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    • Submission deadline
      • 1 November 2012
        11 November 2012
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      • 15 January 2013
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      • 7 January 2013
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      • 1 March 2013
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      • 25 February 2013
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      • 25 March 2013
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      • 3-5 April 2013
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    • Malaga 2012 
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Social Events

 

Professor A E Eiben
Opening Talk: Wednesday, 3 April at 09:45 am

“Let's get physical: the future of evolutionary computing”

Evolution is one of the major powers in the universe that has been studied for about two centuries. Computers, invented in the 20th century, made it possible to move from passively understanding to actively using evolutionary processes as tools in digital spaces. The related area is called Evolutionary Computing. I argue that in the 21st century (probably in the near future) it will be possible to implement and utilize artificial evolutionary processes outside such imaginary spaces and make them physically embodied. In other words, I envision the “Evolution of Things'', rather than just the evolution of digital objects, leading to a new field of Embodied Artificial Evolution. In this talk I will present this vision in more detail and explain why these developments will radically change our lives.

Gusz Eiben is Professor and Head of the Computational Intelligence Group in the Department of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is one of the European early birds of Evolutionary Computing, with his first paper on the subject dating back to 1989. Since then he has published over 100 research papers, and co-authored the first comprehensive introductory book on evolutionary computing, entitled Introduction to Evolutionary Computing (Springer, 2003, with J.E. Smith). Gusz's research interests in evolutionary computing range from fundamental issues such as reproduction operators, self-calibrating algorithms, and constraint handling, to applications in data mining, evolutionary art, the simulation of emergent artificial societies, evolutionary robotics, and more recently, embodied artificial evolution.
Gusz has been an organizing committee member for virtually all the major international conferences on evolutionary computing (CEC, EP, EuroGP, FOGA, GECCO, PPSN), and is on the editorial board of five international journals (including JEC, IEEE TEC, GPEH). He is also a series editor for Springer's book series on Natural Computing, and a member of numerous science management bodies, including the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Computational Intelligence, the Executive Board of the European Network of Excellence on Evolutionary Computing, and the Steering Committee for the Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN) conference series. He presented a TED talk Tech Kangaroos: Evolution at Work" in 2011.

http://www.cs.vu.nl/~gusz/

 

Dr Richard Watson
Closing Talk: Friday, 5 April at 11:30 am

“EvoConnectionism: The Algorithmic Capabilities of Adaptive Interactions Within and Between Evolving Entities”


This talk discusses a developing body of work characterising a functional equivalence between learning and evolution. This is based on the observation that the selective pressures acting on biotic relationships in evolving systems change fitness interactions in the same way as simple associative learning rules that are well-understood in the context of neural networks. This enables conceptual and specific mechanistic knowledge from cognitively-inspired machine learning research to be applied to surprisingly diverse fields of evolutionary biology, including: evo-devo, evo-eco, social evolution and the major transitions in evolution. Here we describe how some of the recent results derived from this equivalence fit together to form the basis of a unified theory of ‘evo-connectionism’. In particular, we discuss the potential of individual selection to facilitate the formation of higher-level units of selection during an evolutionary transition via the same principles by which unsupervised associative learning can beneficially prime performance at supervised learning tasks.

Richard A. Watson is a senior lecturer in the natural systems research group at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science. He received his BA in AI from the University of Sussex in 1990 and then worked in industry for about five years. Returning to academia, he chose Sussex again for an MSc in knowledge-based systems, where he was introduced to evolutionary modeling. His PhD in computer science at Brandeis University (2002) resulted in 22 publications and a dissertation addressing the algorithmic concepts underlying the major transitions in evolution. A postdoctoral position at Harvard University's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology provided training to complement his computer science background. He now has over 50 journal and conference publications on topics spanning artificial life, robotics, evolutionary computation, population genetics, neural networks and computational biology. At Southampton, he's building his research programme and leading preparation of a new MSc in complexity science. He is the author of Compositional Evolution: The Impact of Sex, Symbiosis, and Modularity on the Gradualist Framework of Evolution (MIT Press, 2006).

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/raw


 

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