Yup, flying over the Atlantic always provide some spare time to put to good use. That’s what I did reading O Zhair, the latest Paulo Coelho’s book. You can read an extract of the first chapter here.

The calendars for 2006 arrived to the club last Friday during the 3rd Friday Foil Fight. Check them out! This year they come in a cool landscape layout instead of the 2005 portrait one.

Cecilia Oversdotter Alm is working on an adaptation of active interactive genetic algorithms (see here) to her work on speech synthesis and perception of emotions in expressive storytelling. She needs a version of the active interactive genetic algorithm that works on continuous domains. For that reason I coded a version of UMDAc to replace the cGA currently used for discrete domains. The Java implementation of UMDAc can be found here. In order to run it, you need to download the COLT toolkit . The code is distributed under GPL license. ...

The Journal of New Mathematics and Natural Computation is running the first ot two parts of a special issue on chance discovery (volume 1, number 3). The number, besides including two regular papers, contains the first part of this special issue. The journal page can be found here. The table of contents of this first part of the special issue is: Ruediger Oehlmann, Preface, page 371. Yukio Ohsawa, Data crystallization: chance discovery extended for dealing with unobservable events, page 373. Renate Fruchter, Yukio ohsawa, and Naohiro Matsumura, Knowledge reuse through chance discovery from an enterprise design-build enterprise data store, page 393. Calkin a. s. Montero and Kenji araki, Human chat and self-organized criticality: A chance discovery application, page 407. Ja-min Koo and Sung-bae Cho, Interpreting chance for computer security by viterbi algorithm with edit distance, page 421. Edward Tsang, Sheri Markose and Hakan Er, Chance discovery in stock index option and futures arbitrage, page 435.

Note to self (wishful thinking): Read as soon as possible Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s biography by Daniel Stashower titled “Teller of tales: The life of Arthur Conan Doyle” published by Owl Books.