Human-Computer Interaction

September 21 I was invited to give a talk at the Computer Science Department at UIUC. During the talk “Combating User Fatigue and Contradictions in Subjective-based Optimization Schemes” I reviewed some of the research I have been involved about active interactive genetic algorithms. The PDF of the presentation can be downloaded here. I also gave the same presentation to some of the members of the ASAP research group at the University of Nottingham. Natalio Krasnogor invited me for a visit. The main topic was latest advances on Pittsburgh LCS (Jaume Bacardit is working there on protein folding problems using Pitt-style LCS). I really enjoyed interact with people there—lots of challenges and interesting discussions. Oh, I almost forgot, the three days I was in Nottingham I saw the sun most of the day :). ...

by Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm and Xavier Llorà (2006). Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (INTERSPEECH 2006), paper 1741. Also as IlliGAL TR No 2006018. Link to the PDF. Abstract Emotion is expressed by prosodic cues, and this study uses the active interactive Genetic Algorithm to search a wide space for sad and angry parameters of intensity, F0, and duration in perceptual resynthesis experiments with users. This method avoids large recorded databases and is flexible for exploring prosodic emotion parameters. Solutions from multiple runs are analyzed graphically and statistically. Average results indicate parameter evolution by emotion, and appear best forsad speech. Solutions are quite successfully classified by CART, with duration as main predictor. ...

Well, it finally happened. GECCO started today at 8:30am. You can find live blogging at the IlliGAL Blogging.

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 David E. Goldberg, Yukio Ohsawa, Naohiro Matsumura, Yuichi Washida, Hiroshi Tamura, Masataka Yoshikawa, Michael Welge, Loretta Auvil, Duane Searshmith, Kei Ohnishi, and Chen-Ju Chao (2006). New Mathematics and Natural Computation, World Scientific, pp. 2(1):85–100. Link to the Journal publication. Abstract Creativity protocols and methodologies tend to be time consuming if applied manually. This paper presents how information technologies can support innovation and creativity for collaborative scenario creation and discussion. The fusion of change discovery, genetics algorithms, and computer-supported collaborative tools provide computational models of innovation and creativity. The proposed technology allows groups of participants in a creative processes to have pervasive access to the analysis of the current scenario in real time. This paper introduces such innovation technologies gathered in the DISCUS project, and summarizes initial successful usages of DISCUS on marketing research workshops. ...