I am … unhindered by talent

After many days of preparing to start to begin to get ready to go on vacation (e.g., packing and cleaning the apartment in Colchester, traveling to Preston, etc., etc.), we are finally here in Spain and can start Having Fun (TM). We first arrived in Madrid, where we had a few hours to kill, so we wandered out and found a restaurant where Sub-Evil got an excellent swordfish steak, and I had some cool aged local cheese of unknown name and description.

We then took a brilliant train to Toledo, checked into our hotel, and wandered the tiny cobbled streets of the old town some. We had a fine dinner outside, with my meal being a stew of sorts made from free range local rabbit. I was having real trouble getting any meat off of one piece until (after much poking about) I realized it was half of the head (split right down the middle, top to bottom when looking at it face one)! (I took photos, but I’ll let you sift through the full set on my “events account” to find those.)

The old town is a gorgeous medieval city with stone buildings crowding in on narrow cobbled streets that are quite something to drive on. Many are so narrow that pedestrians have to step into doorways to make room for the car to pass.

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Today we travel south from Preston to Birmingham, and tomorrow morning (early) we fly south to Spain for nearly 3 weeks of well deserved R&R!

We’re not likely to have much internet while we’re away, so there will likely be more of the same non-activity that you’ve come to know and love here in the last few months.

We still love you - we’re just not speaking to you :-).

Best wishes all!

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We’ve been lucky enough to have a very nice chippy up the road. Peggottys was a neat family operation, one of that dwindling pool of old-school independent shops. We’ve gone there roughly once a week all year and gotten to know the folks there, so we were sad to learn that they were selling up to a group that runs several chippies in Colchester.

The hand over occurred a few days ago, and tonight was our first chance to frequent the establishment under their new ownership. Sadly, it wasn’t nearly as good as before. They had definitely changed either their suppliers and/or their processes. The fish was hard and rubbery, and the chips were pale and greasy. All in all, not the win.

Very sad, really. Luckily there are other chippies within ready walking distance, and we’re only here another month, so this isn’t catastrophe it might have been. Still, we will miss the Peggottys folks, their hospitality, and their food. If I’d thought of it sooner, it would have been really cool to have taken a photo of them all at the shop, but that moment has passed.

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We just got back from a really fine week at Methwold Old Vicarage, a wonderful Landmark Trust property. The house dates to 1490-1510, and is quite beautiful inside and out. For an American like me, the idea of sleeping in a house constructed in the time of Columbus’s voyage is just too amazing.

The brick front is a veritable sampler of ornate brickwork from the period and remains a real show piece. There are gorgeous carved beams inside, and cool remnants of late 16th century wall paintings in the main bedroom upstairs that are museum quality. And we slept in that bedroom.

Wow.

We’re totally hooked, and definitely planning another Landmark Trust stay before we return to the States this summer!

I have an utter ton of photos. I’ll be posting some to my “main” Flickr account as I have time process them, and I’m also dumping a bunch of unedited shots to my events account. The shot above is a panorama constructed from six different photos of the house. The brick front faces almost due north, so it’s difficult to get any good light on it. This is in the late evening when the sun had almost swung far enough around.

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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.

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We’ve dodged a fairly serious winter back in Minnesota while on sabbatical this year, and we’ve had no snow and very little cold weather over here in Colchester. In a fit of weird timing, however, we had something like an inch of big Bing Crosby stuff today. I’ve not actually be out of the house all day (trying to get ready for EuroGP), but WeatherGirl walked into town and back this morning, and took a ton of cool photos (including the one above, and lots of neat self-portraits).

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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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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.

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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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After a long day of being cultural and scientific in London with Kildegaards a few weeks ago, we got on the Tube back to Liverpool Street and the train back to Colchester. Looking across into the next car on the Underground, I was surprised to learn that a volcano was expected to erupt in Rome!

Turns out it’s a reference to a rugby player in an international match. And here I thought it was gonna be Pompeii all over again, but with more automobiles.

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