An interesting inversion of several of the themes covered in this journal:
It would be even more interesting if gear-turning performance drove selection...
-Lee
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Monday, November 9, 2009
SIGEVOlution Volume 4, Issue 1, is now available
The new issue of the SIGEVOlution newsletter, Volume 4 Issue 1, is now available for you to download from: http://www.sigevolution.org
The new issue features:
- "Computational Intelligence Marketing" by Arthur Kordon
- "Pyevolve: a Python Open-Source Framework for Genetic Algorithms" by Christian S. Perone
- Calls & calendar
The newsletter is intended to be viewed electronically.
Thanks to Pier Luca Lanzi, SIGEvolution Editor-in-Chief.
Friday, November 6, 2009
GPEM 10(4) now available online
The fourth issue of volume 10 of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines is now available online. This is the first part of the two-part Special Issue on Parallel and Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms, and it contains the following articles:
Introduction: special issue on parallel and distributed evolutionary algorithms, part I
by Marco Tomassini & Leonardo Vanneschi
Distributed differential evolution with explorative–exploitative population families
by Matthieu Weber, Ferrante Neri & Ville Tirronen
A grid-enabled asynchronous metamodel-assisted evolutionary algorithm for aerodynamic optimization
by V. G. Asouti, I. C. Kampolis & K. C. Giannakoglou
Hybrid of genetic algorithm and local search to solve MAX-SAT problem using nVidia CUDA framework
by Asim Munawar, Mohamed Wahib, Masaharu Munetomo & Kiyoshi Akama
Parallel evolution using multi-chromosome cartesian genetic programming
by James Alfred Walker, Katharina Völk, Stephen L. Smith & Julian Francis Miller
Genetic programming on graphics processing units
by Denis Robilliard, Virginie Marion-Poty & Cyril Fonlupt
Book Review: Natalio Krasnogor, Steve Gustafson, David A. Pelta, and Jose L. Verdegay (eds): Systems self-assembly: multidisciplinary snapshots
by Navneet Bhalla
Friday, September 25, 2009
Deadline extended for Tenth Anniversary Special Issue on Progress in Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines
The deadline has been extended for submissions to the Tenth Anniversary Special Issue on Progress in Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines; see the call for papers for details.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
New issue of SIGEVOlution
The new issue of SIGEVOlution is now available for you to download from:
http://www.sigevolution.org
The issue features:
- An Interview with Hans-Paul Schwefel with an introduction by Günter Rudolph
- Memetic Algorithms by Natalio Krasnogor
- Learning From Failures in Evolutionary Computation @ GECCO-2009
- new issues of journals
- calls & calendar
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
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
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
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
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
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