Montreal GECCO Trip - Days 3 and 4
GECCO itself began on my third day (second full day) of my trip to Montreal. The first two days of the conference were to be tutorials and workshops, and the last three days were the paper presentations.
The registration went smoothly, although I found the bonus toy lacking: it was a weird gadget with an extendable ruler, an horizontal bubble, and a pad of sticker notes. Huh? A bag would have been much more useful. The venue chosen for the conference, on the other hand, was very good: A nice hotel, with very efficient servers and nice conferencing rooms.
The first session was a financial tutorial by Christopher Clack, from UCL (UK). Christopher made a very nice overview of the internal workings of a financial company, highlighting the many different areas which we of Artificial Learning background can contribute with. After the talk, I had the pleasure of meeting Ghada Hassan and Omid David, two people I have met in GECCO 2008, in Atlanta. I was very happy that both of them recognized me as well right away, and we spent a whole lot of time talking during the conference.
The second talk I heard was from Natalio Krasnogor, about the simulation of Biological systems. At first I was interested to see if he would link any of his work on Memetic Algorithms, which I had read a lot these past few months. He didn’t, but it was an interesting talk nonetheless.
During the afternoon, I attended the “Failures in Evolutionary Computation” Workshop during the afternoon. The title and the summary of the workshop attracted me. I have this notion that ample divulgation of failures is a very important in any scientific field, and that the reality of “publish and perish” causes a bad situation where any study which is not a “complete success” in some form is thrown away and forgotten. And in this way, we probably have many groups re-inventing the wheel all the time. So I was expecting the workshop to be a step in the opposite direction, where participants would describe some ideas that they had that were spectacularly wrong, and how they eventually found out about the error in their ways.
However, it seems that old habits die hard, and most of the papers in the workshop were more of the sort “I tried this method to solve the problem, and as you can see it was not very successful. But then I tried to change the parameters a little, and it worked really well!”. One of the invited talks was interesting, the speaker talked about how many bad individuals in a population would be necessary to guarantee good results in ES techniques. But even then I was a bit disappointed with the tutorial. I certainly hope that next year people will be more bold to talk about their mistakes - I’ll try to send a paper about my misfortunes with ant clustering.
At night, I went dining in a very nice French restaurant. I fount it a bit funny that, for about the same price, the beef/seafood dishes were so tiny (as one would imagine an stereotypical expensive French restaurant), while the pasta dishes were huge. There was the GECCO student party at a student house in the local university, but while I attended, I was so tired from Jet Lag that I soon returned home.
In the second day, there weren’t any tutorials for which I had a strong desire to attend to. In the morning I saw a tutorial about Generational and Developmental systems. Developmental systems were a big subject during GECCO 2008, and basically means evolutionary systems where there is a complex process which leads from the genotype to the phenotype, and this process can be influenced by the environment. The cool thing about this tutorial was that it had a very large bibliography about GDS, it gave a very broad overview that I want to make sure to read on once I have some time for such.
The next talk was about techniques for running experiments with Genetic Programming. The “meat” of the talk was the use
of programs which automatized the analysis of the parameters in an experiment. Then in the next time slot, I got into the wrong room by mistake, and entered the end of a Workshop on Symbolic Regression. It was a surprisingly good mistake, because the papers in that workshop were all very oriented to practical applications, and interesting.
The end of the workshop day was the poster Session. The poster session is always one of my favorite parts of a conference. You get a chance to talk to many different people in a short span of time, and get many different ideas thrown at you. It has a brainstormy feel to it that I really like. For this year’s edition, a crossover operator for index arrays and a policy to dynamically control the number of offspring generated by crossover every generation were the things that stood on my mind the most.
After the Poster session, I got together with a group of latinos and a group of romenians, and we went all together to the Jazz festival. I mentioned to the latinos that I heard about a guy playing salsa at the festival that night, and they beelined to there like a shark smelling blood. Learned that the Romenian language has some similarities to Portuguese.
July 20th, 2009 at 1:29 am
Interessante essa similaridade com o romeno não mestre, você se lembra de um poema conhecido de Olavo Bilac que fala algo como “Última flor do Lácio, inculta e bela…”, o poema é bonito mas têm um erro, pois ele se referia ao português como sendo o último filho do latim, hoje os linguistas afirmam que o romêno é a última língua derivada do latim, daí a semelhança. O poema vale a leitura.
Abração mestre.