Last week Pier Luca Lanzi was visiting IlliGAL. Yesterday, before he left for Chicago, we went for one last brunch. He mentioned that he liked a lot the videos we shot during NIGEL 2006. Thinking about it we agreed would be useful to recover the videos and upload them into some of the usual video sharing site suspects. Currently they are hosted, for long term storage purposes, at NCSA’s web archive. I spent sometime retrieving them from the archive (they are pretty fat and encoded in wmv) and I stated transcoding it in m4a. My plan? Make them available via Vimeo and LCS & GBML Central. Also, I will be uploading the presentation slides to SlideShare and also make them available via LCS & GBML Central. ...

The deadline for the special issue on Metaheuristics for Large Scale Data Mining to be published by Springer’s Memetic Computing Journal has been extended till May 31, 2009. More information can be found in this post at LCS & GBML Central.

On May 26th I gave a seminar about Meandre’s basics at the Computer Science department at University of Illinois . The talk was part of the Cloud Computing Seminars. I merged together slides I have been using to talk about Meandre, and tried to give it an easy to grasp overview flavor. You view them below.

Sometimes thinking a bit helps to rush decisions that may lead to weird places. Today I was going over a simple genetic algorithm for numeric optimization written in C. The code is nothing special, tournament selection without replacement, SBX crossover operator, and polynomial mutation. To the point, I was running a simple OneMax-like problem (in this case, minimize the value of the sum of all the genes), and I was quite surprised the guy was taking so long for. ...

LCSweb was designed to allow researchers and those seeking to use Learning Classifier Systems within applications access to material on LCS and discussion between members of the LCS community. The site served this community since its was started by Alwyn Barry in 1997. Enhanced and maintained later by Jan Drugowitsch, LCSweb became a valuable community resource. The site was completely community-driven and allowed members to contribute to the content of the site and keeping it up to date. Later on in 2005, I started “LCS and other GBML” Blog to cover a gap providing information information regarding the International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems (IWLCS), the collection of LCS Books available, and GBML related news. Some of you may have realized that after Jan’s move to Rochester and Alwyn’s retirement from research activities, LCSweb has vanished. Will Browne took on himself to take LCSweb to Reading, but technical circumstances have made that move rocky despite his best efforts. Jan and Will however still have a local copy of LCSweb contents. After talking to Jan and Will, I proposed to merge LCSweb with the LCS and other GBML blog, and host the new site at NCSA where dedicated resources has been made available. Jan and Will agreed with the idea. We are happy to announce that the merged site (still under the update cycle) can be reached at http://lcs-gbml.ncsa.uiuc.edu. More information about the process can be found here or at there LCS & GBML Central site. ...