Last week I was at EuroGP where I presented my latest paper “Automatic Design of Ant Algorithms with Grammatical Evolution” (pdf, slides) and it won the Best Paper Award! I am very happy with this distinction since EuroGP is the leading conference on Genetic Programming attended by the best researchers in the field.

In this paper, a Grammatical Evolution approach is used for the automatic design of Ant Colony Optimization algorithms. The used grammar has the ability to guide the learning of novel architectures, by rearranging components regularly found on manually designed variants (for example, the Elitist Ant-System, the Ant Colony System or the Max-Min Ant System). This approach was tested with the TSP and the results show that the evolved algorithmic strategies are effective, exhibit a good generalization capability and are competitive with human designed variants. This is still a starting point and there is a large amount of work to be done but the indications given by these results are encouraging!

This year the conference took place in Málaga, Spain, as part of Evo* as usual. The event was great with an excellent organization lead by Carlos Cotta. It was a fantastic Evo*! Next year it will be held in Wien!

Just received an email with good news! The paper that I got accepted at EuroGP was nominated for Best Paper! The work that I started last year is starting to get some good feedback which is great :-) This paper describes the approach I have developed (in collaboration with Francisco B. Pereira) to evolve pheromone update methods for Ant Systems. The paper only deals with the TSP and the obtained results are promising since it outperforms MMAS. It is the first step to what I am working on, a Self-Ant System. The idea is to let the Ant algorithm find the best components that can help in solving the problem at hand. There is still a lot of work to be done but this is just the start.

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’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.