About the conference itself, it really met the expectations. The quality of the works was good and the model just works! You are able to see and be aware of all the different and sometimes very interesting works that get to be accepted. Not having any parallel sessions is the big plus of PPSN. The invited talks were also amazing, specifically by Hans-Paul Schwefel and Zbigniew Michalewicz. The first talk was inspirational in the sense that we should really pay more attention to what is out there in the natural world. The second talk was simply excellent. Michalewicz showed everyone how theory meets the real-world. Definitely one of the best talks I ever seen.

From the scientific point of view, this PPSN was one of the best conferences I’ve attend. The organization was not perfect but I guess it was ok. The space for the posters was very small (the first session was really complicated to walk around and talk to people) and the second room for the tutorials and workshops was a bit far from the main area.

I look forward for the next PPSN in 2012!

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!

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.

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.