Jorge Tavares weblog

Although a bit late for this post but the year started with a good news: the paper I co-authored with Salma Mesmoudi was accepted at EvoBIO 2010. So, I am going to Istanbul to attend the Evo* set of conferences and workshops. This paper results from my final time at INRIA with Salma. We are still collaborating but due to my constant movements we weren’t able to finish it sooner. Let’s see if we can continue to work on some of possibilities that are open with this work.

And for the record, our paper is titled “Variable Genetic Operator Search for the Molecular Docking Problem”, and the abstract is:

The aim of this work is to present a new hybrid algorithm for the Molecular Docking problem: Variable Genetic Operator Search (VGOS). The proposed method combines an Evolutionary Algorithm with Variable Neighborhood Search. Experimental results show that the algorithm is able to achieve good results, in terms of energy optimization and RMSD values for several molecules when compared with previous approaches. In addition, when hybridized with the L-BFGS local search method it attains very competitive results.

[UPDATE]: Just received the news that the paper was nominated for the Best Paper Award!

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.

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! :-)

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.

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.”

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.

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.