2004

Panel submissions are invited for KDD-2004. KDD is the premiere
event for the
data mining community, bringing together leading researchers
from academia
and industry.

Panels offer an interactive forum that engages panelists and
the audience in
lively discussion of important and often controversial issues.
Panels should
be lively, interactive, informative and relevant. Panels should
not be a set
of independent talks. The panel chair should facilitate discussion.
For
example, the chair may challenge panelists with questions after
short opening
statements.

Panel proposals should include:
-- Summary of the panel topic
-- Name, affiliation, and contact information for the panel chair

-- Names and affiliations of up to four panelists (in addition
to the panel
chair) who have made a commitment to participate
-- Brief biography of each participant
A mix of industry and academic panel members is encouraged.

Panel proposals should be submitted electronically in ASCII format
to the
Panels Chair, Raghu Ramakrishnan, at raghu [at] cs.wisc.edu

Hi,
	 Just letting the group know that I did get some interest in this, so I've
created a discussion group to talk through the basic plan:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/REACTS_Discuss/

	 And anybody else is welcome to contribute if they wish.

	 Ian Badcoe



Living@Home - Open Source Evolving Organisms -
http://livingathome.sourceforge.net/

-- CALL FOR PAPERS - Deadline for submissions of Second Call: 26th
March 2004 (for all contributions) --

               IADIS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE e-SOCIETY 2004
                     July 16-19, 2004 - AVILA, SPAIN
                      (http://www.iadis.org/es2004)

* Conference background and goals
The IADIS e-Society 2004 conference aims to address the main issues
of concern within the
Information Society. This conference covers both the technical as
well as the non-technical
aspects of the Information Society. Broad areas of interest are
eGovernment / eGovernance,
eBusiness / eCommerce, eLearning, eHealth, Information Systems, and
Information Management.
These broad areas are divided into more detailed areas (see below).
However innovative
contributes that don't fit into these areas will also be considered
since they might be of
benefit to conference attendees.

* Format of the Confernce
The conference will comprise invited talks and oral presentations.
The proceedings of the
conference will be published in the form of a book. The best paper
authors will be invited
to publish extended versions of their papers in selected Journals.

* Types of submissions
Full and Short Papers, Posters/Demonstrations, Tutorials, Panels and
Doctoral Consortium.
All submissions are subject to a blind refereeing process.

* Topics related to e-Society are of interest. These include best
practice, case studies,
strategies and tendencies in the following areas:

«« eGovernment / eGovernance »»
May include issues relating to:
· Accessibility
· Democracy and the Citizen
· Digital Economies
· Digital Regions
· eAdministration
· eGovernment Management
· eProcurement
· Global Trends
· National and International Economies
· Social Inclusion

«« eBusiness / eCommerce »»
May include issues relating to:
· Business Ontologies and Models
· Digital Goods and Services
· eBusiness Models
· eCommerce Application Fields
· eCommerce Economics
· eCommerce Services
· Electronic Service Delivery
· eMarketing
· Languages for Describing Goods and Services
· Online Auctions and Technologies
· Virtual Organisations and Teleworking

«« eLearning »»
May include issues relating to:
· Collaborative Learning
· Curriculum Content Design & Development
· Delivery Systems and Environments
· Educational Systems Design
· eLearning Organisational Issues
· Evaluation and Assessment
· Virtual Learning Environments and Issues
· Web-based Learning Communities

«« eHealth »»
May include issues relating to:
· Data Security Issues
· eHealth Policy and Practice
· eHealthcare Strategies and Provision
· Legal Issues
· Medical Research Ethics
· Patient Privacy and Confidentiality

«« Information Systems »»
May include issues relating to:
· Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
· Intelligent Agents
· Intelligent Systems
· IS Security Issues
· Mobile Applications
· Multimedia Applications
· Payment Systems
· Protocols and Standards
· Software Requirements and IS Architectures
· Storage Issues
· Strategies and Tendencies
· System Architectures
· Telework Technologies
· Ubiquitous Computing
· Virtual Reality
· Wireless Communications

«« Information Management »»
May include issues relating to:
· Computer-Mediated Communication
· Content Development
· Cyber law and Intellectual Property
· Data Mining
· ePublishing and Digital Libraries
· Human Computer Interaction
· Information Search and Retrieval
· Knowledge Management
· Policy Issues
· Privacy Issues
· Social and Organizational Aspects
· Virtual Communities
· XML and Other Extensible Languages

* Important Dates:
- Submission Deadline - Second Call: 26 March 2004
- Notification to Authors: 26 April 2004
- Final Camera-Ready Submission and Early Registration: Until 14 May
2004
- Late Registration: After 14 May 2004
- Conference: Spain, 16 to 19 July 2004

* Conference Location
The conference will be held in Avila, Spain.

* Secretariat
IADIS Secretariat - IADIS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE e-SOCIETY 2004
Rua Sao Sebastiao da Pedreira, 100, 3
1050-209 Lisbon, Portugal
E-mail: es2004@...
Web site: http://www.iadis.org/es2004

* Scientific Committee

Conference Co-Chairs
Pedro Isaías, Universidade Aberta (Portuguese Open University),
Portugal
Piet Kommers, University of Twente, The Netherlands

Program Chair
Maggie McPherson, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

for the full Committee Members list please access
http://www.iadis.org/es2004/committees.asp

*** Submission Deadline Extension to March 14th ***

              Workshop Announcement and Third Call for Papers

                     Grammatical Evolution (GEWS 2004)

                        to be held as part of the
         Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO)
                         Seattle, Washington USA
                  June 26-30, 2004 (Saturday - Wednesday)
                     http://www.isgec.org/gecco-2004/

               http://www.grammatical-evolution.org/gews2004/


Following on from the success of two earlier workshops on Grammatical
Evolution at GECCO 2002 and GECCO 2003 we are pleased to announce the 3rd
Grammatical Evolution Workshop to be held at GECCO 2004.

Grammatical Evolution (GE) is an evolutionary automatic programming system
that can evolve programs in an arbitrary language from a binary string. GE
adopts a genotype-phenotype mapping process taking as input a grammar that
describes the syntax of the evolved program. In addition to the grammar,
the search algorithm (the standard has been a variable-length genetic
algorithm) is also a 'plug-in' component of the system. The workshop will
address all aspects of GE including foundations, extensions, analysis,
applications, and welcomes submissions on all grammar-based approaches to
Genetic Programming.

Workshop Deadlines:

Paper submission: Sunday March 14th, 2004
Acceptance/Rejection notification: Friday April 2nd, 2004
Camera-ready copy submission: Friday April 16, 2004

Workshop Submission Instructions:

Submitted papers may be up to *12* pages in length. The format style of
the paper should be the standard GECCO Springer llncs format. Authors
are requested to submit their papers in electronic form (postscript or
pdf) via email to: michael.oneill@...

For up to date information please refer to the workshop website:
http://www.grammatical-evolution.org/gews2004/

Organisers:

Michael O'Neill
Biocomputing & Developmental Systems Group
Dept. of Computer Science & Information Systems
University of Limerick
Ireland
Email: michael.oneill@...
Tel: +353-61-213542
Fax: +353-61-202734

Conor Ryan
Biocomputing & Developmental Systems Group
Dept. of Computer Science & Information Systems
University of Limerick
Ireland
Email: conor.ryan@...
Tel: +353-61-202755
Fax: +353-61-202734


Program Committee:

Atif Azad (University Of Limerick)
Anthony Brabazon (University College Dublin)
Maarten Keijzer (Free University Amsterdam)
Jiri Kubalik (CTU Prague)
Bill Langdon (University College London)
Bob McKay  (Australian Defence Force Academy)
Nic McPhee (University of Minnesota)
Jason Moore (Vanderbilt University)
Miguel Nicolau (University Of Limerick)
Michael O'Neill (University Of Limerick)
Una-May O'Reilly (MIT)
Conor Ryan (University Of Limerick)
Marc Schoenauer (INRIA)
Michele Sebag (Universite de Paris Sud)


---------------
Dr. Michael O'Neill, CSG027A, Biocomputing & Developmental Systems Group,
Dept. of Computer Science & Information Systems,
University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland.

Email: michael.oneill@...   WWW  : http://shine.csis.ul.ie
Phone: +353-61-213542         Fax  : +353-61-202734

Hi Everybody
Is there any software or source code available which
can convert LISP S-expressions to Spice netlist.
Regards
Arun

__________________________________
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ian> Is there a group still working on it today?  I'd be very
ian> interested in talking with them.

We did this work at NECI which has ceased to exist, and the work is
not being pursued at their successor. Igor Durdanovic wrote the C++
code for these experiments and would be able to give you detailed
info. I don't want to post his email without asking him, send me
direct email and I'll put you in touch.
I may be working on these things again next year.

ian> Right but imagine a situation where the input problems have more
ian> variety.  E.g. we might randomly choose between block-problems
ian> where the target is in (A) column#1 or (B) column#4.  In this
ian> case, there may be agents which only come into play for A or B.
ian> These agents might need to survive through a number of whole
ian> instances without making any bids, before they encounter the
ian> situation where they can demonstrate improving the solution.  In
ian> this case, granting them some leeway would help them last long
ian> enough to prove their worth.

Well, its still a question of cost-benefit analysis...
our approach would still work, when you happened to create an A agent
in an A instance and it did well, it would get started,
when you happened to create an A agent in a B instance, it would die,
but roughly speaking that would happen anyway. You can't try out
too many new agents per instance, otherwise you are making big
perturbations on the performance of the system and its ability
to hill climb (which depends on relatively smooth variation)
becomes impaired. With new random agents, the chance that 1 will
improve things is a lot better than that two new ones will improve
at the same time, if two are active, one might be good but the other
basically lethal and result in killing them both off-- and its even
possible the bad one will somehow profit temporarily while getting
rid of the good one.

So, you are testing less than of order one agent per instance,
and whether you keep them around for a while inactive or kill them
soon just impacts the number of agents you create, not the
number you test. And I still believe that, on average,
an agent that has acted and lost money is a worse bet than a new
agent, so unless the creation cost itself is important, its
better to test the best available.


ian> Of course, in this case the parent would get less money back when
ian> the child went bankrupt, but if start-up capitol came from
ian> somewhere else (for example a fund filled with taxes and the
ian> remaining assets of bankrupt agents) then there would be no need
ian> to play fair by the parent in that case.  (That's for systems
ian> with no "creator" agents -- was that your term
ian> -- in ones with creators, then the creator's finances and IP
ian> -- payments serve
ian> this function)

You want to be very careful of pumping money in through new
random agents. It gets pumped in in random, thus unproductive,
ways...

At one point in our early experiments with creator agents, before
we got it working, we had amazing speculative bubbles where
the investor agents would keep producing idiot agents with higher
and higher bids, running the prices up way beyond reality-- in fact
well beyond the final payoff in the instance for success!
Each investor would create an agent that bid more than the last one,
so they each made a profit, and only the final guy took a hit when
the instance was solved...
it would evolve to higher and higher bids for a while, never learning
how to solve instances very well, and then crash...

This was in maybe '96 or '97 while the internet bubble was already
visible, right around the time Greenspan was talking about irrational
exuberance, so it was kind of interesting as an economic model,
although ultimately not useful for evolutionary programming...

ian> That sounds reasonable to me, but I'm sure your experience has
ian> more to say about it...

Dear friends,

If anybody hasthe source code for finding a "shortest
path" for a grath,
pleasesend it to me.

thanking you,

regards,

Alli.

__________________________________
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Yahoo! Search - Find what you’re looking for faster
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SME 2004 is inviting submission of papers on GP, EP, GA, and/or NN
applications in business and economics. The deadline is March 26.

For more information, please check out URL:

http://newton.uor.edu/IFAC_SME_2004/

SME 2004 Chair

There are bibtex files describing some of the papers to be presented
in Coimbra, Portugal, 5-7 April 2004 online at

ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/authors/W.B.Langdon/biblio/evowscop2004.bib
ftp://ftp.cs.bham.ac.uk/pub/authors/W.B.Langdon/biblio/evows2004.bib


                                 Bill

ps: cheap registration at EuroGP until 10 March
     http://evonet.inria.fr/eurogp2004/registration.html

         W. B. Langdon,                          Phone +44 20 7679 4436
         Computer Science,                       Fax   +44 20 7387 1397
         University College, London,
         Gower Street,
         London, WC1E 6BT, UK
         http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/W.Langdon

Foundations of Genetic Programming
                                 http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/W.Langdon/FOGP
EuroGP Portugal 5-7 April 2004  http://www.evonet.info/eurogp2004/
GECCO  Seattle 26-30 June 2004  http://www.isgec.org/
GP Bibliography                 http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~wbl/biblio/

On Feb 19, 2004, at 9:18 AM, Christian Gagne wrote:

> It is somewhat slow, but it seems that you can easily call C/C++
> routines from it to speed-up execution of critical parts of the code.
>
> Knowing so, I wonder if it can be a nice programming language for doing
> GP. Is there people on the list you did some GP in python? What is your
> general experience with it?

Python is indeed pokey: and though you can call C/C++, I wouldn't
imagine that this buys much when you must evaluate some GP-like
structure using a python system.  This notwithstanding, Python is quite
useful as an EC language in a variety of contexts.  I don't know of
people using Python for *GP*, but I do know someone using Python for
Pitt-approach rulesystems.  Jeff Bassett (bassett@...) will, I
think, be very soon releasing his small Python EC core.

Sean

If ou know C++ well, you can download Boost library from www.boost.org that
contains a graph library.


Mohammed

Look at
http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~algorith/files/shortest-path.shtml

Mohammed
----- Original Message -----
From: "H.Alli" <hyderalli@...>
To: <genetic_programming@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2004 8:31 PM
Subject: [GP] help-shortest path


> Dear friends,
>
> If anybody hasthe source code for finding a "shortest
> path" for a grath,
> pleasesend it to me.
>
> thanking you,
>
> regards,
>
> Alli.
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Search - Find what you're looking for faster
> http://search.yahoo.com
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>

Hey everyone, I just found this list and started reading the archives.
Looks great.

I haven't found that much quality info on GP/AL out there on the net,
and much of what I do find seems to be outdated. The links section here
doesn't have that much either, can people recommend some good places to
get more in depth information? My interest with AL started when I read
Artificial Life II, a collection of papers from a conference on AL by
the Sante Fe Institute. The book and it's research are a little old now
and I'm really interested in finding out about more modern techniques.

Besides my recreational interest in AL, I'm starting go back to school
to finish my degree. Currently I'm planning on majoring in Math and
attending UC Santa Cruz (where I live). UCSC seems to have good math
and CS departments, with a lot of professors doing research on machine
learning. Nothing specifically related to genetic programming though.
Any recommendations on schools that are doing work in GP? I've heard
Stanford is great, but I don't think I can get in or afford that.

Thanks,
    Justin

[We apologize for multiple postings]


          *** Submission Deadline Extension to March 19 ***

			 EvoHybrid'04
	 Application of Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithms to Complex
			 Optimization Problems
		 http://evohybrid04.dei.uc.pt

		 Workshop to be held as part of the
	 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2004)
		 Seattle, June 26-30, 2004
		 (http://www.isgec.org/gecco-2004/)

Please note that the submission deadline for GECCO Workshop EvoHybridï04
has been extended until March 19, 2004. EvoHybridï04 will focus on the
application of hybrid evolutionary algorithms to complex optimization
problems. Adopting several current approaches as a starting point, this
workshop aims at promoting a widespread discussion about this topic and,
most important, to analyze if it is possible to develop new hybrid
architectures that perform better than todayïs methods.

All details about EvoHybridï04 (including submission instructions) can be
found at: http://evohybrid04.dei.uc.pt

New workshop deadlines:

Submission deadline: March 19, 2004
Notification of acceptance: April 2, 2004
Camera-ready copy: April 16, 2004

Organizers:

Francisco B. Pereira, Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra, Portugal
(xico@...).
Ernesto Costa, University of Coimbra, Portugal (ernesto@...).
G�nther Raidl, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
(raidl@...).


Program Committee:

Edmund Burke, University of Nottingham, UK.
Carlos Cotta, University of M laga, Spain.
Jens Gottlieb, SAP AG, Germany.
Jin-Kao Hao, University of Angers, France.
Bryant Julstrom, St. Cloud State University, USA.
Byung-Ro Moon, Seoul National University, Korea.
Thomas St�tzle, Technical University, Darmstadt, Germany.
Kay Chen Tan, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
Jorge Tavares, University of Coimbra, Portugal.

dear all
im looking to make my master thesis in risk... did any body know if there is
any genetic algorithm that can work in risk analysis...
best regards

Hi all,

for those historians out there wondering about early EC and "the first
guy to do GP", here's a fascinating email I just had. I hope you enjoy
it.

Peter.


Dear Mr. Bentley

          I was very interested to read your article in the New
Scientist. The following may interest/amuse you.

         In 1958 I built "LEO II/4" (which was the first computer Ford
Motor Company had in Britain). It was as big as a house. Over 7000
valves, Average add time some 320 microseconds. I had unlimited access
to play on it as I wished (in my own time) - which must have been
unusual in those days.

       I had read a book by Professor Grey Walter, a neurology researcher
at Bristol,  (I think that is who it was - it is a long time ago now)
about homoeostasis. He had randomly wired a group of telephone exchange
uniselectors (contacts and motors) and mechanically linked pairs of the
moving arms. Then he applied power. After chuntering for a bit the
system worked itself into the state where it was "happy to sit" because
there was no power being routed to any motor.

          I was obsessed by my toy and wondered how I could programme it
so that it kept running until a quiescent state had been reached. I
thought of what in those days were "eleven-plus"  (exams for grammar
school entry) tests and questions like The "First four members of a
series are a, b, c, d. What is the fifth? And how I would do them.
Namely, do calculations based on 4 until the fourth member's value is
achieved.  The the same algorithm on 3,2,1 and if they give the right
result, apply it to 5.

        So I wrote a program to invent little programs by randomly 
picking up instructions to change the current number in the
"accumulator" by

           ADD  1, or 2 or 3

           ADD  1 x  the number, or 2 x, or 3 x

           ADD the number squared or 2 x

           AS ABOVE, but SUBTRACT.

           Random numbers (for selecting one action out of 16) were
generated by picking out 4 bits from the middle of successive squarings
of a 39 bit number.

            The only bias in the selection of the next instruction was to
take into account whether an augmenting or a decreasing one was
currently needed.

           In other words,  given the value of

                  a  *  x ^ 2 + b *  x + c   for x = 4, 3 , 2, 1

         find the value of a, b, c and the value of the expression for x
= 5

           It worked!. The average time to find and answer was some nine
seconds.  If the algorithm reached 23 instructions it was aborted and a
new one started. This was because the successful program was output by
punching the machine code onto a single Hollerith card, which could
only represent 22 instructions.

        The same type of cards were used to feed the programme - hand
punched in machine code binary - into the computer.

         I was pleased with the resuilt, but having done it, it all
seemed rather trivial. I now realise that had I known where to publish
it might have been of interest. Though it may be that there was no
relevant literature in those days.

          I subsequently, on the next main frame I was building, tried
assemblling algorithms from Boolian sub-routines to create the logic of
a single-bit adder. But did not have time to complete it / lost
interest because it was a lot of work to show that it could inevitably
be done (!)

       I hope you have found this amusing.


             Regards


                     Steve Farrow

Dear all,

  Please note that the deadline
  for 'early bird' registration
  for EuroGP is March 10th.

   http://evonet.inria.fr/eurogp2004/registration.html

  Best regards,

    Simon
    (EuroGP publicity chair)


--------------------------------------------------
Dr. Simon Lucas
Department of Computer Science
University of Essex
Colchester CO4 3SQ
United Kingdom
Email:  sml@...

http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/staff/lucas/lucas.htm
--------------------------------------------------

** WSC9 - First Call for Papers ***

WSC9: 9th Online World Conference on Soft Computing in Industrial
Applications

September 20th - October 08th, 2004

** On the World Wide Web **

Conference URL: http://www.cs.nmt.edu/~wsc9/

Mirror: http://wsc9.softcomputing.net/


General Information about WSC9:

Original papers and tutorials are invited for the 9th Online World
Conference on Soft Computing in Industrial Applications (WSC9) to be
held on the Internet. WSC9 aims at bringing together outstanding
research and developments in the field of soft computing
(evolutionary computation, fuzzy logic, neural networks, and their
fusion) and its applications across the world with the goal to
publish high-quality research quickly and with less cost. Accepted
papers of WSC9 will be published as an edited volume by Springer
Verlag, Germany after the conference. Moreover, extended versions of
selected papers of the conference will also be invited for a "fast
track" submission for the Elsevier Science Applied Soft Computing
Journal.

We aim to have inspiring discussions between the authors and
participants, and make them visible to everyone on the Internet.
There will be a number of mirror sites around the world to make
easier the access to this major event. Please note that the
registration is open to everyone and it is completely free of
charge.

June 04th, 2004
Deadline for submissions of regular papers, online survey paper
proposals and online tutorial proposals. Papers are submitted in
electronic form as PDF-files through the conference web site.
Authors are also encouraged to submit multi-media demonstrations
(including software etc.)

July 30th, 2004
Acceptance/rejection notification

August 27th, 2004
Submission of full papers and online presentations

September 20th - October 08th, 2004
Online conference

November 12th, 2004
Submission of camera-ready papers for final review

Topics of Interest:

Submissions are invited in, but not limited to, any of the following
areas:

Soft Computing for Modeling, Control, and Optimization
Fuzzy Control
Neuro-Fuzzy Systems
Genetic Fuzzy Systems
Neuro-Fuzzy-Genetic Systems
Software Agent Systems and Architectures
Multi-Agent Architectures and Collaborative Learning
Ant Colony Optimization
Fuzzy Information Fusion
Rough Sets
Bayesian Networks
Fuzzy Image Processing
Bio-inspired Systems
Artificial Neural Networks
Support Vector Machines
Evolutionary Algorithms, Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search
Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization
Hybrid Optimization Techniques (integration of global search and
local search techniques)
Simulation Environments
Data Mining
Industrial Applications of Soft Computing
Intelligent Information Retrieval
Language Processing
Robotics
Autonomous Reasoning
Fault Diagnosis
Bioinformatics
Web Intelligence
Speech Processing
Business Information Systems
Knowledge Management


Paper Submission

Authors should fill up the online form and upload a full paper (max.
10 pages) in PDF format by June 04, 2004.

Authors who are interested to submit a paper should send an
expression of interest to: <wsc9@...> including title
of paper and author details.

Organized session proposals and tutorials are welcome. Please notify
the Special Events Chair, Katrin Franke (katrin.franke@...)
about your intention to organize a session/tutorial as soon as
possible.

For special sessions, please send session title, organizer's name
and e-mail address, a short synopsis of session objective (max. 100
words), organizer's expertise in the field, and a tentative list of
papers in the proposed technical session. At least three session
papers have to be submitted by June 04, 2004.

For online proposals and survey papers, please send the abstract and
biography of the presenter before June 04, 2004 and if approved send
the final presentation paper by August 27th, 2004.



Paper Acceptance:
All accepted papers would be presented during the online conference.
Participants are also encouraged to present multimedia presentations
like online demonstrations, software, video clips etc.) to make the
online discussions more interesting. Authors of accepted papers have
to register and visit the conference website on a regular basis in
order to respond to questions and comments on their paper without
delay. By November 26th, 2004, camera-ready copies of extended
papers have to be submitted for final inclusion in the conference
proceedings. Extended versions of selected papers will appear in a
special issue in the "Journal of Applied Soft Computing".


WSC 9 Organization

Honorary Chair
Ronald Yager, Iona College, USA

General Chair
Ajith Abraham, Oklahoma State University, USA

International Co-chairs
Frank Hoffmann, University of Dortmund, Germany
Avineri Erel, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel

Program Chair
Mario Köppen, Fraunhofer IPK Berlin, Germany

Sponsorship Chair
Rajkumar Roy, University of Cranfield, UK

Publication Chair
Bernard de Baets, Ghent University, Belgium

Virtual Exhibition Chair
Fabio Zambetta, University of Bari, Italy

Special Events Chair
Katrin Franke, Fraunhofer IPK Berlin, Germany

Industrial Liason Chairs
Antony Satyadas, IBM, USA
Suthikshn Kumar, Larsen & Toubro Infotech, India

------------------------------------------------
For further information please contact:

Ajith Abraham <ajith.abraham@...>
Mario Köppen <mario.koeppen@...>


Please address all general enquiries to <wsc9@...>

I am a PhD student in Economics, and my minor area of
study is computer science. My dissertation is on
application of genetic algorithm/programming, neural
network, and data mining techniques for the prediction
of exchange rates and financial crises. I am also
applying standard statistical and econometric
tecjniques for the same purpose. I am going to
graduate very soon. However, although I have got
several interviews for positions in the area of pure
economics, I can hardly find any position that would
offer an opportunity in the combined area of finance,
economics, and artificial intelligence. I heard that
there are many finance corporations and research
centers that specialize in financial forecasting using
genetic programming and other artificial intelligence
techniques. Is it possible to give me some idea how
and where I could get the names of these corporations?
Your help is really appreciated.

Regards,
Saktinil Roy


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Search - Find what you’re looking for faster
http://search.yahoo.com

Thanks a ton for sharing that great story!

You wonder how many people may have tinkered with similar ideas back in
the past.  Probably limited (as he points out) by who had access to
interesting hardware, but still.

	 Nic McPhee
	 mcphee@...
	 Division of Science and Mathematics
	 University of Minnesota, Morris

Peter J Bentley wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> for those historians out there wondering about early EC and "the first
> guy to do GP", here's a fascinating email I just had. I hope you enjoy
> it.
>
> Peter.
>
>
> Dear Mr. Bentley
>
>          I was very interested to read your article in the New
> Scientist. The following may interest/amuse you.
>
>         In 1958 I built "LEO II/4" (which was the first computer Ford
> Motor Company had in Britain). It was as big as a house. Over 7000
> valves, Average add time some 320 microseconds. I had unlimited access
> to play on it as I wished (in my own time) - which must have been
> unusual in those days.
>
>       I had read a book by Professor Grey Walter, a neurology researcher
> at Bristol,  (I think that is who it was - it is a long time ago now)
> about homoeostasis. He had randomly wired a group of telephone exchange
> uniselectors (contacts and motors) and mechanically linked pairs of the
> moving arms. Then he applied power. After chuntering for a bit the
> system worked itself into the state where it was "happy to sit" because
> there was no power being routed to any motor.
>
>          I was obsessed by my toy and wondered how I could programme it
> so that it kept running until a quiescent state had been reached. I
> thought of what in those days were "eleven-plus"  (exams for grammar
> school entry) tests and questions like The "First four members of a
> series are a, b, c, d. What is the fifth? And how I would do them.
> Namely, do calculations based on 4 until the fourth member's value is
> achieved.  The the same algorithm on 3,2,1 and if they give the right
> result, apply it to 5.
>
>        So I wrote a program to invent little programs by randomly
> picking up instructions to change the current number in the
> "accumulator" by
>
>           ADD  1, or 2 or 3
>
>           ADD  1 x  the number, or 2 x, or 3 x
>
>           ADD the number squared or 2 x
>
>           AS ABOVE, but SUBTRACT.
>
>           Random numbers (for selecting one action out of 16) were
> generated by picking out 4 bits from the middle of successive squarings
> of a 39 bit number.
>
>            The only bias in the selection of the next instruction was to
> take into account whether an augmenting or a decreasing one was
> currently needed.
>
>           In other words,  given the value of
>
>                  a  *  x ^ 2 + b *  x + c   for x = 4, 3 , 2, 1
>
>         find the value of a, b, c and the value of the expression for x
> = 5
>
>           It worked!. The average time to find and answer was some nine
> seconds.  If the algorithm reached 23 instructions it was aborted and a
> new one started. This was because the successful program was output by
> punching the machine code onto a single Hollerith card, which could
> only represent 22 instructions.
>
>        The same type of cards were used to feed the programme - hand
> punched in machine code binary - into the computer.
>
>         I was pleased with the resuilt, but having done it, it all
> seemed rather trivial. I now realise that had I known where to publish
> it might have been of interest. Though it may be that there was no
> relevant literature in those days.
>
>          I subsequently, on the next main frame I was building, tried
> assemblling algorithms from Boolian sub-routines to create the logic of
> a single-bit adder. But did not have time to complete it / lost
> interest because it was a lot of work to show that it could inevitably
> be done (!)
>
>       I hope you have found this amusing.
>
>
>             Regards
>
>
>                     Steve Farrow
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>

[Apologies if you receive this more than once]

----------------------------------------------


Dear researcher,

We would like to inform you that the deadline for our GECCO-2004
workshop on Adaptation, Approximation, and Learning in Evolutionary Computation
is now extended. Please see the details below.
We heartily invite your submissions.

More information can be found at
http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/jirio/GECCO-2004/

Best regards

Jiri Ocenasek, Sibylle Mueller, Stefan Kern, Nikolaus Hansen
& Petros Koumoutsakos



-----------------------------------
GECCO-2004 Workshop Call for Papers
-----------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Adaptation, Approximation, and Learning in Evolutionary Computation
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                      to be held as part of the
     Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO)
                       Seattle, Washington USA
               June 26-30, 2004 (Saturday - Wednesday)
                      http://www.isgec.org/gecco-2004/

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DESCRIPTION OF THE WORKSHOP TOPIC:

The goal of introducing learning to EAs to enhance their efficiency has
quite some history: In evolution strategies (ES), this form of learning
is usually referred to as 'adaptation' and was developed since the
beginnings of ES in the 1970's.  In genetic algorithms (GA),
the learning is called 'estimation of distribution' or 'learning
probability distributions' and has been the subject of intensive research
starting in the 1990's. Moreover, in the last years the topic of
learning functions, called 'approximation', has gained increasing
attention from many researchers. Although belonging to the same community,
there has not been so much interaction between the researchers from the
different fields to work together towards an increasing efficiency of their
algorithms. However, the underlying ideas are often similar. Therefore, we
propose to bring together researchers from the field of ES and GA to discuss
their ideas. Under the unifying concept of learning, we hope that this exchange
will result in interesting new ideas and will lead to novel, rigorous
and efficient algorithms.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WORKSHOP AND PAPER FORMAT:

The workshop will run for half a day. The program will include:
o  1-2 presentation by invited speakers
o  paper presentations (each about 20 minutes)
o  Panel discussion:
    "Summary and future work"

Please see the GECCO 2004 paper submission details for the format of the
papers.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

IMPORTANT DATES (updated):

April 4     Paper submission (from 4 to 10 pages, only PDF accepted).
             Please send your paper to Jiri Ocenasek (jirio@...).

April 19    Notification of paper acceptance/rejection.

April 28    Camera ready paper (only PDF accepted).

June 27     Workshop in Seattle.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS:

Jiri Ocenasek, Sibylle Mueller, Stefan Kern, Nikolaus Hansen, Petros
Koumoutsakos

Contact person:
              Dr. Jiri Ocenasek
              Computational Lab & Institute of Computational Science
              Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zuerich
              ETH Zentrum, HRS H9
              CH-8092 Zuerich
              Switzerland
Email:       jirio@...
Phone:       +41 1 632 6410
Fax:         +41 1 632 1703

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi :)
I'm postgraduated university student .
My thesis is about the application of Genetic Algorithm and fuzzy
logic ( And Other branch of Soft computing ) In project Planning an
Control ( Schedualing & Resource allocation ) , Could everybody help
me please?
And if your research is approch to this please drope me a line .
Thank you very much
Best regards
Mas'ood

--Apologies for multiple copies--
                            --Deadline extended--

                                 WORKSHOP ON

        Modularity, Regularity, and Hierarchy in Evolutionary Computation

                           to be held as part of the
          Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO)
                            Seattle, Washington USA
                  June 26-30, 2004 (Saturday - Wednesday)
                         http://www.isgec.org/gecco-2004/

Scope

Scalability of open-ended evolutionary processes depends on their
ability to exploit functional modularity, structural regularity and
hierarchy. Functional modularity creates a structural separation of
function that reduces the amount of coupling between internal and
external behavior, allowing evolution to reuse modules as high-level
building blocks. Structural regularity is the correlation of patterns
within an individual, such as symmetry, repetition and self-similarity,
allowing evolution to specify increasingly extensive structures while
maintaining short description lengths. Hierarchy is the recursive
composition of function and structure into increasingly larger and
adapted units, allowing evolution to search efficiently increasingly
complex spaces. This workshop will bring together researchers interested
in these topics to discuss how principles of modularity, regularity and
hierarchy can be applied in open-ended evolutionary computation.

Format

The goal of this workshop is to encourage discussion of these topics
across boundaries within the evolutionary computation field. Interested
participants are encouraged to submit a proposed contribution to this
discussion, ranging from a 1-page position statement to a full
camera-ready paper to be included as part of the proceedings of the
workshop (published with the GECCO proceedings). Selected authors will
be invited to present their ideas at the workshop, and jointly co-author
a review paper that will be submitted to a leading journal. The format
and contents of this paper will be discussed at the workshop.

Submission

Submit a proposed contribution to hod.lipson@... in PDF format,
by April 16, 2004. The contribution can range from a 1-page position
statement to a full camera-ready paper to be included as part of the
proceedings of the workshop. Ideas that have been published elsewhere
are permissible.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline April 16, 2004 for contributions to be included in
the proceedings, or April 30 for position statements.
Notification of Acceptance April 19, 2004
Workshop in Seattle June 26, 2004

For more information, see:
http://www.mae.cornell.edu/lipson/gecco_modularity.htm

Organizers

Hod Lipson (Cornell), Edwin de Jong (Utrecht), John Koza (Stanford)

*** FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS ***

*** DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MARCH 26 ***

AAAI - GECCO 2004 Workshop on:

Biological Applications of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (BioGEC)

Summary

The field of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GEC) has greatly
benefited by borrowing ideas from the biological sciences.  Recently, it has
become clear that GEC can help solve biological problems, and thereby "repay
its debt".

The third annual workshop on Biological Applications of Genetic and
Evolutionary Computation (BioGEC), organized in connection with the 2004
Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2004) in Seattle, is
intended to explore and critically evaluate the application of GEC to
biological problems.  Specifically, the goal is to bring biologists and
computer scientists together to foster an exchange of ideas that will yield
emergent properties that will move the field forward in unpredictable ways.

Workshop Date and Location

Sunday, June 27, 2004 (2 hours)

Held as part of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
(GECCO-2004)
Seattle, Washington USA June 26-30, 2004 (Saturday - Wednesday)

Request for Papers

In order to facilitate interaction and discussion, the workshop invites
papers in the form of commentaries, essays, perspectives, surveys,
tutorials, and reviews that focus on ideas for discussion rather than
specific research results.  Investigators interested in presenting research
results are encouraged to submit their papers to the GECCO track on
biological applications.  Questions that might be addressed in a paper
include (but are not limited to):

1) What biological problems are GEC methods well-suited for?

2) What biological problems are GEC methods not well-suited for?

3) Which of the many GEC methods should be used for a specific biological
problem?

4) What are the successes and failures of GEC for a specific biological
problem?

5) What impact has GEC had on biology/bioinformatics?

6) Should all biologists/bioinformaticists be using GEC?

7) What is the future of GEC for solving biological problems?

8) What GEC software tools are available for use by
biologists/bioinformaticists?

9) What unanswered questions in GEC are relevant to solving biological
problems?

Presentations will be selected according to papers submitted to the workshop
organizers.  Criteria for selection of papers for the workshop include:

1) Paper addresses an important question on the use of GEC for solving
biological problems.

2) Paper contributes to the diversity of topics covered by the workshop.

3) Paper is well-written.

4) Paper focuses on ideas for discussion and interaction rather than new
research results.

Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.  The best
papers will be invited to contribute to a special issue of the journal
"Frontiers in Biosciences" to be published summer or fall of 2004.

Please send 1-12 page papers (PDF or Word) to Jason H. Moore
(Moore@...) and Marylyn D. Ritchie
(Ritchie@...) by Monday, March 26, 2004.  The format for
manuscripts submitted to the workshop is that used for the Springer-Verlag
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.  Please see the GECCO-2004
website for details of the LNCS style and format.

Important Dates

March 19, 2004: early registration for GECCO-2004

March 26, 2004: papers due

April 14, 2004: acceptance notices

April 26, 2004: camera ready revisions due

June 27, 2004: BioGEC workshop


Workshop Organizers

Jason H. Moore, Ph.D.
Marylyn D. Ritchie, Ph.D.

E-mail:
Moore@...
Ritchie@...

Phone:
615-343-5852

Fax:
615-343-8619

Surface address:
Center for Human Genetics Research
519 Light Hall, Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN, USA 37232-0700

At 16:45 10/03/2004 +0000, K wrote:
>Hi :)
>I'm postgraduated university student .
>My thesis is about the application of Genetic Algorithm and fuzzy
>logic ( And Other branch of Soft computing ) In project Planning an
>Control ( Schedualing & Resource allocation ) , Could everybody help
>me please?
>And if your research is approch to this please drope me a line .
>Thank you very much
>Best regards
>Mas'ood

Genetic algorithms are unlikely to be the best tool for the job, see
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/ai/genetic/part3/faq-doc-1.html

Fuzzy logic can't handle dependent variables correctly and is a poor
choice.  Use Bayesian probability.

Regards

Martin

Resources:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/ai/fuzzy/part1/faq.html
JAYNES, E.T. (edited by G. Larry Bretthorst), Probability Theory: The Logic
of Science
news:comp.ai.genetic
news:comp.ai.fuzzy

Just in time for the GECCO Tiny-GP Contest :-) ECLab has posted ECJ 11,
the canonical example of how to program GP in the small!  We've also
posted MASON version 3.

ECJ has finally, and officially, moved from U Maryland to George Mason
University.  The new URL is:

	 http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/ecj/

If you have any projects which used ECJ that you'd like a link from off
of the main page, let me know.  MASON is likewise at

	 http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/

ECLab's home page is http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/

For those who are still scratching their heads, here's the boilerplate:

-----
ECJ is a research EC system written in Java. ECJ has a very large
number of features and was designed to be highly flexible, with nearly
all classes (and all of their settings) dynamically determined at
runtime by a user-provided parameter file. All structures in the system
are arranged to be easily modifiable. Even so, the system was designed
with an eye toward efficiency; ECJ may make you reconsider notions
about Java and slowness. The software has nothing to do with
Evolutionary Computation Journal :-)

MASON is a fast discrete-event multiagent simulation library core in
Java, designed to be the foundation for large custom-purpose Java
simulations, and also to provide more than enough functionality for
many lightweight simulation needs. MASON contains both a model library
and an optional suite of visualization tools in 2D and 3D.  The toolkit
is co-developed by ECLab and GMU's Center for Social Complexity.
-----

Sean Luke
George Mason University