Hello visitors! In spite of the COVID pandemic, I hope that everyone is managing life their own way.
I'm happy to announce that the students in our research group published several of their works: Yifan He got his work on auto-adaptive evolutionary computation accepted accepted at the "Advances in Data Science and Adaptive Analysis" journal, and the "BIOMA" conference; Jair Pereira and Yuri Lavinas presented their work at IEEE-CEC on genetic programming and multi-objective optimization, respectively; and Eduardo Hauck presented his work on Super Mario level generation at IEEE-COG. See details and links at the publications list.
We also had four (remote) internship students who finished/are finishing their projects. Adrien, Mael and Thomas submitted entries for the very fun Generative Design in Minecraft Competition. These entries were based on Eduardo's "Urban City Generator" that he submitted last year, but each student added their own twist to the idea. Clement is about to finish a comparative study on several Genetic Programming Techniques, which I hope can be used by future students, specially those planning to do work on ALife.
Finally, I published a programming tutorial for the AIWolf Project. It is 70 minutes of video (and accompanying code repository) that explains what is the AIWolf project, how to program an AI for it, and future research directions.
Now it is time to prepare for Fall. This means... grant applications (urgh...). This year I am kinda sick of getting rejected over and over on Kakenhi, so I'm trying a completely different project based on Yuri's and Yifan's work, along with my partnership with Romain. I will still try to submit the old project for a smaller grant somewhere else... I just don't know where yet :-). Also, this fall I'm in charge of the "Math for Computer Sciences" and "Intro to Programming" lectures, and since our university has decided on online learning for most lectures, this means a lot more youtubing my way. Finally, our group has four students graduating this year: Eduardo, Jair, Kobayashi and Tamaki.
Time to turn on the lo-fi and start working!