The May, 2010, issue of the Communications of the ACM (CACM – the flagship magazine of the ACM) features a photograph of UMM CSci alum Tyler Hutchison presenting research work done with Andy Korth and Nic McPhee at MICS 2007. The article is “Student and Faculty Attitudes and Beliefs About Computer Science”. Andy and Tyler won the best student paper award at that year’s MICS for their paper “On the impact of geography and local mating in evolutionary computation”. The photo (taken by me during Tyler and Andy’s joint MICS presentation) features some of Tyler’s artwork illustrating the material.

The graphics folks at CACM found my photo on Flickr, and contacted me via Flickr offering to pay me a small fee if I’d be willing to let them use it. I happily said "Yes", and the rest is history.

As well as being a cool computer-science-type, Tyler is also a cool comic-art-type, and did the nifty drawings for the cover of our book "A field guide to genetic programming".

Happy, happy, happy.

But I’m easily amused :-).

In fairness, this could well be the one and only time I ever get published in CACM. I’m not all that likely to submit an article to them (in part because I don’t tend to write things they might want), so this could easily be the pinnacle of my career in terms of the number of people in my field seeing my work.

Weird.

But cool.

But I’m here to tell you that the real reason we teach is for the cool drawings!

This gem was just penned by Tyler Hutchison for possible use as an illustration for a UMM piece on the paper Tyler and I wrote with Brian Ohs that won the best paper award at EuroGP 2008 in Naples earlier this year. I’m the distinguishedly disheveled fellow in the middle, Brian is steering the ship up front, and Tyler is the terrified fellow on the back (which is in stark contrast to his cool, composed presence at the conference!).

I’ve been fortunate enough to have students generate quite a few cool drawings of me over the years, ranging from notebook doodles to projects for art classes. I really need to pull all that stuff together sometime and post a little “show”. In the meantime we can all bask in the glory of the three of us riding the wondrous “Geneticorn” off into the sunset!

Thanks to Brian and Tyler for their fine work on this research project, and thanks to Tyler for the super cool drawing!

On Friday after the EvoStar/EuroGP events wrapped up, Bill (Langdon), Riccardo (Poli), Tyler (Hutchison), and I spent a couple of hours being tourists in Naples, starting at Castel dell’Ovo ("Egg Castle"). This castle sits on a little island just off the shore right in front of our hotel and the conference center, so we saw it the whole time we were there. Most of our time there was gray, and often wet, but happily Friday afternoon turned clear and blue (if blustery). So we walked over to the castle and wandered about chatting and admiring the many views.

Here we have Tyler and Bill being blown about a bit, with Vesuvius dimly visible across the bay in the background. I love what the wind’s done to Tyler’s hair and Bill’s clothes :-).