From: Dan Jacobs Subject: WebTech Tuesday 6/21 - Genetic Algorithms and Programming Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 21:04:03 +0000 Hi everyone, This month's WebTech meeting will be on Tuesday, 6/21/2005, 7 to 9 pm, at IBM in Waltham. Details and directions will be up on the group website at http://www.acm.org/chapters/webtech. We are extremely fortunate this month to have a joint presentation by David Walend and Jim Goodwin on Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming. This is an important area of technology that most of us know too little about. It's a great opportunity to expand your technical horizons and learn some new approaches to problem solving from two of the field's experts. I hope to see you there! Dan Jacobs, Chairman ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Abstract: Genetic algorithms and genetic programming are focused search heuristics inspired by Mendelian genetics and the theory of evolution. Most college classes and most of the literature on evolutionary computing focuses on the biological analogy and theoretical issues. This talk will focus on applying GAs and GPs to practical problems. We will introduce genetic algorithms and genetic programming, present real-world examples, and speculate about other applications of the technology. Outline: 1 GA Basics 2 GA Application Stories and points 3 GP Basics 4 GP Application Story and points 5 GA/GP Comparison 6 Discussion About the speakers: David Walend is a lead software engineer at British Aerospace, where he uses Java to build experimental planning systems for coordinating teams of robots. He started learning Java with the alpha 3 release in 1994 and began participating in open source projects in 1999. His open source projects on java.net include JDigraph, a directed graph library, and Somnifugi JMS, an in-memory implementation of JMS. David is a regular blogger at java.net. In 2004 David completed a masters in computer science at Tufts University. His masters project used genetic programming to demonstrate Lamarkianism and the Baldwin effect in armor tactics. Jim Goodwin has a long and checkered history as an Artificial Intelligence programmer, starting at BBN in 1969, and then a decade at Linköping University in Sweden where he did a PhD about non-monotonic truth maintenance. There followed jobs at GE R&D, Symbolics, Gensym, Optimax, Affinnova, inter alia. He has done interesting applications in factory scheduling and market research which you'll hear about in our talk. He has long-standing interests in knowledge representation, OOP, and GA's, and a new interest in model-based GUI generation.