Conferences

The hotel finally got the wireless system rebooted, so I am finally back up. I found quite unusual to open the ICEIS 2008 conference with a panel form by the four invited speakers: Moira Norrie (Global Information System Group, ETH), Jorge Cardoso (SAP), Jean-Marie Favre (UFR, IMA), Ricardo Baeza-Yates (Yahoo! Research Barcelona). Each of them did a short introduction of their invited talks, and just three questions were asked. Since the conference started at 11am, after the panel, lunch break :D ...

by Xavier Llorà, Noriko Imafuji Yasui, Michael Welge, David E. Goldberg (in press, 2007). To apper in the Proceedings of the Digital Humanities 2007 Conference.Also as IlliGAL TR No. 2006023. Link to the PDF. Abstract Blogging has become a new and disruptive communication medium. Blogs have changed the way people and organizations express, interact, and—quite unforeseen—exercise influence. The digital nature of the blog media provides access to an always-expanding corpus of information. It would take more than a lifetime to read all the available blogs necessary to answer questions such as what were the more relevant plots suggested or what key concepts were managed by bloggers in their ideas. However, human-centered analysis and visualization techniques may help users navigate such enormous corpus. This paper presents human-centered analysis and visualization techniques for supporting innovation and creativity can help to identify relevant post portions and to visualize concept relations in the blogosphere. ...

by Xavier Llorà, Kumara Sastry , Francesc Alías, David E. Goldberg, and Michael Welge (2006). Proceedings of the ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2006), pp. 1417–1418, ACM press. Also as IlliGAL TR No 2006004. Link to the PDF. Abstract This paper build on active interactive genetic algorithms and introduces visual-analytic techniques to aggregate, summarize, and visualize the information generated during interactive evolutionary processes. Special visualizations of the user-provided partial ordering of solutions, the synthetic fitness surrogates induced, and the model of user preferences were prepared. The visual-analytic techniques proposed point out potential pitfalls, strengths, and possible improvements in a non-trivial case study where the hierarchical tournament selection scheme of an active interactive genetic algorithm is replaced by an equivalent incremental selection scheme. Visual analytics provided an intuitive reasoning environment that unveiled important properties that greatly affect the performance of active interactive genetic algorithms that could not have been easily reveled otherwise. ...

by Xavier Llorà and Kumara Sastry (2006, accepted). Proceedings of the ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2006), pp. 1513–1520, ACM press. Also as IlliGAL TR No 2006001. Link to the PDF. Abstract Over the last ten years XCS has become a de facto standard for Michigan-style learning classifier systems (LCS). Since the initial CS-1 work conceived by Holland, classifiers (rules) have widely used a ternary condition alphabet {0,1,#} for binary input problems. Most of the freely available implementations of this ternary alphabet in XCS rely on character-based encodings—easy to implement, not memory efficient, and expensive to compute. Profiling of freely available XCS implementations shows that most of their execution time is spent determining whether a rule is match or not, posing a serious thread to XCS scalability. In the last decade, multimedia and scientific applications have pushed CPU manufactures to include native support for vector instruction sets. This paper presents how to implement efficient condition encoding and fast rule matching strategies using vector instructions. The paper elaborates on Altivec (PowerPC G4, G5) and SSE2 (Intel P4/Xeon and AMD Opteron) instruction sets producing speedups of XCS matching process beyond ninety times. Moreover, such a vectorized matching code will allow to easily scale beyond tens of thousands of conditions in a reasonable time. The proposed fast matching scheme also fits in any other LCS other than XCS. ...

The agenda for the Ninth International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems (IWLCS’2006) can be found here. The workshop is coming with a list of very interesting papers and topics. We are looking forward to another edition of the workshop crowded of new and exiting ideas. If you are in GECCO, do not let it pass by ;). By the way, if you want to dig a little further into the learning classifier systems (LCS) and other genetics-based machine learning (GBML) world, check the website of the NCSA/IlliGAL Gathering on Evolutionary Learning (NIGEL’2006). It contains the slides and videos of the talks on cutting-edge LCS and GBML research. ...