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Accepted Tutorials

Tutorials held prior to the congress serve to update participants on the advancements in the field of evolutionary computation topics in recent years. The IEEE CEC 2007 will feature a number of pre-congress tutorials that are related to the technical scope of the conference on 25 September 2007:

Tutorials Session 1: (8.15am to 11am)
Tut. 1   Evolutionary Computation: A Unified Approach
            Kenneth A. De Jong
            Room Enterprise
Tut. 2   Cancelled
Tut. 3   Evolutionary Computation in Finance and Economics 
            Edward Tsang
            Room Mercury
Tut. 4   From Evolving Single Neural Networks to Evolving Ensembles
            Xin Yao

            Room Minto

Lunch Break: (11am to 12noon)

Tutorials Session 2: (12noon to 2.45pm)
Tut. 5   Cancelled
Tut. 6   Evolving Soccer Teams for RoboCup Simulation
            Tomoharu Nakashima

            Room Enterprise
Tut. 7   Evolutionary Computation in Bioinformatics  
            Gary Fogel and Kay Wiese

            Room Mercury
Tut. 8   Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization (EMO): Fundamentals,
            State-of-the-art Methodologies and Future Challenges 
            Kalyanmoy Deb

            Room Minto

Tea Break: (2.45pm to 3.15pm)

Tutorials Session 3: (3.15pm to 6pm)
Tut. 9   Adaptive Business Intelligence -- Evolutionary Computation for Real World             Problems
            Zbigniew Michalewicz
            Room Enterprise
Tut. 10 Cancelled

Tut. 11 Genetic Programming Practice and Theory  
            Riccardo Poli
            Room Mercury
Tut. 12 Particle Swarm Optimization and Differential Evolution 
            Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam Suganthan

            Room Minto


 
 
 
  Abstract  
  Tut. 1.   Title: Evolutionary Computation: A Unified Approach
              Organizer: Kenneth A. De Jong
              Venue: Room Enterprise

The field of Evolutionary Computation (EC) has experienced tremendous growth over the past 15 years, resulting in a wide variety of evolutionary algorithms and applications.  The result poses an interesting dilemma for many practitioners in the sense that, with such a wide variety of algorithms and approaches, it is often hard to  se the relationships between them, assess strengths and weaknesses, and make good choices for new application areas.

This tutorial is intended to give an overview of EC via a general framework that can help compare and contrast approaches, encourage crossbreeding, and facilitate intelligent design choices.   The use of this framework is then illustrated by showing how traditional EAs can be compared and contrasted with it, and how new EAs can be effectively designed using it.

Finally, the framework is used to identify some important open issues that need further research.


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Tut. 3.  Title: Evolutionary Computation in Finance and Economics 
            Organizer:
 Edward Tsang
            Venue: Room Mercury

Computing has changed many aspects of our daily life. It certainly has changed the face of finance and economics research. Advances in both hardware and software allow us to study finance and economic in ways that were previously impossible. For example, advances in evolutionary computation allows us to discover forecasting rules, bargaining strategies and economic models; advances in optimization allows us to search for portfolios with maximum return and minimum risk. The use of artificial markets enable us to understand better some of the fundamental concepts in economics, such as rationality and the efficient market hypothesis. In this tutorial, I shall give an overview of research in evolutionary computation in finance and economics.


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  Tut. 4.   Title: From Evolving Single Neural Networks to Evolving Ensembles
             Organizer: Xin Yao
             Venue: Room Minto

Designing compact neural networks that generalise well is often very difficult and requires much domain knowledge about the problem. Simulated evolution can be used to search for a near optimal neural network automatically. This tutorial first introduces an evolutionary system for designing neural networks, where behavioural rather than genetic evolution is emphasised. Parsimony is encouraged through the sequential application of mutation operators. Behavioural link between parents and offspring is maintained. Some experimental results will be given.

The tutorial then argues that learning is different from optimisation in practice. The way we evolved neural networks did not exploit the useful population information fully. It is shown, through experiments, how simple techniques can be used to improve neural network's generalisation ability by combining different individuals in a population.

Since we are going to combine different individual neural networks, the question now is how to design and train those individuals so that they can be combined more effectively. This tutorial describes a new learning algorithm which trains individual neural networks simultaneously so that they will cooperate with each other when combined.

OUTLINE:

   1. Introduction to Evolutionary Computation
       1.1 Algorithms
       1.2 Main Areas

   2. Combinations of Evolutionary and Neural Computations
       2.1 Evolution of Weights
       2.2 Evolution of Architectures
       2.3 Evolution of Learning Rules

   3. Evolving Ensembles
       3.1 Combining Individuals
       3.2 Fitness Sharing and Automatic Modularisation

   4. Ensembles Learning Using Negative Correlation

   5. Conclusions


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Tut. 6.   Title: Evolving Soccer Teams for RoboCup Simulation 
             Organizer:
 Tomoharu Nakashima
             Venue: Room Enterprise

RoboCup is an international project that promotes various research fields such as robotics and artificial intelligence. The ultimate aim of RoboCup soccer is to beat against the human world champion team by the year 2050. The environment of RoboCup soccer provides us with many challenging problems such as real-time information processing, noisy data handling, and cooperation between soccer players. Among five leagues in RoboCup soccer, simulation league is the most active research domain in terms of the development of computational intelligence techniques. In the first part of the tutorial we give a general introduction of RoboCupand RoboCup soccer. Specifically the soccer simulation league is more focused on than the other leagues. The second part of the tutorial shows an evolutionary computation method for evolving soccer team strategies. A team strategy is encoded as an integer string that represents a set of action rules of ten players. The task of the evolutionary computation method is to find the optimal set of action rules. Various techniques for improving the performance of the evolutionary computation method are also illustrated. For example, instability in the game results obtained from the iterations of the same match-up is resolved by modifying the fitness function in the evolutionary computation method.

The tutorial is intended to give an idea of how to implement computational intelligence techniques especially evolutionary computation in developing RoboCup soccer simulation teams. A simple implementation of a soccer team using a base set of source codes will be also demonstrated.


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Tut. 7.  Evolutionary Computation in Bioinformatics  
            Organizers:
Gary Fogel and Kay Wiese
            Venue: Room Mercury

Application of evolutionary computation to problems in computational biology and bioinformatics have steadily increased in recent years.   This is likely due to the demonstrated utility of evolutionary algorithms for searching vast numbers of possible solutions and as an optimization method for pattern recognition models. This tutorial will provide an introduction to a wide assortment of biological problems relevant to the computer scientist as well as an overview of the leading data repositories (EMBL, GenBank, DDBJ, Swiss-Prot, PDB, and others) typically utilized when working on computational biology and bioinformatics research. Applications of evolutionary computation will be illustrated, in terms of both broad possibility and specific applications. The application section of the tutorial will be of interest to both biologists and computer scientists. The tutorial will conclude by identifying open opportunities for further exploration in this regard.


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Tut. 8.    Title: Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization (EMO): Fundamentals, State-of-the-art                         Methodologies and Future Challenges 
              Organizer: Kalyanmoy Deb
              Venue: Room Minto

Many real-world search and optimization problems are naturally posed as non-linear programming problems having multiple conflicting objectives. Due to lack of suitable solution techniques, such problems are usually artificially converted into a single-objective problem and solved. The difficulty arises because multi-objective optimization problems give rise to a set of Pareto-optimal solutions, each corresponding to a certain trade-off among the objectives. It then becomes important to find not just one Pareto-optimal solution but as many of them as possible. Classical methods are found to be not efficient because they require repetitive applications to find multiple Pareto-optimal solutions and in some occasions repetitive applications do not guarantee finding distinct Pareto-optimal solutions. The population approach of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) allows an efficient way to find multiple Pareto-optimal solutions simultaneously in a single simulation run.

In this tutorial, we shall contrast the differences in philosophies between classical and evolutionary multi-objective methodologies and provide adequate fundamentals needed to understand and use both methodologies in practice. Particularly, major state-of-the-art evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO) methodologies will be discussed in detail in the context of their computer implementations. Thereafter, three main application areas of EMO will be discussed with adequate case studies from practice -- (i) applications showing better decision-making abilities through EMO, (ii) applications exploiting the multitude of trade-off solutions of EMO in extracting useful information in a problem, and (iii) applications showing better problem-solving abilities in various other tasks (such as, reducing bloating, solving single-objective constraint handling, and others).

Clearly, EAs have a niche in solving multi-objective optimization problems compared to classical methods. This is why EMO methodologies are getting a growing attention in the recent past. Since this is a comparatively new field of research, in this tutorial, a number of future challenges in the research and application of multi-objective optimization will also be discussed.

This tutorial is aimed for both novices and users of EMO. Those without any knowledge in EMO will have adequate ideas of the procedures and their importance in computing and problem-solving tasks. Those who have been practicing EMO will also have enough ideas and materials for future research, know state-of-the-art results and techniques, and make a comparative evaluation of their research.


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Tut. 9.  Title: Adaptive Business Intelligence--Evolutionary Computation for Real World Problems
             Organizer:
 Zbigniew Michalewicz
             Venue: Room Enterprise

The statement “complex business problems are difficult to solve” is so obvious that it does not require any justification. A closer look at any real-world business problem, whether in distribution, customer retention, or fraud detection, will bear witness to this obvious truth. Most complex business problems share the following characteristics, which is the reason they are so difficult to solve:

  • The number of possible solutions is so large that it precludes a complete search for the best answer. In other words, the number of possible distributions, routes, fraud rules, or transportation plans is so large, that examining all the possibilities would take many centuries of supercomputing time.

  • The problem exists in a time-changing environment. This means that yesterday’s decision, however optimal, may be far from optimal today.

  • The problem is heavily constrained. For most problems, the final solution should satisfy many restrictions imposed by internal regulations, capacities, laws, and/or preferences. Sometimes finding even one feasible solution (i.e., a solution that satisfies all problem-specific constraints) is quite difficult.

  • There are many (possibly conflicting) objectives. For example, the goal of many scheduling problems is to minimize both time and cost, but these two objectives work against each other (as a decrease in time usually results in an increase in cost, and vice versa). To allow business managers to effectively control these tradeoffs, such problems may require an entire set of solutions (rather than just a single solution).

  • The problem includes prediction component. Indeed, this is the case for portfolio management, supply chain optimization, marketing problems, and may others.

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  Tut. 11.  Title: Genetic Programming Practice and Theory  
               Organizer: Riccardo Poli

               Venue: Room Mercury

Genetic programming (GP) is an evolutionary technique for getting computers to automatically solve problems without having to tell them explicitly how to do it. Since its inception genetic programming has
been used to solve many practical problems including producing a number of human competitive results and even patentable new inventions.

This tutorial includes two parts. In the first part I will introduce the basics of GP practice, briefly explaining GP representations, operators and search algorithm, and showing examples of real runs. In the second part of the tutorial, I will then concentrate on explaining how and why GP works. This will done by first characterising GP's search space (the space of all possible programs) and then by explaining the way in which GP explores such a space.

Despite its technical contents, the tutorial will require limited mathematical background.


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Tut. 12.  Title: Particle Swarm Optimization and Differential Evolution 
               Organizers:
 Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam Suganthan

               Venue: Room Minto

Since the first publication of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) in 1995, the number of research papers on PSO and the number of researchers in PSO have exploded. Many variations of the PSO have been developed to improve the performance, studies have been done to understand the dynamics of particles, and adaptations have been developed to apply the PSO to different optimization problem types. DE algorithm, proposed by Storn and Price in 1995, is a simple but powerful population-based stochastic search technique for solving global optimization problems. Its efficiency has been successfully demonstrated in many application fields. DE’s self-organizing scheme takes the difference vector of two randomly chosen population vectors to perturb an existing vector. This tutorial will provide the attendee with an overview of PSO and DE literature, and will show how the different PSO/DE algorithms can easily be implemented using an open source CI library, called Cilib. This will provide the attendees with hands-on experience in using and coding PSO/DE algorithms.

The tutorial will cover the following topics, in relation to the PSO:

  • Basic PSO: The philosophy of PSO will be discussed, and the basic (original) PSO algorithms will be explained and illustrated. The need for social network structures will be discussed, as well as the importance of PSO control parameters, basic variations (velocity clamping, inertia, constriction). An overview of performance criteria will be given.

  • Particle trajectories: The behavior of PSO particles will be discussed, and formal heuristics derived to guide selection of values for control parameters. Example particle trajectories will be illustrated, and one of the major pitfalls of PSO will be pointed out and corrected.

  • Single-solution PSO: A number of variations of the basic PSO to locate a single solution will be presented and illustrated.

  • Niching PSO: It will be shown how the PSO can be adapted to find multiple solutions.

  • MOO PSO: This section will show how PSO can be used to solve multi-objective optimization problems.

  • Constrained PSO: Here PSO variations to solve constrained problems will be discussed.

  • Dynamic environments: It will be shown how PSO can be adapted to maintain and track optima in dynamically changing environments.

  • Discrete optimization: Changes to PSO to solve binary/discrete-valued problems will be discussed and illustrated.

The above topics will be illustrated during the tutorial using the open source library, Cilib.

The tutorial will cover the following topics, in relation to the DE:

  • Introduction to DE
  • Recent variants of DE self-adaptive DE (for parameters and strategies)
  • Niching, constrained and multiobjective cases would be briefly covered.
  • CEC05 and CEC06 benchmarking study results on real parameter evolutionary algorithms    

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