so, this night is my last night in london. i had a great time here, not only at the conference, but also visiting some of the world’s most famous places.
gecco was quite interesting, i attended some great presentations and even got some good feedback on my own one. a highlight was the keynote event, but also meeting some guys with similar research interests from all over the world was just great. i’m really curious about whenever i get an oppurtunity like this again.

funniest thing was meeting a pakistani at the pub where i spent almost every night after wandering around in the city, who complimented me on my good english. i’m quite sure there are some of you with a different opinion on that. ^^

unfortunately, i’m going to leave quite early tomorrow, and i still have to get my (unexpectedly grown) luggage packed. i even bought a new rock climbing rucksack to get the gecco proceedings back to germany, together with some gifts. might get hard when checking in for the flight tomorrow morning.

yesterday in the evening, the gecco keynote took place at the national history museum in london.
a great location, especially for meeting “some of the greatest minds in evolutionary biology” (gecco program preamble, Hod Lipson): Richard Dawkins, Lewis Wolpert and Steve Jones.

Here are some pictures (sorry for some of them being blurred, couldn’t dare using a flashlight ):

the location:

inside:

the panel:

Hopefully, some of you have better quality images that they are willing to share.

as jj proposed on his blog, some of the guys blogging about the gecco 2007 could meet up somewhere in london.
sounds like a good idea!

great city, can’t state that often enough.
i was just wandering around yesterday evening, here are some impressions:

covent garden:

trafalgar square/nelson’s column (where the tour de france started lately, for the first time in london):

big ben:

and finally, the location where gecco 2007 takes place, the University College London:

now i’m going to prepare for my presentation which is scheduled for tuesday, five o’clock.
though… no need to hurry, perhaps i’ll take a sunbath at hyde park during lunch break first.

Today, i submitted the final revision of our paper entitled “Self-Adaptive Ant Colony Optimisation Applied to Function Allocation in Vehicle Networks”, which i am going to present at the GECCO 2007 [1] in London (July 7-11, 2007).

Here’s the abstract:

Modern vehicles possess an increasing number of software and hardware components that are integrated in electronic control units (ECUs). Finding an optimal allocation for all components is a multi-objective optimisation problem, since every valid allocation can be rated according to multiple objectives like costs, busload, weight, etc. Additionally, several constraints mainly regarding the availability of resources have to be considered. This paper introduces a new variant of the well-known ant colony optimisation, which has been applied to the real-world problem described above. Since it concerns a multi-objective optimisation problem, multiple ant colonies are employed. In the course of this work, pheromone updating strategies specialised on constraint handling are developed. To reduce the effort needed to adapt the algorithm to the optimisation problem by tuning strategic parameters, self-adaptive mechanisms are established for most of them. Besides the reduction of the effort, this step also improves the algorithm’s convergence behaviour.

Feel free to contact me to get the full paper.

[1] gecco 2007

finally, jon flanders put his atlas-powered workflow designer online. you can read about it and download it at [1], or have a look at the online demo at [2].
looks like a good point to start from for hosting the designer in a custom web application.

[1] atlas based workflow designer
[2] online demo

when i put technorati in my list of services to ping when publishing new posts, i was NOT aware of not beeing able to change my mind at all and delete a post.

from the technorati faqs ([1]):

“I just posted something that was indexed that I don’t want displayed. What can do?

Please DO NOT delete the post. If the post is still displaying on the home page of your blog, then edit the post and overwrite the information in the post body with new content (something like, “This post has been removed”). Re-ping Technorati and all other services such as ourselves to pick up the “updated” post with the new information, and our indexes will replace the content that you are looking to remove with the new content that is okay to display.

If the blog or post has already been deleted, or the blog claim has already been deleted in Technorati, then we’re afraid there’s not much we can do. Due to the time and effort required to remove previously indexed posts, we are unable to support removal at this time unless it is a matter of copyright infringement. “

great. :-/

so, what about that “temporary” post that live writer generated for style detection?
when i wrote this post, 1,186 other bloggers obviously had the same problem ([2])

[1] technorati faq
[2] other live writer “temporary” posts

after reading jon flanders’ (spare *g*) post (see [1]) on his very first windows live writer experiences, i got curious about it. briefly, it’s a wysiwyg editor for publishing with the most popular blogging systems, primarily, of course, msn spaces. also blogger, typepad and wordpress are supported.

read about that nifty new tool and get it at [2]!

[1] jon flanders’ live writer test

[2] windows live writer blog

great!
i just noticed Ashish Shetty’s post about his netfx3-based p2p version of sudoku [1], get it at [2].
his implementation takes advantage of windows communication foundation, windows presentation foundation as well as windows workflow foundation, requiring the june ctp available at [3].

for solving your daily sudoku without the need of installing anything you could also point your browser at [4].

[1] http://nerddawg.blogspot.com/2006/07/sudoku.html
[2] sudoku at netfx3.com
[3] netfx3 june ctp
[4] websudoku

there are two more books on the windows workflow foundation listed at amazon and waiting to be published:
Read the rest of this entry »