I am … unhindered by talent

I’ve been sitting on this for a while I waited for EuroGP to get their web site updated; they have, freeing me up to do a little unabashed chest-thumping, leavened with some praise for UMM’s excellent students.

A few weeks from now the Eleventh European conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP) will happen in Naples Italy. The only other time I’ve been to EuroGP was in 2001 when we were here on sabbatical the first time. I really love the conference, and it’s small and intimate and tends to have a really high signal-to-noise ratio. Unfortunately, it’s also an expensive flight from Minnesota for a three day event, and the timing tends to be really awkward in my teaching schedule, so I’ve never made it back. One of my many fond memories of that conference was winning the best paper award with Riccardo Poli for a pair of papers we’d written together as part of that sabbatical visit. (Oddly, both times I’ve attended have happened to be the only two times it’s been in Italy. The little photo is from the 2001 event at Lake Como.)

The best paper nominations for this year’s event have been released, and I’m quite excited that both of the papers that I submitted this year are on the list. One is another join project with Riccardo, and the other is a paper with two UMM undergrads: Brian Ohs and Tyler Hutchison.

That’s Tyler in the photo up top, presenting some work he did with Andy Korth and I that won the best student paper award at MICS a year ago; Tyler also did the cover illustration for the forthcoming book Riccardo, Bill Langdon, and I are just wrapping up. In a big happy, Tyler was able to pull together the funds to fly out for the conference, so we’ll be able to do a joint presentation enlivened by his presence and cool drawings. Unfortunately Brian can’t make it, but it’s cool that Tyler can; this will be the first of my students co-authors that’s made it to a European conference with me.

The competition is gonna be tough for the best paper award, including a very nice paper by one of Riccardo’s students (Stephen Dignum). Fingers crossed!

The full program is also now on-line (as a PDF) — it looks like some cool material. I’m quite looking forward to the conference, although I must say I’m a bit nervous about the ongoing trash crisis in Naples (here and there).

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Apparently we had an earthquake here in the UK last night around 1am, and Sub-Evil and I snoozed through the whole thing! WeatherGirl, however, was still up and reports on the not-exactly-harrowing experience, complete with links to other sources of info.

This is the second earthquake she’s experienced and I haven’t. (I was in Texas at a workshop when we had a small tremor in Minnesota shortly after we moved there. There’s a wonderful story there, but it’ll have to wait until for another day.)

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Almost had an alliteration in the title, but then lost it at the end. Sigh.

I’ve finishing dumping all my Dagstuhl photos (uncleaned and unedited) to my event account on Flickr, so those with more time than sense can rush over and gaze upon them all. Over the next week or two I’ll work on cleaning some of my favorites and posting them to my “real” Flickr account, but who knows how long that will take.

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Which of the following was written by (a) me, (b) William Shakespeare, and (c) Charles Darwin?

“I would have sent to Rome that’s worthy death?”

“The naturalist looking at species as he might succeed from a fork low down in the separation of the species of any species in a more or less from their sap this is unimportant for the instincts already possessed by certain plants so that natural selection of mere piles of superimposed strata and watch the sea separating an island even if we believe that pure water can effect little or no offspring.”

“The troubling aspects of a building block semantics in a given tree in the context and false.”

The answer and (much) more is below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

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All good things must come to an end, and our week at Dagstuhl ends tomorrow after lunch. Above is yesterday’s group picture (I’m in yellow near the front) just before the traditional Wednesday hike (below), which was wet and misty but still an enjoyable few hours out in the world.

I gave a talk this morning which (I think) went well, especially since I didn’t know I was going to be giving a talk until Tuesday afternoon! There was certainly a lot of good discussion and people came up with tons of suggestions and ideas, which is what I really love about presenting at Dagstuhl. I started with something quite fun, which I’ll post here later. Most of the talks have used computer slides (PowerPoint or some more sensible alternative like LaTeX/Beamer), but Jon Rowe did a great blackboard talk on Tuesday (pictured below).

I was greatly inspired and did almost all of mine on the boards as well. I had four slides at the beginning that really needed to be slides, and then I did the bulk on the boards, and came back to a fifth slide at the end.

Tomorrow there are talks before lunch, including a talk/discussion thing that Riccardo is doing that I’m sure I’ll be roped into in some mysterious way. Then we eat, and it’s a taxi out to the Frankfurt Hahn airport for our flight back to the UK!

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This is from the morning break here on our first full day at Dagstuhl. I love the look on his face.

Dagstuhl isn’t all heavy thinking and hard work, though. I had a beer with dinner (pictured below); unfortunately it made me very sleepy for a while. I’m such a lightweight…

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We all arrive at Dagstuhl on Sunday night for the week’s workshop. After a long day of traveling we enjoy some of Dagstuhl’s exceptional food, meet with folks, and catch up.

Above is the conversation during dinner tonight. It’s not the sharpest photo I’ve ever taken, but I think it captures the spirit of the room quite nicely.

And then we (at least quite a few of us) get to work. The photo below was taken at 9:30pm (probably 2.5 hours after the previous one), and there were quite a few people in this lab at the time. And there’s another lab elsewhere in the facility, and the library, and people’s rooms. I’m sure that lots of folks were also hanging out in the coffee room or playing pool, but there were a lot of people working on a Sunday night as well.

It helps if you enjoy your work, and most of these folks are extraordinarily interested in what they’re studying.

While I’m at Dagstuhl this year I’m going to try (amidst all the “real” work) to capture something of what the workshop is like and, more generally, what it is to do (computer) science. This is hard because it’s not flashy high-action bull-riding kind of work, but it’s important, significant work and deserves to be documented. I’m just going to have work harder at it.

I’m also probably going to take more people pictures than I would be naturally inclined to. If anyone finds them self in a photo here and objects, let me know and I’d be happy to remove it.

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It’s late and I’m way tired, but I think the packing is under control (more or less) (sorta kinda) (as well as can be expected) for tomorrow’s grand journey to Dagstuhl. Not sure how much posting will happen from there; depends a lot on how good the wireless is in my room this year.

In the meantime I leave you with this travel (and research) related shot from my excellent visit to Dublin last month: a group of vehicles driving onto O’Connell Bridge. It looks like it’s the middle of the night, but it was actually only a bit after 6pm as everyone was hurrying home from work. Short days in Dublin in December.

Ciao!

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JOCP! It’s been almost five days since I’ve posted anything here, and I have so much backed up in the queue…

There’s a major conference deadline (GECCO 2008) in a few days, and I’m struggling to finish up four different (and only loosely related) papers for submission. On top of that I leave Sunday morning for an excellent week in Germany at a research seminar at the wondrous Schloss Dagstuhl. (Feel free to visit some of my photos from my last visit to Dagstuhl.)

So sleep is short and fun on the blog is shorter still. In two weeks, though, I should be able to get back in the game a bit.

The top photo is of a student (Tyler - now graduated) during a talk he was giving with another student (Andy) at a regional computer science conference (MICS) last April. On the next day the two of them received the best student paper award for this work :-).

I’ve spent numerous hours this week drawing and redrawing graphs and tables, so this is all too reminiscent of my life at the moment.

The photo below is from a beautiful snowfall we had during the Dagstuhl workshop two years ago.

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Coming from a country where we thump our chests and wave our flags at nearly any provocation, one is struck here by the near absence of flags and their waving.

They can be found, however. You just need to sneak up on them very, very quietly…

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