Research
We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
– Alan Turing
Background
- Adjunct Researcher at CISUC, University of Coimbra, Portugal, Present.
- Postdoctoral Researcher at MIT, Cambridge, USA, 2008-2009.
- Postdoctoral Researcher at INRIA, Lille, France, 2007-2008.
- PhD in Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Portugal, 2003-2007.
- Complex Systems Summer School Alumni, Santa Fe Institute, June 2006.
Interests
At the moment my research interests are broadly in the area of complex systems, biologically inspired computing and artificial intelligence in general. I am interested in understanding some principles and mechanisms that are important to develop systems that have an understanding of complexity and emergence and exploit it for their own use. At the moment I am working in the development of Self-Ant Systems. I am using Evolutionary Computation techniques, e.g., genetic programming, to automatically generate specific ant colony optimization algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems.
Selected Publications
These are some of my publications that try to cover my recent work as well as the most important topics I have done in the past. I hope this list keeps changing! Anyway, for a full list of papers that I have written or contributed, the publications page is the best place to took.
- Tavares, J. and Pereira., F. B., Designing Pheromone Update Strategies with Strongly Typed Genetic Programming, in Proc. of the 14th European Conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP 2011), Torino, Italy, April 27-29, 2011 [Nominated for Best Paper Award ]
- Tavares, J. and Mesmoudi, S. and Talbi, E.,On the Efficiency of Local Search Methods for the Molecular Docking Problem, In Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation, ML and Data Mining in BioInformatics (EvoBIO09), Tuebigen, Germany, April 15-17, 2009 [Nominated for Best Paper Award] [PDF]
- Tavares, J. and Pereira, F. and Costa, E. , Multidimensional Knapsack Problem: A Fitness Landscape Analysis, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics – Part B, Vol. 38, # 3, In Press, June 2008 [PDF]
- Pereira, F. B. and Tavares, J. and Machado, P. and Costa, E., GVR: a New Genetic Representation for the Vehicle Routing Problem, in Proc. of the 13th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS 2002), pp. 95-102, Limerick, Ireland, September 2002 [PDF]
I also had the pleasure to edited with Francisco B. Pereira a book on the topic where I started to do research when I was still an undergraduate student. The book contains the latest advances regarding bio-inspired approaches to the Vehicle Routing Problem:
- F. B. Pereira, and J. Tavares, Bio-inspired Algorithms for the Vehicle Routing Problem, Studies in Computational Intelligence series, volume 161, ISBN 978-3-540-85151-6, Springer-Verlag, 2009.
