The list of papers to be presented at the Ninth International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems (IWLCS 2006) can be found here.

Today I gave a presentation for the ALG group in NCSA about metadata stores and how they can be used in D2K. The presentation has two parts. The first one covers and introduction to metadata in general with some examples. The second one, is about how to wrap a metadata store (Kowari, see the previous post here) and make it accessible in D2K. You can find the slides here. ...

by Xavier Llorà (2006). IlliGAL TR No 2006017. Link to the PDF. Link to the Java code Abstract This technical report describes how to compute the fitness of a rule for an arbitrary size multiplexer without doing any instance matching. Pittsburgh-style learning classifier systems require the accuracy and the error of a rule to compute a fitness that promotes maximally accurate and maximally general rules. The accuracy (α) may be computed as the proportion of overall examples correctly classified, and the error (ε) is the proportion of incorrect classifications issued. Once the accuracy and error of a rule are known, the fitness can be computed as f(r)=α(r)*ε(r). This technical note shows how to computed the fitness only by inspecting the rule, requiring a time proportional to number of possible address values O(2^|a|) instead of the O(2^l) that requires a traditional rule matching strategy against all the possible instances. The proposed method makes tractable for Pittsburgh learning classifier systems multiplexer problems larger than the 11-input one. ...

José Agustín Goytisolo wrote a powerful poem named “Palabras para Julia”. The poem can be found here. Below, the song by Paco Ibáñez sings José’s poem. The mp3 is provided by www.poesia-inter.net.

Sunday night. The first tornado warning of the season is over in Champaign-Urbana. This one came pretty close. The tornado did not hit the town but strong winds touched ground and caused damages. When the tornado alarm went off I was watching “The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition”. I was deep into the movie and it took me a little while to realize that it wasn’t a whaler blowing the horn. After the proper safety stop looking for shelter and listening at the radio report, I continued with Endurance. If you have not seen it, just watch it, I am still speechless. ...