Events

Yup, that time of year is coming around again. The 2009 Genetic and Evolutionary Computing Conference (GECCO 2009) is going to be held in Montreal, Canada. The paper submission dead line is January 14, 2009.

Yesterday I just got to New Orleans for the Internet2 fall meeting. I was invited to give a talk about work we are doing on the SEASR project at NCSA. SEASR fosters collaboration through empowering scholars to share data and research in virtual work environments. The SEASR project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The last part of the week I will be at San Francisco joining the Project Bamboo workshop, again representing the SEASR project seeking a better understanding of possible synergies. ...

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… ...

If you are looking for a list of the related blogging done during ICEIS 2008 just follow this link. During Sunday morning I run into Angel A. Juan, an assistant professor at Open University of Catalonia (UOC), interested on analyzing online teaching efforts and how tools to assist professors monitoring students performance on online media. I visited him yesterday at his office and we got and interesting exchange of ideas. Most of them revolved around the work we have conducted under the DISCUS project, and how similar is our efforts on marketing focus groups and their online teaching environment. His group, Distributed, Parallel and Collaborative Systems, was also interested on the work done under the SEASR project, mostly focusing on the Meadre infrastructure for data-intensive flow computing we are getting close to release. ...

This is the final sprint for ICEIS. I have been mostly focusing on posters this morning. It his hard to pick one up. I would just say that there was some interesting work on personalized recommender systems—paper 219. But as I said, there were a bunch of interesting ones and quite a few interesting by-the-poster conversations. Actually, I am having a very interesting time after the mix of attendees’ profiles. The morning finally meandered into Ricardo Baeza-Yates’s keynote talk. After the initial technical problems—presentation mode of OpenOffice running on Ubuntu 8.0.4 got up just 75% of the slide area—they finally succeeded on getting something up and get the talk started. This was a pretty technical talk about Yahoo! research effort on caching to improve the performance and also help scalability and contain cost on the coming years. Besides several cache techniques, he also presented a bunch of possible paralyzation models based on document/term partitions. A thing he breezed over was the machine learning model for classifying queries. That surfaced several places, from predicting common and rare content, to frequent, unfrequent, and rare queries. I was glad that the technical problems were solve and we could enjoy it. And the conference is finally close. Next year, Milan. ...