Conferences

I just got an email from Martin Butz about a discussion session being planned for IWLCS 2010 and his request to pass it along. Hope all is well and you are going to attend GECCO this year. Regardless if you attend or not: Jaume asked me to lead a discussion session on “LCS representations, operators, and scalability – what is next?” … or similar during IWLCS… Basically everything besides datamining, because there will be another session on that topic. So, I am sure you all have some issues in mind that you think should be tackled / addressed / discussed at the workshop and in the near future. Thus, I would be very happy to receive a few suggestions from your side – anything is welcome – I will then compile the points raised in a few slides to try and get the discussion going at the workshop. Thank you for any feedback you can provide. Looking forward to seeing you soon! Martin P.S.: Please feel free to also forward this message or tell me, if you think this Email should be still sent to other people… —- PD Dr. Martin V. Butz <butz@psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de> Department of Psychology III (Cognitive Psychology) Roentgenring 11 97070 Wuerzburg, Germany http://www.coboslab.psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de/people/martin_v_butz/ http://www.coboslab.psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de Phone: +49 (0)931 31 82808 Fax: +49 (0)931 31 82815 ...

Below you may find the abstract to and the link to the technical report of the paper entitled “Scaling Genetic Algorithms using MapReduce” that will be presented at the Ninth International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications (ISDA) 2009 by Verma, A., Llorà, X., Campbell, R.H., Goldberg, D.E. next month. Abstract: Genetic algorithms(GAs) are increasingly being applied to large scale problems. The traditional MPI-based parallel GAs do not scale very well. MapReduce is a powerful abstraction developed by Google for making scalable and fault tolerant applications. In this paper, we mould genetic algorithms into the the MapReduce model. We describe the algorithm design and implementation of GAs on Hadoop, the open source implementation of MapReduce. Our experiments demonstrate the convergence and scalability upto 105 variable problems. Adding more resources would enable us to solve even larger problems without any changes in the algorithms and implementation. The draft of the paper can be downloaded as IlliGAL TR. No. 2009007. ...

Below you may find the slides I used during GECCO 2009 to present the paper titled “Data-Intensive Computing for Competent Genetic Algorithms: A Pilot Study using Meandre”. An early preprint in form of technical report can be found as an IlliGAL TR No. 2009001 or the full paper at the ACM digital library

by Llorà, X., Ács, B., Auvil, L., Capitanu, B., Welge, M.E., Goldberg, D.E. (2008). This paper has been accepted at the 4th IEEE International Conference on e-Science. An early draft of the paper can be found as IlliGAL technical report 2008013. You can download the pdf here. More information is also available at the Meandre website as part of the SEASR project. Abstract: Data-intensive flow computing allows efficient processing of large volumes of data otherwise unapproachable. This paper introduces a new semantic-driven data-intensive flow infrastructure which: (1) provides a robust and transparent scalable solution from a laptop to large-scale clusters,(2) creates an unified solution for batch and interactive tasks in high-performance computing environments, and (3) encourages reusing and sharing components. Banking on virtualization and cloud computing techniques the Meandre infrastructure is able to create and dispose Meandre clusters on demand, being transparent to the final user. This paper also presents a prototype of such clustered infrastructure and some results obtained using it. ...

Yes, I disappeared from my blog during GECCO 2008. Yes, I started blogging about the International Workshop on Learning Classifier System 2008 held on Sunday 13 at GECCO 2008. The workshop was terrific. Lots of new ideas were presented, but more importantly, lots of new ideas end sparking in participants head. As usual, the big workshop family went to dinner together where we all end having a blast. Some good traditions do not change, fortunately. Then, GECCO started. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday have been the most unusual GECCO days in my 10 years of attendance. Yes, I presented our paper and attended some interesting talks, but what made it different was that I spend a lot of time on hallways talking to people. There was an unusual concentrations of very interesting people to talk to, not to mention friends I have not seen in a long time. So, overall was really fun, and now I am trying to catch up with the papers published on the proceedings… ...