John H. Holland will give a keynote speech at GECCO-2009 on July 12, 2009 (Sunday), 10:40am-11:40am. The talk is entitled Genetic Algorithms: Long Ago [Past] and Far Away [Future] and the abstract of the talk follows:
It was in the mid-50’s of the 20th century when I realized that Fisher’s fundamental theorem could be extended from individual alleles to co-adapted sets of alleles, without linearization. That led to a realization that recombination, rather than mutation, was the main mechanism providing grist for the natural selection mill. There was little theory concerning recombination in those days, but now recombination is a standard explanation for biological innovations, such as swine flu.
Much later, in the early 1990’s, GA’s provided the “adaptive” part of rule-based models of complex adaptive systems (CAS), such as the artificial stock market pioneered at the Santa Fe Institute. Tag-based signal processing occurs in systems as different as biological cells, language acquisition, and ecosystems. CAS models offer a unified way to study the on-going co-evolution of boundary and tag networks in these systems.
Another keynote speaker at GECCO-2009 is Demetri Terzopoulos, who will give the talk Artificial Life Simulation of Humans and Lower Animals: From Biomechanics to Intelligence on July 11 (Saturday) at 4.10pm-5.50pm. As if this wasn’t enough, GECCO-2009 will also feature an invited talk of Hans-Paul Schwefel at the Learning from Failures in Evolutionary Computation (LFFEC) Workshop, which is entitled Failures as stepping stones to success or per aspera ad astra.
More details can be found on GECCO-2009 webpage.
