Jorge Tavares weblog

For the next days I will be attending PPSN 2010, in Krakow, Poland. I was here for the venue two years ago and it was a conference that I enjoyed very much. Mostly because of the model which is different from the standard ones (poster only format, absence of parallel sessions and a summary presentation of the papers by a senior session chair).

I will be talking about my lastest work which ties together two techniques that I’ve always wanted to do some serious work with them: Ant Systems and Genetic Programming. In this first paper, I am using GP to evolve an Ant System component. A key issue in AS research is how to design the communication mechanism between ants that allows them to effectively solve a problem. We propose in this work to evolve the current pheromone trail update methods. We tested with the TSP and initial results show that the evolved strategies perform well and exhibit a good generalization capability when applied to larger instances.

Doing this work was also very fun and it was all made in Lisp. I just need to improve the code a bit and package it nicely before making it free available.

Anyway, I wish PPSN 2010 will be an interesting conference!

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.