Journal Publication versus Conference Contribution?

In a recent issue of the Communications of the ACM, Moshe Vardi discusses the pros and cons of journal archival publications versus conference contributions. The upshot of his statement, which points to two recent contributions to the viewpoint columns of the journal [1], [2] is that perhaps it is time for Computer Scientists to shift emphasis away from conference and workshop contributions, and start publishing in journal as all other sciences do. A lively discussion followed, see among others, the opinion piece of Lance Fortnow.

As an editor myself of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines I have always wondered why it would be more attractive for people in our discipline to publish in conference venues than in archival journals. Are there not enough journals to allow for scientific progress? Or is there a dire need to communicate with colleagues in spatial co-location? Well, to my mind, none of the two! We are not the types of people that wanted to discuss our results to extreme length. Our conferences and workshops usually operate under tight time constraints, and one to three questions is about the average a presenter receives, anything else would eat into the next presenter's time and is discouraged. Also, the number of journals now accepting work from our field has grown over the years to a very reasonable number so that there is no shortage of places where quality work could find a home.

What is it then, that makes us submit and publish so much at conferences? Possible explanations are the existence of deadlines and the incremental nature of much of the work published. The existence of deadlines is a valuable selection pressure in our hectic times where everything is under the dictate of time-driven priorities. It can only be mimicked by journals through the introduction of regular "special issues" which also come with this requirement, and usually are successful in attracting work. As for the second possible explanation, I'd like to cite from [1] on the pitfalls of program committee work: "And arguably it is the more innovative papers that suffer because they are time consuming to read and understand, so they are the most likely to be either completely misunderstood or underappreciated by an increasingly error-prone process." So while innovative work has a harder time at conferences, "our culture creates more units to review with a lower density of new ideas." It is not only that we get to review smaller pieces of work, we are also more busy, with all the workshops and conferences that make us look at these papers. "Genuinely innovative papers that have issues, but could have been conditionally accepted, are all too often rejected in this climate of negativism. So the less ambitious, but well-executed work trumps what could have been the more exciting result." Those would have to be revised and revised and revised again, and there is no time to do this for conferences. Journal articles, on the other hand, can be worked on for a long time, if need be, and there is no time pressure except for the fact that delays could be unbearable and make results obsolete.

In the end, however, it is the impact of the work that counts most. And it is my experience that a carefully edited journal paper is worth the effort, as it produces impact on a scale that conference papers have diffulty to achieve.


[1] K. Birman and F.B. Schneider. Comm. ACM, 52(5) 2009, p. 34
[2] J. Crowcroft, S. Keshav, and N. McKeown, Comm. ACM, 52(1) 2009, p. 27

GPEM 10(3) now available online

The third issue of volume 10 of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines is now available online, containing the following articles:

A three-step decomposition method for the evolutionary design of sequential logic circuits

by Houjun Liang, Wenjian Luo and Xufa Wang

Evolutionary design of evolutionary algorithms

by Laura Dioşan and Mihai Oltean

Semantic analysis of program initialisation in genetic programming

by Lawrence Beadle and Colin G. Johnson

Additional awards at GECCO-2009

There were several awards presented at the GECCO-2009 conference aside from the Human-Competitive Results Awards (Humies) awards about which Wolfgang posted previously, and for which I've listed the other winners below. Of particular interest to readers of this blog may be the Best Paper awards from each of the technical tracks; these are generally awarded for exciting new results, several of which may soon be appearing in more complete form in our field's journals. In addition, this year was the first year of the SIGEVO GECCO Impact Award, for the papers with the most citations from the GECCO conference 10 years ago.

Congratulations to all of the winners!

2009 SIGEVO GECCO Impact Awards, for the papers with the most citations from GECCO 1999

M. Pelikan, D. Goldberg, E. Cantu-Paz: "BOA: The Bayesian Optimization Algorithm"

Citations: 447

S. Hofmeyer, S. Forrest: "Immunity by Design: An Artificial Immune System"

Citations: 212

2009 "Humies" Awards for Human-Competitive Results Produced by Genetic and Evolutionary Computation

Humies BRONZE MEDALS

Perez, Olague: "Evolutionary Learning of Local Descriptor Operators for Object Recognition"

AND Hauptpman, Elyasay, Sipper, Karman: "GP to Evolve Solvers for the Rush Hour Problem"

Humies SILVER MEDAL

Shahzad, Zahid, Farooq, Khayam: "GA+PSO for User ID on Smart Phones"

Humies GOLD MEDAL

Forrest, Le Goues, Nguyen, Weimer: "GP for Automated Software Repair"

2009 GECCO Best Paper Awards

Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence: "Parallel Shared Memory Strategies for Ant-Based Optimization Algorithms" by T. Bui, T. Nguyen, J. R. Rizzo Jr.

Artificial Life, Evolutionary Robotics, Adaptive Behavior, Evolvable Hardware: "How Novelty Search Escapes the Deceptive Trap of Learning to Learn" by S. Risi, S. D. Vanderbleek, C. E. Hughes, K. O. Stanley

Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Modeling: "Evolutionary Fitness for DNA Motif Discovery" by S. Rahmann, T. Marschall, F. Behler, O. Kramer

Combinatorial Optimization and Metaheuristics: "Fixed-Parameter Evolutionary Algorithms and the Vertex Cover Problem" by S. Kratsch, F. Neumann

Estimation of Distribution Algorithms: "EDA-RL: Estimation of Distribution Algorithms for Reinforcement Learning Problems" by H. Handa

AND

"Approximating the Search Distribution to the Selection Distribution in EDAs" by S. I. Valdez-Peña, A. Hernández-Aguirre, S. Botello-Rionda

Evolution Strategies and Evolutionary Programming: "Efficient Natural Evolution Strategies" by Y. Sun, D. Wierstra, T. Schaul, J. Schmidhuber

Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization: "Multiplicative Approximations and the Hypervolume Indicator" by T. Friedrich, C. Horoba, F. Neumann

Generative and Developmental Systems: "The Sensitivity of HyperNEAT to Different Geometric Representations of a Problem" by J. Clune, C. Ofria, R. T. Pennock

Genetic Algorithms: "Tunneling Between Optima: Partition Crossover for the Traveling Salesman Problem" by D. Whitley, A. Howe, D. Hains

Genetic Programming: "A Genetic Programming Approach to Automated Software Repair" by S. Forrest, T.V. Nguyen, W. Weimer, C. Le Goues

Genetics-Based Machine Learning: "Learning Sensorimotor Control Structures with XCSF" by M. V. Butz, G. K. M. Pedersen, P. O. Stalph

AND

"New Entropy Model for Extraction of Structural Information from XCS Population" by W. K. Park, J. C. Oh

Parallel Evolutionary Systems: "Strategies to Minimise the Total Run Time of Cyclic Graph Based Genetic Programming with GPUs" by T. E. Lewis, G. D. Magoulas

Real World Applications: "Optimizing Low-Discrepancy Sequences with an Evolutionary Algorithm" by F.-M. De Rainville, C. Gagné, O. Teytaud, D. Laurendeau

Search Based Software Engineering: "Software Project Planning for Robustness and Completion Time in the Presence of Uncertainty using Multi Objective Search Based Software Engineering" by S. Gueorguiev, M. Harman, G. Antoniol

Theory: "Dynamic Evolutionary Optimisation: An Analysis of Frequency and Magnitude of Change" by P. Rohlfshagen. P. K. Lehre, X. Yao

GECCO Graduate Student Workshop: "Learnable Evolution Model Performance Impaired by Binary Tournament Survival Selection" by M. Coletti (George Mason University)

GECCO Humies Award (GOLD) 2009

GP was well featured at this year's GECCO Humies Awards. The most spectacular application which was subsequently awarded first prize (GOLD) was based on two papers by Weimer/Nguyen/Le Goues/Forrest
published in proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in May 2009 and Forrest/Weimer/Nguyen/Le Goes in this year's GECCO proceedings. Both papers won awards from the respective conferences, and winning the Humies award was the "icing on the cake".

The authors apply a specialized/improved form of Genetic Programming to locate and repair software bugs. Repairing software bugs is a time consuming and commercially very costly activity. To date, automating the process has been very difficult. The GP method proposed by our Gold Medal winners takes down the average repair time for software bugs from more than 3 hours per bug to 3 minutes.

The authors rightly claim that "showing how to use GP in the context of modern software systems and integrating GP into modern software practice will help evolutionary computation to become more widely accepted by computer scientists."

Congratulations to the authors for a prize well deserved!

Award for David E. Goldberg

David E. Goldberg has been awarded an Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award by the Computational Intelligence Society. More details here. Well-deserved congratulations to David, who has given so much to our field!

SIGEVOlution Volume 3, Issue 3, is now available

I'm a little late with this post because I couldn't reach the blog from China (where I was for the 2009 World Summit on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation). Aside from the web access issues it was an interesting conference and I had a great visit in China more generally. I'm now in Tokyo where I'll visit GPEM associate editor Hitoshi Iba tomorrow, and the only web challenge appears to be in getting Blogger's menus to appear in English rather than Japanese... but I've managed.

Anyway, in the interim I have received mail from Pier Luca Lanzi informing me that the latest issue of SIGEVOlution, the SIGEVO newsletter, has just been released. It is available from http://www.sigevolution.org and features:

• An Interview with John H. Holland with an introduction by Lashon Booker
• It's Not Junk! by Clare Bates Congdon, H. Rex Gaskins, Gerardo M. Nava & Carolyn Mattingly
• Car racing @ CIG-2008
• GECCO-2009 competitions
• New issues of journals
• Calls & calendar

Don't be confused by the "Autumn 2008" cover date. It is indeed a new issue that just came out in June, 2009, but the volume/date correspondence has slipped (and will probably be adjusted soon).

Editorial board renewed

We have just completed the "renewal" process for the Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines editorial board, the most exciting aspect of which is that we now have a new Associate Editor, Pauline C. Haddow (of The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway) and four new regular members of the editorial board: Marc Ebner (of Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany), Jason H. Moore (of Dartmouth Medical School, USA), Sara Silva (of Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal), and Tina Yu (of Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada). Thanks to all of the continuing associate editors for helping with this process, and welcome to the new editors! I think that the journal will be even stronger with these additions.

The full editorial board can be found here.