I am … unhindered by talent

Archive for February, 2006

You know you needed a tool just like this…

Posted in Photography, Web development on February 26th, 2006

Spell with Flickr lets you spell out words and phrases using images from Flickr. You know I needed that…!

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Hey, I passed 8th grade math as well!

Posted in Education, Mathematics, Mildly amusing, Photography on February 26th, 2006

So Sub-Evil Boy found this via Pharyngula and was quite pleased that he could already (in the 6th grade) “pass” 8th grade math. Well, if he can pass, let’s hope his old man is up to the task… :-)

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

Huzzah!

And no, I’m not dead, just absolutely buried in work stuff. This is the price one pays for a week in Germany (slowly posting more photos on Flickr) and being chair of too many things.

I particularly like this shot of Riccardo and Alden working on the material that eventually became that amazing one week paper!

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Flickr faves, 16 Feb 2006

Posted in Photography, Research, Travels on February 16th, 2006

There are so many cool images on Flickr, it’s way too easy to make spiffy mosaics like this :-).

1. BW JAPANESE MAPLE, 2. BW OLD STOVE, 3. Feel, 4. Nature, 5. Water’s edge, 6. Procession, 7. Automatic, 8. As occasion may demand piled container, 9. Center slope, 10. Only one, 11. Moistened morning #4, 12. Cities, 13. Blue Agave, 14. Desiderata, 15. Eternal hope, 16. Truly Madly Deeply, 17. Deja Vu, 18. feel alone, 19. A Ray Of Hope, 20. Woodpecker in snow, 21. stairs to where?, 22. ghost-dance, 23. Tend, 24. pernalonga virado a poente, 25. Split Decision, 26. Safeway, 27. Vertigo, 28. Handywork, 29. Cemetery View, 30. Subtle strength!, 31. Splinters of the past, 32. Under Pressure……, 33. Thortable, 34. Eisvogel - ice bird, 35. powerlines, 36. When Nature Isn’t Interesting Enough

Yeah, I’m back from Dagstuhl, and it was definitely extremely cool. Riccardo went insane again and we (mostly he) generated a paper from scratch, start to finish in one week. Wow.

More later when some other things calm down.

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Snow pretty

Posted in Computing, Photography, Research on February 9th, 2006

We had a beautiful snowfall this morning at Dagstuhl, and this was the view while we ate breakfast. Tough, eh?

Tomorrow I give my presentation (the very last talk on the very last day - too much responsibility!), so I’m frantically trying to get my stuff together.

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Daaaagstuuuuuhl!

Posted in Computing, Research, Travels on February 6th, 2006

I’m happy ensconced once again at the Schloss Dagstuhl International Conference Research Center for Computer Science in Germany for a week, and it’s swell.

The short version is that Dagstuhl is a 1700’s manor house converted into a dedicated CSci research facility. They run a series of weekly workshops on different topics year round. Every two years they’ve had one in January or February on the Theory of Evolutionary Algorithms, and I’ve had the pleasure of coming three times (including this visit). It’s a small-ish group of about 50 cool people focusing pretty intensely on the subject, and it really stretches my head in cool (if sometimes painful) ways.

I could talk a lot, but I should be doing research, so I’ll leave you to look at the pictures and read the history. (Getting ready to come here in the midst of classes and admin duties is largely the reason for not much blogging recently, and it’s likely to remain quiet as a result.)

This morning’s round were on co-evolution and had some very nice material.

Ken De Jong gave a nice talk on work by his student Popovici that, among other things, showed how you could use best-reponse curves to understand the dynamics of co-evolutionary systems with some nice results on unstable and even chaotic dynamics.
Edwin De Jong (no relation) talked about his work on underlying objectives in multi-objective optimization, which was very cool since one of his papers had been the primary focus of one of my Senior Seminar students (Jon Q) last semester. Jon and I had really enjoyed that paper and I’d gotten a lot of ideas from it, so I’m looking forward to talking further with Edwin about his work.
Paul Weigand suggested that one of the things that co-evolutionary systems “did” (or were “good at”) was to evolve robust solutions as much as evolve (close to) optimal solutions. While there are lots of issues (which Paul raised and acknowledges) about what “robust” exactly means and how all this depends on problems and representations, the basic idea seems to make some intuitive sense. Any process that has to act in a noisy or stochastic environment needs to be robust to a degree against that noise, which makes it seem plausible that (given the correct representation and operators) evolution would be fairly good at generating solutions that are robust to other forms of change.

Soon it’s tea and cake, and then we’re back in for the afternoon session! Huzzah!
Dagstuhl in the snow