Xavier Llorà » Conferences

GECCO 2009 submission deadline

Xavier — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:01:24 +0000

Yup, that time of year is coming around again. The 2009 Genetic and Evolutionary Computing Conference (GECCO 2009) is going to be held in Montreal, Canada. The paper submission dead line is January 14, 2009. Related posts: GECCO 2009 paper submission deadline extended till January 28 GECCO 2011 Submission Deadline: January 26, 2011 GECCO 2010 [...] Related posts:

Yes, GECCO 2008 was intense!

Xavier — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:35:08 +0000

Yes, I disappeared from my blog during GECCO 2008. Yes, I started blogging about the International Workshop on Learning Classifier System 2008 held on Sunday 13 at GECCO 2008. The workshop was terrific. Lots of new ideas were presented, but more importantly, lots of new ideas end sparking in participants head. As usual, the big workshop family went to dinner together where we all end having a blast. Some good traditions do not change, fortunately.

Then, GECCO started. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday have been the most unusual GECCO days in my 10 years of attendance. Yes, I presented our paper and attended some interesting talks, but what made it different was that I spend a lot of time on hallways talking to people. There was an unusual concentrations of very interesting people to talk to, not to mention friends I have not seen in a long time. So, overall was really fun, and now I am trying to catch up with the papers published on the proceedings…

ILWCS 2008 live

Xavier — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 15:32:17 +0000

The 11th edition of the International Workshop on Learning Classifier System 2008 is hot. So far a lot of idea exchange and interesting discussions. So far Gilles Enee, myself, Natalio Krasnogor, Albert Oriols, Thyago Duque covering map problems, encoding language and model building, TSP and metaheuristics, learning association rules, and multi class labeling. Had to rush back to the next one

Leaving for GECCO 2008

Xavier — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:56:19 +0000

Yup, I am just packing on the run. Should get to Atlanta late afternoon or early evening. Wish me luck A bit of information about the city provided by Wikipedia

Atlanta (pronounced /ətˈlæntə/ or /ætˈlæntə/) is the capital and the most populous city in the state of Georgia, and the core city of the ninth most populous metropolitan area in the United States at 5,278,904. It is the county seat of Fulton County, although a small portion of the city extends into DeKalb County. As of July 2007, the city of Atlanta had a population of 519,145^[4], and a combined statistical area population of 5,626,400^[5]. Residents of the city are known as Atlantans.^[6]

For more information see the GECCO 2008 website.

ICEIS 2008: Blogging summary and final strings

Xavier — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:28:37 +0000

If you are looking for a list of the related blogging done during ICEIS 2008 just follow this link. During Sunday morning I run into Angel A. Juan, an assistant professor at Open University of Catalonia (UOC), interested on analyzing online teaching efforts and how tools to assist professors monitoring students performance on online media. I visited him yesterday at his office and we got and interesting exchange of ideas. Most of them revolved around the work we have conducted under the DISCUS project, and how similar is our efforts on marketing focus groups and their online teaching environment. His group, Distributed, Parallel and Collaborative Systems, was also interested on the work done under the SEASR project, mostly focusing on the Meadre infrastructure for data-intensive flow computing we are getting close to release.

ICEIS 2008: Final sprint and Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Xavier — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:10:46 +0000

This is the final sprint for ICEIS. I have been mostly focusing on posters this morning. It his hard to pick one up. I would just say that there was some interesting work on personalized recommender systems—paper 219. But as I said, there were a bunch of interesting ones and quite a few interesting by-the-poster conversations. Actually, I am having a very interesting time after the mix of attendees’ profiles.

The morning finally meandered into Ricardo Baeza-Yates‘s keynote talk. After the initial technical problems—presentation mode of OpenOffice running on Ubuntu 8.0.4 got up just 75% of the slide area—they finally succeeded on getting something up and get the talk started. This was a pretty technical talk about Yahoo! research effort on caching to improve the performance and also help scalability and contain cost on the coming years. Besides several cache techniques, he also presented a bunch of possible paralyzation models based on document/term partitions. A thing he breezed over was the machine learning model for classifying queries. That surfaced several places, from predicting common and rare content, to frequent, unfrequent, and rare queries. I was glad that the technical problems were solve and we could enjoy it.

And the conference is finally close. Next year, Milan.

ICEIS 2008: A cloudy Sunday in Barcelona

Xavier — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 15:14:45 +0000

The morning started with Jean-Marie Favre and his invited speech about “Software languages through the ages”. Quite an eclectic presentation that was quite a bit thought provoking. Some excerpts out of his amalgam of concepts:

Human kind is defined by language
Civilization is defined by writing
Languages expand across a vast period of history, computer science for just a few millimeters in such history line

You may agree or dispute his claims, but you cannot dispute that it was a thought provoking talk. His bottom line, the next research frontier software language engineering and software linguistics. You can find more information at planet-sl.org.

Then I run to attend the presentation of paper 263 and 344. I would mention Texas Tech’s SORCER effort and their effort on service-oriented infrastructure to approach programming large-scale networked systems—their approach also take from the get go issues like availability and fault tolerance. Unfortunately I could not finish the presentation because I had to run because it was my turn.

The afternoon started with papers 331, 346, and 723. The last one was presenting IBM’s work on modeling life cycles, and their effort of making it a generic model. The last round of papers 87, 614, and 655 where rather eclectics, RDF, RFID tags, and Wikipedia. Quite an interesting combinations. Also the afternoon was crowded with interesting hallway conversations, despite the gray day outside

ICEIS 2008: Slow afternoon and Moira Norrie

Xavier — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 16:31:50 +0000

This afternoon has been quite slow. My path 340, 348, 495, 612, 193, and 467. The key slower of the afternoon has been the fact that for each of the session there has always been a missing presenter. May be because it is a Saturday afternoon in Barcelona, but then I check the rest of the parallel tracks and it seams quite endemic it. Anyway, I run into an interesting talk about how to map workflows onto multicore architectures—paper 340. It was just a talk that lead straight to scheduling problems of direct acyclic graphs. I ask about the cyclic cases and their approach was to break the cycle and use the acyclic schedule. Mmh. I also found myself how they plain to make those schedulers a reality without messing with the underlying OS one. Another paper that cough my attention was paper 193, where they were focusing to fraud risk reduction. The interesting twists there were that (1) it is, by nature, an unsupervised problem, and (2) they were trying to do both detection and prevention. Unfortunately the only evolutionary computation related paper— paper 306—had no presenter…

A total different story has been Moira Norrie keynote speech. She has presented their research efforts on paper & the digital world. A very interesting presentation covering from basic technologies—Anoto—and latest digital paper products—Livescribe—to their research on interactive paper. The basic idea, paper that allows you to interact with the content—for instance multimedia one. Their research involves from clicking on paper, to gestures, to the infrastructure (iServer) their cross-media information server, and their plugins—such as iPaper. Active components (no, not the Microsoft ones) are the bridges they build to control media from a paper and digital pen. Of course, they can also record annotations, whiteboards, audio, or also support collaboration via multiple pens usage. Other interesting usages of the digital paper was information search and proofreading to mention a few. You can find more information on Moira’s home page.

ICEIS 2008: First Friday afternoon session

Xavier — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:44:48 +0000

I attended four papers (you can check the abstracts of Friday papers here): paper 304, 323, 538, and 434. On of the paper has nobody to present it. There were quite a bunch of interesting ideas. I just want to mention one of them. Two papers presented several methodologies to model SOA. Another interesting approach was the claim (papers 304 and 434) that SOA can be used for modeling business processes, and have little to do with information technologies. They claimed that such a connection to information technologies should be done once the SOA business processes are well defined. This may sound quite estrange if you are coming from a technical background. However, it is not far fetch. It just sound like a reincarnation of the late nineties hype on business reengineering via functional designs—which SAP rided so successful. Interestingly Jorge Cardoso also hinted this direction during the morning panel.

ICEIS 2008: Blogging from Barcelona (Friday Morning)

Xavier — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:26:52 +0000

The hotel finally got the wireless system rebooted, so I am finally back up. I found quite unusual to open the ICEIS 2008 conference with a panel form by the four invited speakers: Moira Norrie (Global Information System Group, ETH), Jorge Cardoso (SAP), Jean-Marie Favre (UFR, IMA), Ricardo Baeza-Yates (Yahoo! Research Barcelona). Each of them did a short introduction of their invited talks, and just three questions were asked. Since the conference started at 11am, after the panel, lunch break