cat /proc/claus

Two days ago I went to this Nomikai (work-related drinking “parties”) with some industry contacts of my lab. While the nomikai itself was not very exciting (I don’t really like this kind of Japanese event, but that’s for another post), I had a nice little neat idea while chatting there.

One of the research topics addressed in my laboratory is the use of Evolutionary Computation to assist in music composition. Basically, a EC algorithm generates multiple small pieces of music, which are evaluated by the human composer, and those evaluation scores are sent back to the computer, which try to generate a new generation of pieces similar to those which received a high score. This particular framework of evolutionary computation is called “Interactive Evolutionary Computation” (IEC) [1], because the fitness function is a human operator, and not a algorithmic function.

A big issue IEC is “user burden”. Evolutionary computation is based on scoring multiple candidate solutions, many times - when this evaluation is done by a human, instead of a computer program, the user may get tired after scoring too many individuals. To avoid that, it is important to either use the least amount of evaluations as possible, or make the evaluation as quick and painless to the user as possible - a lot of research has been done in both areas.

Now, the idea - how about using the concept of crowd sourcing to IEC? Instead of having one user evaluating the songs, we would have multiple users evaluating them in a asynchronous manner. The example we thought up would be a website where, say, mobile ring tones are generated by EC, with downloads and user evaluation being used as scores. Every few days(?), these values would be used to generate new tones, which would replace the old ones. This could not only generate more interesting tones, but also be able to “track” or “follow” fashions or memes of users.

A quick google search on the above keywords seemed to reveal that this is still a new idea (nothing relevant shows up on the first page for “crowd-sourcing IEC” and “crowd-sourcing composition” only show non-EC approaches [2]). Try it while it is fresh. Brainstorming in the comments is welcome

Links
[1] IEC on Wikipedia
[2] Crowdsourcing Composition

Today in the University meeting my professor told me that my pre-thesis defense will consist of an one hour presentation, followed by an one hour Q&A session. Since my Master Thesis presentation 2 years ago here in Tokyo university was a paltry 20 minutes, I was both relieved and a bit apprehensive. I was thinking that maybe one hour was a bit too much (I was expecting more like 40 minutes), but talking to Y I realized that among the three techniques and two problem I will have to explain and discuss at length, one hour might even be too little. Anyway, I’m breathing a little easier now that I know exactly how much time I have available - now I just need to do the work. I just wished they would give me the damn deadline already so I could prepare my schedule better.

Also, In today’s meeting we had visitors from another laboratory which presented to us their research on DNA computing. DNA computing is a sort of wet computing where you use the chemical reactions between DNA strands as the processing units. They were explaining their work in developing an AND gate with DNA. To be honest, I was not very impressed. I had heard before of wet computing before (maybe chemical computing?), and in my mind the state of art in this was a bit more evolved. But in their presentation, one AND operation would take more than one hour to complete, and they would need to do the experiment from scratch to change the data inputs. I wasn’t very convinced (although the rain might have made me grumpier than usual). Either you try to emulate electro-mechanical computing, but do it faster, or you get some new operators to do different stuff (like quantum computing). Could someone enlighten me about what I’m missing here?

In other news, RPG game tomorrow, and I got a pretty neat series of encounters for my players. Report coming from Sunday on

With a little less than 1 year to finish my PhD, the chief complaint from my advisor about my project is that, while my methodology has produced very good results, I have applied it to only one problem domain: Portfolio Optimization. While I have been making analysis and hybrids of my technique that have given me small differential gains in performance, what I really need is to find out other problem domains where I could apply my technique, to demonstrate its generality.

Unfortunately, it is not so easy as it seems. My MTGA, in short, was made for bounded parameter optimization problems. This means a problem that can be described as: “you have a value, X, which must be divided among Y variables (sum of all Y is X)”. The problem is that most benchmark functions for parameter optimization are not bounded. I have to assign the values of Y, but they are not bounded by an X sum. I tried to get around that by adding a “dump” variable which would get the remaining value of X, but that breaks down because I still need to know the max X, negative values make everything go wonky.

In my current research, X is the total resource available for investiment, and Y are the different assets that I can invest that resource into. If you can describe your research problem (in any field, no need to be remotely related to computing) in terms of this X and Y, I would love to hear about it!

Today professor Fukunaga from the Tokyo University of Engineering (Toukoudai), came to Toudai to make an invited lecture about Heuristics. I had a very nice chance to talk to him after his lecture, where we discussed some questions about my research which are likely to result in a chapter of my thesis (and possibly a publication somewhere), and I also had a chance to pick his brain about his opinions on cooperative research here in Japan and in the United States.

I always had some problems with Cooperative Research. It is in my nature to try and get people to participate in what I’m doing - be it parties, or my hobbies, or anything - and yet I had very little success in trying to do some cooperative research. Until very recently, I was never able to do it at all. Fortunately, I think I’m finally getting the hang of what exactly you can and cannot expect to share with other people in terms of work and research tasks.

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Later this night I had a meeting with a group called the “Asia Interaction Club”, which was introduced to me by Chaminda. “International Clubs” like this one, for those who have never been in an university in Japan, are student associations which aim to have meetings to integrate foreign and local students. An interesting thing about this one is that they concentrate mostly on
east asian foreign students, while most of the other International Clubs I have seen before seemed to just consider tall blue eyed blond foreigners as “proper” international students. The meeting was quite fun, as they were planning for an “games afternoon” event in the near future and I was able to give many suggestions of what kinds of games to run. Managed to take my head off my many research tasks I’m swamped to these days (the fact that some of the results from my experiments came today and were quite positive also made the night meeting a bit more fun, I guess :-P)

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After watching the move “Us Now”, like I blogged abotu a few days ago, I made my Couchsurfing profile. Since then (about 3 days ago), I already got more than 10 requests for couchsurfing for the next month - half of them for the next week - WOW! I wonder if october is holiday season in Europe or something like that. Of course, I could not accept many of them because of my thesis or stuff, but I actually got guests staying at home for the most part of the next few days. I’ll report about it as they come.

Late June, I wrote into my calendar “Thesis countdown - 6 months”. Today I stopped to consolitade my tasks, and just realized that I’m down to two and a half months until my first thesis deadline (the pre-thesis comitee - don’t really have a good name for this in english). Of course, I’m nowhere near 50% done.

So things are picking up in the work/research front. Among my current tasks, I’m writing experiments for two different papers, one with two researchers (one from the U.S. and one from Brazil) who I met at GECCO, and the other suggested by a Japanese professor which visited the lab two weeks ago on a local conference. Also, I’m organizing the arrival of a new Post Doc student in november - making sure he has a desk to study, a roof to sleep under, etc. Finally, I’m writing two papers, one which is the translation of a paper recently published by my laboratory - not sure how that will turn out yet - the other one a paper for a local conference in Okinawa in December.

Between all this stuff, my lab days have been quite busy - but that is not to say that I haven’t enjoyed my free time, though. Mainly I have been doing Geocaching in my weekends - a hobby which consists of talking long walks to find small treasures hiding in interesting/difficult places, with the help of a GPS. I also have an RPG campaign going on, which keeps my creative juices flowing. Next on the schedule is a part-time job playing with some kids on a costume at an English School during Halloween, and a gaming party the next week or so.

I’m also halfway through “Salt: A World History”, a genial book from Mark Kurlansky, where he describes the role salt has played in many different societies over the centuries. Sometimes I can’t but feel that he is exaggerating on the importance of salt for
armies, governments and revolutions. I’ll try to write more about the book once I’m done with it (maybe next week or so).

So things are going mostly well - thesis is coming by and the pace is picking up fast. My only options are to ride the wave or get drowned in worries, so …