Jorge Tavares weblog » Molecular Docking

Going to Evo* in Istanbul

Jorge Tavares — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:32:29 +0000

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!

Filed under: Publications, Research Tagged: Collaborations, Evo*, EvoBio, Molecular Docking

Paper accepted at HIS 2008

Jorge Tavares — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:55:51 +0000

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.”

Paper Accepted at PPSN 2008

Jorge Tavares — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:03:32 +0000

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.