Past Meeting

Thursday, February 21 - Dr. David Fogel of Natural Selection, Inc.

Evolutionary Computation: Using Darwinian Thinking to Solve Real-World Problems

The San Diego Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) will meet at 6:30PM at the San Diego office of Mitchell International in the Scripps Ranch area at 9970 Carroll Canyon Road.

We are extremely pleased to have the sponsorship of Mitchell International for this event, and very excited to have Dr. Fogel speaking. The lecture should be a don't-miss ... we hope to see you there!

Abstract:

Real-world problems pose many difficulties for traditional problem solving, yet evolution continues to invent new solutions for a host of real-world problems facing living organisms. Evolutionary computation uses Darwininan thinking as inspiration for a new approach to problem solving, in which the computer simulates an evolutionary struggle for survival amongst competing solutions that "live" in a computer program. These evolutionary algorithms have been applied with success to diverse problems in pharmaceutical design, factory scheduling, medical classification, and others.

Some of these examples will be highlighted, along with the most recent application of evolutionary computation to software entertainment: the self-taught checkers program named Blondie24. Attendees will have the opportunity to play against Blondie24 after the talk.

Biosketch:

Dr. David Fogel is chief executive officer of Natural Selection, Inc., a small high-tech company in La Jolla, CA that uses evolutionary computation, neural networks, and other forms of computational intelligence to solve challenging real-world problems in medicine, industry, and defense. Dr. Fogel is the author of over 200 papers and 6 books, most recently "Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI," which was on Amazon.com's "What We're Reading" list in November 2001.

Dr. Fogel is the founding editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, and is also the editor-in-chief of BioSystems, the evolutionary computation series editor for Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., and serves on the editorial boards of several other journals. Dr. Fogel is general chairman of the 2002 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, to be held May 12-17, 2002 in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is also chief scientist of Digenetics, Inc., a sister company to Natural Selection, Inc. that focuses on applying evolutionary computation to gaming. Dr. Fogel was elected a Fellow of the IEEE in 1999 and was recently named the Southwest Regional Young Investigator for 2002 by Sigma Xi.