Blog entries for category "research":

I'd like to share a little story that is, in my personal opinion, very typical of how Monash University operates. Enjoy a good laugh!

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Finally I know it's not just me...

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I went to Madeira to attend the ICEC'09 conference (International Conference on Evolutionary Computation) where I presented my and Suzanne's work on Dual Phase Evolution. The presentation went extremely well and there were some interesting questions during the following discussion.

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Down in the old town centre lights shimmered busily. The wind mixed the buzz of the city, the hooting of cars, and the occasional laughter and shouting into a jolly babble and carried it up the Castle Hill, across the park, and up to the walls of the palace. Around, a few groups of people, strolling, many with wine glasses, chatting, smiling, enjoyed the warm Indian summer night and the views across the Danube onto the city of Pest. The giant cornice above the tunnel that lead through the Castle Hill and connected Buda's alleys directly to the Chain Bridge shimmered in a magical silver tone created by the fool moon that shined through the trees. The cornice was a traditional meeting place for couples, and on this night several of them sat and stood along the cornice edge and further up between the trees of the castle. Enchanted, I thought that if someone would ever ask me what it was that I missed while living in breathtaking Australia, missed so much that I could hardly imagine settling there, all I needed to do was to bring across a little of this humbling atmosphere that filled everything around. I could not imagine to find anything like that anywhere outside Europe.

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The Eleventh International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems was a big success in general as well as for me personally. While the biggest ALife event to date, the conference was signified by a traditionally very low acceptance rate and a very high paper quality. Presenting my own work as a full conference paper was fantastic, and attending the meeting of the leading ALife researchers in the world was a stimulating and rewarding experience.

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The reason I came to Knoxville was to visit Sergey's Gavrilets lab for theoretical evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee. Sergey is one of the leaders in the field and it was a very interesting visit.

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The actual reason for my trip to Atlanta was attending GECCO - the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2008. I have published some work there and thus presented that work in form of 2 posters and a paper presentation at the Graduate Student Workshop. One paper was on protein pattern classifier learning [Paperin, 2008a], the other - a conceptual investigation into using my computational model of Gavrilets' Holey Fitnes Landscapes for preventing premature convergence in evolutionary optimisation algorithms [Paperin, 2008b].

The conference was a brilliant one, everyone I met there liked it a lot.

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