I am … unhindered by talent

As mentioned earlier, our paper “Semantic building blocks in genetic programming” with Brian Ohs (UMM ‘08) and Tyler Hutchison (UMM ‘07) was nominated for Best Paper at EuroGP 2008 in Naples, Italy.

We won!

That a paper co-authored with two undergraduates from a small, public, undergraduate liberal arts institution like the University of Minnesota, Morris, could win an award like this at an international science conference is just too damn cool. Well done to both Brian and Tyler!

In the hectic melee of the conference, most folks don’t have time to do anything more than skim the nominated papers, and usually not even that. This makes the talks a crucial part of an award like this, as much of the voting is based on them. Tyler (pictured above at Castel dell’Ovo in Naples) was a huge help in that regard. He flew over to the UK several days early so we could work on our talk, giving us the time we needed to revise and practice. He also produced a super cool little six page comic with a nifty introduction to our work that the audience could follow along with. We did a joint presentation, each covering about half the paper. Our talk was well received, and Tyler’s comic was incredibly (and deservedly) popular, and there’s no doubt that his participation was a huge help.

(And all this is on top of Brian and Tyler’s hard work and contributions on the paper itself. Obviously without that content we never would have had the paper accepted or nominated in the first place. So they both deserve huge kudos for that as well.)

Friday morning our paper was voted Best Paper by the conference attendees, and we were presented with a certificate, a box of Italian lemon cookies, and a box of Irish chocolates. All the Best Paper winners from the various EvoStar conferences and workshops also got to choose a free book from the Springer table. Tyler got a really cool book enitled Leonardo’s Lost Robots, and I got The forgotten revolution: How science was born in 300 BC and why it had to be reborn. (It was all terribly liberal arts of us - pretty much everyone else took evolutionary computation/artificial intelligence books of one form or another.)

Tyler upheld a fine tradition of our students making UMM look really good at conferences like this. From his deportment and grasp of the material, most people assumed he was a graduate student, despite the fact that the looks like he’s about 16 :-). He’s currently doing contract work as a web developer and designer, but is seriously interested in going to graduate school in the near future, and he definitely impressed the folks at the conference. I’ve been really lucky to work (and co-publish) with a string of great UMM students, and am looking forward to continue that with a very sharp student named Sara Lahr when we get back.

The trick for me (sometimes) is remembering just how good our students can be. The room we spoke in was this grand space of inlaid wood and marble that was quite a surprise in several ways. This was made worse by the fact that we were in the first session, so we had very little time to adjust and adapt. I was worried about running long (we had a lot of material to cover), and started to lose my nerve about having Tyler wandering around the room at the beginning handing out the comic. Tyler was really calm and collected about it, though, talked me down, and everything did in fact go really smoothly. The moral? Handouts are Good, really cool comics handous are Even Better, and I need to remember to listen to my students :-).

Thanks a ton to Brian and Tyler and all the people and offices at UMM that supported our work, and everyone who voted for our paper at EuroGP! Special thanks also to Riccardo Poli for hosting me on this sabbatical at the University of Essex. I’ve gotten a ton of cool work done here with Riccardo, including “A linear estimation of distribution GP system” at EuroGP, which was also nominated for Best Paper (and which I suspect was also strongly in the running).

I’ve dumped all the photos Tyler and I took in Naples onto my events account on Flickr. I’ll try to clean up a few to post to my main Flickr account in the next week or so.

Related posts

• Nothing like a little shameless self-promotion (0)
• JOCP! At revision 400! (2)

While I’ve been utterly swamped with Jess’s visit (here and there), preparing for EuroGP and the book release, and various random deadlines, life has (strangely enough) continued around me.

Included in this mêlée of activity is the crazy news that PeeZed got expelled from Expelled. This is (by numerous accounts) a fairly dreadful film about how hard done by those poor ID folks are, and how mean and nasty those icky evolutionists are. Waa. Both PeeZed and Richard Dawkins were interviewed for the film under false pretenses, and get non-trivial screen time. There was a free pre-screening of the film in the Cities last night, which conveniently (and I think accidentally?) coincided with a major atheist meeting in the Cities. So PeeZed and various of his family and friends including Dawkins(!) all trouped off to check it out.

The wonderful kicker is that one of the producers

• Recognized PeeZed in line,
• Had PeeZed expelled,
• Failed to recognize Dawkins (or any others in his group)

Saw Dawkins got to see the movie, but Paul had to hang out in the mall waiting for them to get out! The Mall of America (where all this happened) is big, but I’m not sure it’s big enough to hold that much irony.

There’s loads o’ blogging on the subject; PeeZed is collecting and sharing links (here, there, and elsewhere, plus his post from the Apple Store during the film). Quite happily, it’s also being reported for the fiasco that it is in the mainstream press (e.g., Pioneer Press and the NY Times).

Thanks to Dan Flies for sending me an e-mail about all this. I really had missed it all, so having the direct pointer was a Good Thing.

Related posts

• UMM students are just so cool! (4)
• Some must see TV tomorrow night (for those in the U.S.) (0)

Sometimes you’re just minding your own business, trying to get a little science done, and a little art pops out at you all unexpected.

What?!? You want to know where this comes from? All is revealed beneath the fold…

Read the rest of this entry »

Related posts

• UMM students are just so cool! (4)
• JOCP! At revision 400! (2)

It’s pretty cool when you update your repository and see

At revision 400

We just hit that on the genetic programming book that Riccardo and Bill and I are working on; we’re currently averaging close to 10 commits a day here in the final stages. We hope to wrap it up in the next 1.5 weeks and then off to the printers for fun (and no profit in the traditional sense)!

P.S. Anyone want to proof read a few pages? Get in touch and we can work something out.

Related posts

• UMM students are just so cool! (4)
• Nothing like a little shameless self-promotion (0)

Chris posted some cool questions on my earlier post about decentralized behavior in social insects:

so what kinds of things do computer scientists do w/this idea? is sort of what evolutionary computing is about? i picked up the evolution of cooperation recently (tit for tat wins prisoner’s dilemma) you must be familiar w/this, yes?”

There’s really three different (but related) ideas in this question:

• Decentralized and emergent behavior
• Evolutionary computation
• Game theory and cooperation

I’ll take them one at a time, with more on the first of the three, at least for now.

Read the rest of this entry »

Related posts

• I think my head is full of ants (2)
• Wrapping one’s head around the data (0)

As many of my students can attest, I’ve always loved emergent behavior where you have a whole bunch of “stupid” agents working with simple rules, but the end result is amazingly complex and wondrous. There are termites, for example, that by following simple rules (and with no “leader” in charge) manage to build large mounds with extraordinarily precise climate control in certain chambers where they farm special fungi. If you held a gun to my head and told me to use dirt, sticks, and other bits lying around to build a chamber that would be nearly constant temperature day and night, winter and summer, I’d have to tell you to pull the trigger. Yet these insects, with no blueprint or foreman, pull it off over and over again across thousands of years. (Doesn’t evolution just rock!)

No surprise, then, that I was smitten with this recent TED video (of a talk from four years ago) where Deborah Gordon talks about her research into how ants figure out how to allocate tasks (i.e., who does what when).

If you want to play with this sort of thing, I recommend both NetLogo and Breve, as well as this cool Breve-based screensaver, which evolves walking creatures while you’re momentarily distracted from your random web surfing. Both NetLogo and Breve can happily suck up way too much of your life (there are literally days to be spent playing with all the canned models in NetLogo), but it’s great fun, and working with tools like this can really help build your intuition for how complex systems of agents can work.

Below the fold I list some of my favorite NetLogo simulations that I often use in demos.

Read the rest of this entry »

Related posts

• Decentralized, distributed systems, evolutionary computation, and prisoner’s dilemma (0)
• Not quite a wave (1)

I was bummed that, being abroad, we’d missed Nova’s Judgement day.

But w00t!

It’ll be available on-line starting 16 Nov.

Looking forward to it :-).

(I feel like I should have converted this post to haiku or limerick form. Not today, however.)

Related posts

• Some must see TV tomorrow night (for those in the U.S.) (0)
• We have to help them understand: Science matters! (1)

As has been noted elsewhere by many (e.g., PeeZed), tomorrow night (Tuesday, 13 Nov) PBS is airing Judgement Day. This is a Nova program covering in considerable detail the ins and outs of the trial two years ago in Dover, Pennsylvania, that was, at its heart, about whether “intelligent design” had any pretense to being science. It obviously doesn’t, and the court had the wherewithal to agree.

This has been heralded by many as a landmark case in the fight between science and reason on the one hand and politics, mumbo jumbo, and bizarrely wishful thinking on the other. While I fervently hope that this ruling is in fact a harbinger of a more rational future in the U.S., only time will truly tell. The case is clearly an crucial one, however, both for what it tells us about the powerful, organized, and persistent forces of willful ignorance, and about the ability of the forces of reason and sense to carry the day with clarity and force of their own.

Being out of the country, we will obviously miss the show, although we might get to catch it here later if one of the UK broadcasters picks it up. The most recent Science Talk podcast includes an interview with the show’s writer and producer, Joseph McMaster. Steve Mirsky (Science Talk’s excellent host) obviously really likes the show (he saw an advance tape), which makes me all the more sad that we’ll miss out. Mirsky ends the segment by mentioning that the pro-ID Discovery Institute has preemptively denounced the program, fussing that Nova fails to be impartial and should be more up-front about their clear bias. As Mirsky points out (with a wee twinkle in his voice), Nova could hardly be clearer about their bias: They’re a science program, and ID ain’t science.

Related posts

• Nova’s Judgement day available on-line 16 Nov! (0)
• We have to help them understand: Science matters! (1)

One of the joys of cool students (who eventually turn into cool alums) is they send you pointers to crazy weird stuff they find on-line. Like photos of carrion beetles!

OK, so the photo itself probably doesn’t wow you (unless you’re another carrion beetle), but the write up on this little critter is pretty cool. The real kicker, though, is the follow-up post and photo.

All those little red guys are mites that hitch a ride on the underside of the beetle, and you might reasonably wonder why the beetle tolerates them (esp. in such numbers).

Because they eat fly eggs and maggots which present a real threat to the carrion beetles’ wee ones. Because the flies, well, fly, they can get to the dead bodies faster than the beetles typically can, and their maggots can strip a little mouse corpse before the carrion beetle couple can get their brood up and running. So the beetles are quite happy to bring along a gaggle of mites, who then clear out any fly bits without bothering the beetles or their offspring.

A rockin’ example of symbiosis if I ever saw one. Tip o’ the cap to MJ for the pointers, and to insectpod.com for the photos and explanation of what’s going on.

Related posts

• I think my head is full of ants (2)
• Decentralized, distributed systems, evolutionary computation, and prisoner’s dilemma (0)