Seventh GECCO Undergraduate Student Workshop

Wednesday, July 8, 2009, 2:00 –6:00 PM

to be held as part of the

 

2009 GENETIC AND EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION CONFERENCE (GECCO-2009)

July 8-12, 2009 (Wednesday-Sunday)

Delta Centre-Ville Hotel

777 University Street , Montreal , Quebec , H3C 3Z7 , Canada

Organized by ACM SIG-EVO

www.sigevo.org/GECCO-2009

Important Dates

 

Submission deadline:           Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Acceptance notification:      Friday, April 3, 2009

Camera ready deadline:      Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Workshop Description

 

 

      The seventh annual Undergraduate Student Workshop at a GECCO conference will occur on Wednesday, July 8, 2009 as part of the GECCO-2009
      conference in Montreal , QC , Canada . The workshop will provide an opportunity for undergraduate students to present their research in evolutionary       computation. Typically, presentations will describe senior-level research projects supervised by a faculty mentor; however, summer research projects or       exceptional course projects may also be appropriate.

 

      The workshop will be a half-day event, during which approximately eight undergraduate students will present their work to each other, to participating       students' faculty mentors, and to GECCO participants interested in undergraduate research. Students should plan on 20-minute presentations, followed by five       minutes of questions and discussion
      Students invited to the workshop will also participate in the conference poster session. Students will display posters summarizing their work, allowing the larger       GECCO community to see what's being done by undergraduates in evolutionary computation. The poster session will also be a great opportunity for networking!
.

The goals of the Undergraduate Student Workshop are to:
  • provide a forum allowing undergraduate students to put a capstone on their undergraduate research activities, by presenting their work at an international conference
  • encourage teaching faculty to consider undergraduate research opportunities for their students in the EC field
  • prepare undergraduate students for graduate work in EC areas
  • encourage sharing and networking amongst teaching faculty with students participating in undergraduate research projects in EC
  • provide networking opportunities for graduate school faculty and undergraduate students interested in pursuing advanced degrees, and
  • encourage more emphasis on education at the GECCO conference

Workshop Format

       We anticipate a half-day workshop with approximately 8 presentations, organized according to the following schedule:


        14:00 – 14:10   Workshop welcome
       14:10 – 15:50   Four presentations (20 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A each)
       15:50 – 16:10   Coffee break and informal discussion
       16:10 – 17:50   Four presentations (20 minutes + 5 minutes Q&A each)
       17:50 – 18:00   Discussion and planning for future workshops



Submissions

      Students are invited to submit papers not to exceed 4 pages that must strictly adhere to the ACM formatting rules; Word and LaTex templates are provided at
       http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2009/papers.html. Papers should be submitted in PDF format only and should be submitted via email to       ayworkshops@uaa.alaska.edu. Be sure to place the text "GECCO 2009 UGWS" in the subject line of your message. For additional information, please refer to the       workshop web site at http://math.uaa.alaska.edu/~ugws2009.
      In addition, each paper must be accompanied by an email message from a supervising faculty member verifying that the author(s) performed the research       described in the paper while enrolled as undergraduate students during the 2007-8 and/or 2008-9 academic year.By custom, faculty members are not named       co-authors of Undergraduate Student Workshop papers, although they may be recognized in the acknowledgments section of the paper.
Faculty Participation

      Since many undergraduate students do not normally read the EC newsgroups and mailing lists, faculty participation is a key element for promoting this       workshop. Faculty who have taught undergraduate courses related to evolutionary computation, or who have supervised undergraduate research activities in the       field, are encouraged to consider which of their outstanding students might wish to submit papers for the workshop. In addition, faculty members who are       interested in undergraduate education may serve on the workshop panel. The panel will provide an excellent opportunity for sharing project ideas and pedagogy       related to evolutionary computation. Interested faculty members should contact the workshop organizers at ayworkshops@uaa.alaska.edu.
Organizing Committee

      Each member of the commi

Clare Bates Congdon
University of Southern Maine
P.O. Box 9300, Portland, ME 04104 USA
PH: 1-207-228-8441
Fax: 1-207-228-8271
congdon@usm.maine.edu

ttee has been active in research involving evolutionary computation. Collectively, they have published more than 150 journal and       refereed conference papers and technical reports, and have received research funding exceeding $1.5 million.
Laurence D. Merkle
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
5500 Wabash Ave., CM-103, Terre Haute, IN 47803 USA
PH: 1-812-877-8474
FAX: 1-812-872-6060
laurence.d.merkle@rose-hulman.edu
Larry Merkle teaches computer science, mathematics, and computer engineering courses and advises senior thesis students at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. He served as an active duty officer in the United States Air Force from 1988 through 2002, and continued to serve as a reservist through 2007. He became involved in evolutionary computation in 1991, and has been involved in its application to a number of problems of interest to the military, including design of materials with nonlinear optical properties, design of high-power microwave sources, modeling of biochemical processes in molecular computing applications, and enhancing the effectiveness of compilers for polymorphous computing architectures. During the summer of 2004, he held a Visiting Professor position with the Air Force Research Laboratory where he studied evolvable hardware.
Frank W. Moore
University of Alaska Anchorage
SSB 154 L, 3211 Providence Dr., Anchorage, AK 99508 USA
PH: 1-907-786-4819
FAX: 1-907-786-6162
affwm@uaa.alaska.edu
Frank Moore is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He received his BSCE, MSCE, and PhD from Wright State University. He has taught computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering courses at the undergraduate and graduate level since 1997. In addition, he has over six years of industry experience developing software for a wide variety of military projects. His recent research at the Air Force Research Laboratory has used evolutionary computation to optimize transforms that outperform wavelets for signal compression and reconstruction under conditions subject to quantization and thresholding.
Contact Point
      Frank W. Moore
      ayworkshops@uaa.alaska.edu
Clare Bates Congdon received her BA from Wesleyan University and MS and PhD from The University of Michigan, and has been teaching evolutionary computation and machine learning to undergraduates for over a dozen years. She is an advocate and mentor for undergraduate research, and has been bringing undergraduate students to GECCO and other conferences to present their evolutionary computation research since 2000. Her research (including that done with undergraduates) includes evolutionary computation as applied to areas such as bioinformatics, art, and robotics; her project "Machine Learning for Phylogenetics and Genomics" is funded by the NIH INBRE program.