cat /proc/claus

Between Dec. 18th and 20th I visited Okinawa for the second time, to attend the 3rd Japanese Symposium on Evolutionary Computation. Since it was a school-paid trip, I was not allowed any extra days to have some fun in Okinawa, but I managed to squeeze some time before and after the conference.

The report is broken in two posts - this first one will focus on the fun stuff I did in Okinawa, the second one will focus on “school stuff”.

Okinawa is an island far to the south of the Japanese archipelago. It is considered to be a beach resort by many people. I have actually been here for tourism only in 2006, when I came with the rest of my lab. This time, I decided to try and do some exploring by myself - I downloaded about 20 different geocaching locations around Naha (the main city) to find while I was there.

In the first night, I went out around 22:30, after having dinner with a Sempai (see the other post), with the goal to find about 7 caches within 1km of my hotel. Unfortunately, the force was not with me that night. I could not find the first two caches, and when I went to search for the third one, I somehow managed to lose the papers where I had all cache information written down - I was quite dejected.

In the second day, though, lady luck smiled at me. First thing, I found out that the hotel I was staying in let us use their bicycles for free! That was a big relief, because the bike rental prices in Okinawa were quite above the rest of the country. Now on wheels, I could check more caches before having to head for the conference.

That morning I found two very interesting locations. The first was the Fukushu-en. It is an incredible Chinese garden, with a large waterfall, two ponds, and many environments. You could walk there for hours looking at each small detail. The cache (which I didn’t find), was located somewhere inside a series of artificial caves under the waterfall. Finding these kind of places is 90% of the fun of Geocaching for me The second interesting place I got to that morning was a cache on the top of a hill - the thing is, I had no map to get to the cache, just the GPS coordinates, so I had to try many small streets to find out the correct location, backtracking all the time. While doing that, I ran across an unkempt cemetery, an old church, and an abandoned shack! A true adventure in getting lost :-P.

But not as lost as I got at night. That night I decided to use my extra time to check some caches further away, near the famous Shuri Castle. One problem (or is it a feature?) of geocaching, though, is that by following the coordinates to your location, you take the most straight way to it, which is not necessarily the easiest way. In my case, I ended up crossing this giant hill in the middle of the island, which was also a huge cemetery, in the middle of the night, under light rain. Can you say spooky? At least the way down was this old, old, steep slope which was quite charming (even though It was so steep I couldn’t just ride my bike down). I ended up finding only two of the 4 caches I searched for that night, but the adventure was well worth it. When I got back to my hotel room, I fell asleep almost immediately.

Although not as successful as I hoped, caching in Okinawa was rather fun. It is interesting to note the differences between the caching styles of different areas. I was a bit disappointed by the number of “shop-caches” in Okinawa - caches that were located not in interesting places, but in front of shops. One of the caches was actually located INSIDE a bar, just under the cashier. Can you say monetization? Also, even in the caches you can feel the looming presence of the American Military in Okinawa - many cache containers were army supplies, and the geocoins featured lots of silly jingoist messages (”support our troops”, blablabla). I longed for the more family/geek friendly caches in Tokyo. It is funny how you can feel welcomed/un-welcomed through an inanimate object hidden behind a rock.

Of course, the trip was not all fun an games. In the next post I’ll report on the “research” side of the trip.

In the last day of GECCO, there was little in terms of the conference itself. First we had the GECCO business meeting. A number of CFP were announced, including the CFP for GECCO 2010, in Portland, Oregon. It was also said that there was a plan to alternate GECCO between north america and Europe from them on - I hope it works, I think it would be nice. After that, the winners of the different competitions and awards were announced - no big surprises.

After the business meeting we had a plenary talk from professor J. Holland, who talked about the development of evolutionary computation in the past and present, tying it with the idea of complex systems. It reminded me how nice it is to be in a field where you can still hear talks from its pioneers.

After Prof. Holland’s talk, I attended to one of the Late Breaking Papers sessions, to see the work of Nunes that I mentioned in the previous post. It was interesting, and seemed to fit well with the work that other people in my lab are doing for finance.

GECCO was over, and then I went for lunch with many of the people I were hanging with in the conference. Supposedly, there was a “Conference Lunch”, in a restaurant in Chinatown, but when we got there we could see no one from GECCO - just shrimps. Shrimps. That chinese restaurant, for some reason, had 90% of its dishes composed of shrimps - fried shrimp, boiled shrimp, raw shrimp, yakisoba with shrimp, shrimp pie… some people in our group were getting quite sick of it, but I was loving!

After the lunch, Verena, who was with us, said she was going Geocaching - and having heard about it before, I invited myself to accompany her, out of curiosity. I must say it was one of the coolest things I have done in a while. The idea of Geocaching is that people hide small caches in out of the way locations, or in the city, and then publish GPS coordinates for those caches. You get those coordinates and try to find them. When you do, you can sign a log book, and see what other people have left in the same cache.

Sounds simple enough, but for me the most amazing part of the experience was that 1- it took you to places you would never otherwise see in a town - It seems to me a great thing to do when you are in a place you have never been before (like the conference) 2- it also makes you see places you see every day in a very different way - something is hidden somewhere you pass by every day. Verena was quite a pro at it already, and in about 8 hour walking, we found almost a dozen caches in Mount Royal and the old town. We walked a total of almost 15 km! Quite an excercise too!

And that ended my short trip to Montreal It was a good chance to make contacts with new people, re-establish old ones, see new research, and even do quite a bit of tourism.

The 5th day of GECCO (friday, 10th) was the first day of paper presentations. With only two days of paper presentations (as compared with the three days of GECCO 2008), it felt hard to attend to all the presentations I wanted to. I’ll probably send an e-mail to the GECCO organizing comittee suggesting that they spread the presentations a bit more next year.

Also, since I had to present two works in different sessions, my choices were further limited. Oh well. Anyway, the first session
I attended was “Financial Applications 1″, with two works by Chris Clack, Wei Yan and Ghada Hassan from UCL, which were extensions of their works in the previous edition of GECCO. I particularly like Ghada’s work, which focuses on not allowing a pareto front of solutions to “switch places” (move to a different area of the pareto front) when the environment changes. There was also a work on using developmental solutions for stock trading, which I still have to read more closely (TODO: and refer it to my trading colleagues in the lab).

The second session was the RWA best paper, where I had to present the work on generating trading rules with GP by my labmate Hirabayashi. Unfortunately, as Murphy would have it, my laptop and the projector decided that they don’t really like each other, and would cut communication between each other every few minutes (even though I checked everything and it was alright just one hour before :-(). Oh well. After the presentation, I made the acquittance of Stefan Haflidason, a very pleasant fellow from the UK. We had lunch together and talked about his plans to do a Post Doc in Japan.

In the afternoon, I wanted at first to go to the “GECCO Job Shop”, where poor grad students looking for work would supposedly meet with people with open positions… but no one was in the room. Instead, I had the pleasure to attend to the HUMIES award presentation. The HUMIES is a competition of research works on evolutionary computation which are not only effective, but competitive with human habilities in fields which are traditionally dominated by humans. There is a cash prize to the best work, and all the presentations were of very high quality. Among the candidates, the ones I found most interesting was a system that could find and correct bugs in programs - which was demonstrated on outstanding bugs in varied open source projects! Obviously that one won the prize this year. Other works that I liked were a system that generated malware programs, and a system that used IEC to generate drum accompainment to musical pieces. On a more light hearted note, one of the presenters sounded just like Dr. Strangelove - so much that I was half-expecting his hand to grab his throat at any time during the presentation.

The last session I attended to was second financial applications session, where I presented my own work on Memetic Algorithms for Portfolio Optimization. This time, the laptop and the projector respected each other, and the presentation ran without a glitch. I had a number of questions, and it was a very fine experience.

After the day was done, I tried to get together a largish group of people to go and walk around Mt. Royal - but ran into a complicated constraint satisfaction problem. A group of Romanians wanted to go walking, a group of Japanese wanted to go by train, and everyone had different ideas about how hungry we were. In the end, we separated our 15 people group in two: one to go walking, and one to go by train, and decided to meet by the entrance of the park. By a freak accident of destiny the walking group got to the meeting point before the group that would go by train, which led me to believe that we missed the meeting point. Me and Stefan tried to find the train group, and in doing so, we missed them completely (they got to the meeting point 5 minutes after us) - when we returned, the Romanians had returned home, some people already had dinner, and nobody wanted to go to Mt. Royal anymore :-P. Me, Stefan and about 10 Japanese went to a nearby American-style diner, and managed to salvage the night with some nice lasagnas. After so much walking, I returned home and slept like a stone.

The next day, Saturday, was a bit overcast. The first session I attended was on “Dynamic Environments and Aging” - and it had two papers which were quite relevant to my work. One was the use of ALPS (age-layered population structure) to maintain diversity in the population for Real-Valued problems (by Gregory Hornby). The basic idea of ALPS is to give each individual in a GA an “age” (based on the evolutionary operators it went through), and separate the population into age layers, so that only individuals in the same layer could mate to each other. One interesting point in this particular work is that older individuals tended to be more complex and solve the problem better, and it was suggested during the discussion stage that individuals in different age layers could be trained in different, and progressively difficult, problems, to achieve some sort of developmental property. I found this idea really cool. The second paper which I found relevant was about “Terrain-Based Memetic Algorithms” (TBMA) by Carlos Azevedo and Scott Gordon (couldn’t find any links handy, sorry). The basic idea was to generate a grid, and distribute the individuals of the population in the grid - individuals could only mate with other geographically near individuals. Then for each position in the grid, you assign different parameters for the local search of the evolutionary algorithm. In this way, the movements of the individuals over the grid as they mate and are selected by the fitness function will lead to a self-adaptation of the best LS parameters (the grid locations with the best parameters will attract individuals). I found that this idea can be expanded in a very neat way to my project (and I still have to contact the authors to talk about this.)

After the DEA session, I attended to the game session where I saw Omid’s wonderful presentation about his computer chess player. He has this very simple and elegant idea to train chess positions evaluators using a database of movements from a human grandmaster. In a way, he is reverse engineering the mind of Kasparov. The impressive thing about his current work is that training multiple times on the same dataset, he got a number of chess players with different characteristics. Since he reported that none of his chess players managed to get more than 40% of the answers right, I’m guessing that the difference comes from learning different parts of the database that correspond to different styles of play from the same player. So I guess it is not even possible to go much above this threshold, since the “evaluation” function used by the grandmaster may have been actually quite different for different groups of moves. It is a fascinating work and I can only guess at what Omid will come up with next year.

For lunch, I went back to lovely Rue St. Denis, and to the “Valet du Cour” game shop, to buy a deck of cards that Leon had asked me. I also bough myself a plush green dragon - I couldn’t resist the little beast. It started raining, and I took shelter at local Cafe. All the waiters could speak mostly French with some pidgin english, and I felt a bit ashamed for not being able to communicate properly with them. Need to learn more languages - or at least make an effort to learn the basics out of a phrasebook before visiting other countries.

Because of the rain, I didn’t make it back in time for the third session in that afternoon. I arrived a few minutes before the end of the session, and while I was browsing the net in the lobby, it was curious to observe the network getting considerably slower when the session ended and the influx of geeks turning on their laptops began.

After that we had the plenary session, with a talk by professor Demetri Terzopolous - It did not have anything to do with evolutionary algorithms, but I guess that is kinda the point of a plenary session, right? Demetri talked about is works on the simulation of individuals and societies, describing the framework for realistic simulation of complex creatures, from the physics level to the structural, muscular, reactive and behavioral levels. Plenty of pretty pictures and animations too (Although it got a bit awkward when he showed that strip scene from Animatrix).

At night, we had the main reception at the Montreal Science Center. It was supposed to be GECCO’s 10th birthday, so we had a cake and fireworks (not provided by SIGEVO *g*). It was a good chance to shake hands and talk to many people I had not yet had the chance to meet. In particular, I was introduced to Nuno Horta and his student Antonio Gorgulho, who used my master thesis in some of their earlier works - It may be kinda silly, but it felt nice to know of someone who studied your works!

After the party, I went with Mark and Jeff and a few others for some extra drinks in a bar in old town. It rained quite heavily while we were looking, and none of us had umbrellas, so when we finally picked a place, we were quite drenched. I didn’t stay for long, for I was quite tired, but I heard they had a terrific time there.

And that’s for 5 and 6. Sorry for the delay! I’ll try to get the last part of my travel log online soon, so we can get on with our regular schedule! (I have postponed some stuff I wanted to talk about until I could get these GECCO posts finished).

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.

A delayed post with the next part of my trip!

It turns out that internet access is more difficult than I expected at first - there is internet available in my hotel, but I usually got there too late and tired to do any serious posting - and the conference also has wireless access, but I was usually too busy there to use the computer.

But this just means that now that I have more free time, my posts will hopefully much more juicier.

Anyway, day two was a free day, so we woke up late and decided to go out and walk around some tourist places in Montreal. Before leaving, I managed to talk to Albert, a friend I knew from a Mafia Forum, and we arranged to meet at night. This is the third time I meet someone from the online games I access during my trips - and it is usually funny in what ways people in Real Life turn out to be different from their internet personas. In particular in the case of Albert, he had a much softer and kinda introverted voice than I would expect from his posts.

Me, and two friends from the Lab went for shopping at a nearby supermarket, where I found out that everything sold here has a hefty 17% sales tax which is not included in any price tags - It could lead to very embarassing situations if you don’t have enough money for a big purchase without tax. The supermarket was giantic, putting to shame anything I had ever seen in Japan in terms of variety. The prices were pretty similar to the prices in Tokyo.

Breakfast done, we’re cleared for some tourism! Montreal has a pretty comprehensive metro system, which takes you to most interesting spots in the city. There is a one week pass for metro/buses for $19.00 (23.50 with taxes T_T). Our first stop was the “Old Town”, which is a neighbourhood near the riverside with lots of very beautiful old-European styled houses. There is a large number of Touristy shops and Museums there, but there are also some boulevards and parks where people can just sit and relax in weekends.

Besides the tourist traps, there were more interesting places - like some very charming (and a bit - not much - expensive) French Restaurants, and a medieval shop with incredible looking statues of knights and witches. We found a shop specialized in Maple Syrup - they had Maple Syrup icecream, butter, salad dressing, and even Mustard! (the mustard was not that tasty).

We also visited the magnificent Notredame Cathedral, where I enjoyed some very unique cultural shock with my Japanese friends. Basically, they have never really been to a big Christian church, so I had to explain most of the imagery and the meanings of the rituals and objects. They were quite interested in attending to a Missa, although they were worried about the money (You need to pay quite some money to attend to Shinto religious rituals). It was the reverse role of what I was used to in Japanese temples.

After the old town, we headed to Rue St. Deniz, a somewhat more Bohemian part of the town, with many bars and clothing shops. My real objective, though was visiting the Valet du Cour, a large game shop in that street. While the prices were not very different, there were many games that couldn’t be found in Japan. I bored my friends for about an hour while I poured over their many games. In the end I spend almost $100 with Bang, a Carcassone expansion, a Munchkin expansion and the “Dungeon Delve” 4E book.

After that, we decided to walk our way back into the hotel - we followed through this completely charming part of the town, with many cute houses in the shape of castles, balconies asking to be used for reading and drinking, and parks full of squirrels. I could speak more and more, or you could just check out the pictures of the trip.

When we arrived in the hotel, I slept for a little while, then met Albert, from the previously mentioned mafia forums. We went to a coffee shop, and spent a long while talking about the japanese language, my life in Japan and Montreal city. Unfortunately, since Albert was without internet connection or a Mobile phone, we were not able to meet up again after this.

This concludes my second day in Montreal - the next day was quite promising: The start of the GECCO conference