A bit quiet and recent changes
My online presence, specifically this blog/homepage has been quiet for the past several months. This was mostly due to my postdoc at MIT and also a little laziness I must add. Anyway, I am slowly changing this. I am making this my main site on the web and started my cleaning and organizing a little bit this blog and how to coordinate the stuff from the other places where I have a presence, like the tumblr or the books blog. There’s still a lot to do but it will fall into place one of these days. I guess a big-bang style update would be the best but I don’t think that’s going to happen. The big news is that I have my own domain now! Finally http://jorgetavares.com became free and so it’s pointing now here! As well as some of the others more famous domain terminations. One more reason to give more life to this place!
Game over for Human Evolution?
I’ve just read a news on Times online that reports a talk given by Steve Jones at the University College of London (UCL). Quoting the news:
Speaking today at a UCL lecture entitled “Human evolution is over” Professor Jones will argue that there were three components to evolution – natural selection, mutation and random change. “Quite unexpectedly, we have dropped the human mutation rate because of a change in reproductive patterns,” Professor Jones told The Times.
The rest of the news gives some more details, however, I don’t completely agree with the reasoning exposed. I would be more favourable to a slowing of the process, a change of direction or something like that. Evolution is a dynamic process and stating it is on halt or simply over is very reductive. Different variables come into play in different times and stages. Anyway, it’s an interesting news and topic for thought.
Back from PPSN X
Just got back from PPSN 2008 and I enjoyed it very much. It was my first time at this conference and I believe the poster only format, absence of parallel sessions and a summary presentation of the papers by the session chair works very well. You are given a quick overview of the papers, having a bit more of information on what you want to see and afterwards, the interactions between attendants and presenters is much stronger. Of course some posters are flooded with people whilst others not but that’s not important. I belive the conversations between researchers are always interesting.
Although there is a bias towards theory papers and Evolutionary Strategies, you have a good diversity of approaches and type of papers, from applications to new techniques for example. For me it is hard to pinpoint a best work from all that I’ve seen but I was impressed with Peter Merz’s new approach to very large TSP problems.
Finally, I guess the organization and the venue of the conference were very good. No complaints here. I wish I can attend in 2010 too.
Bio-inspired Algorithms for the Vehicle Routing Problem
And it seems our book is almost out! Springer already put it on its website and it’s announced in Amazon.com and UK. This book is part of the Studies in Computational Intelligence series and has some of the most recent advances of evolutionary approaches to VRP variants. I can hardly wait to see it on paper! 
CiteULike
I’ve decided to take a more serious look at CiteULike as a way to keep a list of my publications and, most important, to start a reference library. Why? Well, first it’s easy to keep your publications and have some additional services attached: tags, comments, easy export, links, etc. Second, having a livrary of articles that we like, want to read, etc, is useful in the sense that you can keep a record of your research literature. Moreover, if you start a group within your research group and/or collaborators, it might be a useful tool. And then, since it’s a social network site you could find interesting references that you probably wouldn’t see them (or maybe not). For now, I just added some of my own publications but I intend to explore and use more this site.
Paper accepted at HIS 2008
And the second paper related to the work done in INRIA is accepetd, at the 8th International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent Systems. The event will take place in Barcelona, Spain, from September 10th until the 12th. From their website:
“The objectives of HIS 2008 are: to increase the awareness of the research community of the broad spectrum of hybrid techniques, to bring together AI researchers from around the world to present their cutting-edge results, to discuss the current trends in HIS research, to develop a collective vision of future opportunities, to establish international collaborative opportunities, and as a result to advance the state of the art of the field.”
The “Tyranny of the Power Law” essay
Just came across the following blog post/essay which I found very nice to read:
Tyranny of the Power Law (and Why We Should Become Eclectic)
“(…) However, as a normative or prescriptive approach to how things shouldwork, I believe that the gaining popularity of the power law holds some dangers as well as benefits. After all, should we find it acceptable — even if it is an accurate description of how things really are — that the top 20% of people control 80% of the wealth in a society? Is it really a good idea that a few ‘hits’ (often ginned up to be that way rather than by popular demand) swamp out more meritorious ‘misses’? Is it really ultimately beneficial, efficient, or rational for a society to have a few people at the top of the power law — at least those who got there by inherited privilege and/or genetic accident — hold sway over the lives of the many who live down along the ‘long tail’ of the power law? (…)”
This post raises some interesting questions and valid points. However, we should not forget they can be useful tools. And well, I think some more work relating Power Law and EC can/should be done! 
Paper Accepted at PPSN 2008
I got accepted my first paper related to the work done in INRIA, at the 10th International Conference on
Parallel Problem Solving From Nature. The event will take place in Dortmund, Germany, from September 13th until the 17th. The interesting fact about PPSN is the conference format. From the website:
“all accepted papers will be presented during small poster sessions of about 16 papers. Each session will contain papers from a wide variety of topics, and will begin by a plenary quick overview of all papers in that session by a major researcher in the field. Past experiences have shown that such presentation format led to more interactions between participants and to a deeper understanding of the papers.”
I agree that this might motivate the interaction between participants and thus, everyone will benefit much more from the event. I’m curious and I wish it will be a nice event since I’ve never been to PPSN before.
Talks at NCRA
The 2nd Natural Computing Research and Applications Group workshop was a success and very interesting. I got the chance to see first hand the work developed at NCRA and I liked it. I found the work of Erik Hemberg on Meta-Grammars & Grammatical Evolution interesting, as well as Sébastien Piccand’s presentation on Optimisation of PSO topology. On a side note, the slides of my talk can be found in slideshare.
The Strange Attractors
The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.
– Henri Poincaré
This is my weblog/homepage dedicated to my research activities. Make yourself at home.
