Claus Aranha @ Tsukuba University

Goodbye 2022, Hello 2023! I hope the year of the rabbit brings cool things for everyone.

Here is a post looking back on the publications that I was a part of last year.

The publication I'm most proud of the last year is not exactly a scientific paper, although it distills really well how I think about science. It is my short story submission to Lana's Fiction Science contest:

• "Nature Finds a Way" Claus Aranha, Diego Aranha, Fiction Science Contest, 2022-03

And the publication that already got the most citations was the "open letter" that the "bestiary gang" (Felipe, Soresen, etc) publised to push against metaphor metaheuristics. I guess rants do attract attention!

• "Metaphor-based metaheuristics, a call for action: the elephant in the room", Claus Aranha, et al., Swarm Intelligence, 2022-03

On the same topic, Jair started publishing his results on techniques for automatically comparing and categorizing different metaheuristics:

• "Empirical Similarity Measure for Metaheuristics", Jair Pereira Junior, Claus Aranha, BIOMA, 2022-11

The DWARF collaboration (Me, Romain, and our students) published two papers on the intersection of subsurface models and evolutionary computation:

• "Optimization of Subsurface Models with Multiple Criteria using Lexicase Selection", Yifan He, Claus Aranha, Antony Hallam, Romain Chassagne, Operations Research Perspectives, 2022-01

• "Comparison of Map Metrics ad Fitness Input for Assisted Seismic History Matching, Antony Hallam, Romain Chassagne, Claus Aranha, Yifan He, Journal of Geophysics and Engineering, 2022-06

Yuri got the results of his SPECIES internship in the UK out of his system with several papers, some of which got nominated for awards in Evostar and GECCO:

• "Faster Convergence in Multi-Objective Optimization Algorithms Based on Decomposition", Yuri Lavinas, Marcelo Ladeira, Claus Aranha, Evolutionary Computation, 2022-02

• "Search Trajectories Networks of Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithms", Yuri Lavinas, Claus Aranha, Gabriela Ochoa, Evostar, 2022-04

• "Component-wise Analysis of Automatically Designed Multiobjective algorithms on constrained problems", Yuri Lavinas, Marcelo Ladeira, Gabriela Ochoa, Claus Aranha, GECCO, 2022-07

And Abe summarized his master thesis work in this AAMAS paper about multi-agent simulation of anti-covid policies. One cool thing about this paper is that it was the first time where I actively got several students contributing on the same work. Each of them proposed a different simulation scenario, and we published a comparison analysis of that:

• "Using Agent-Based Simulator to Assess Interventions Against Covid-19 in a small community generated From Map Data", Mitsuteru Abe, Fabio Tanaka, Jair Pereira Junior, Anna Bogdanova, Tetsuya Sakurai, Claus Aranha, AAMAS 2022, 2022-05

Talking about students, Mohiuddeen did a short online internship at our group, and the following paper was the result. Unfortunately, it did not get accepted at IEEE-COG, but it is a work that certainly deserves extra effort:

• "A Novel Weighted Ensemble Learning Based Agent for the Werewolf Game", Mohiuddeen Khan, Claus Aranha, ArXiv, 2022-05

And the Minecraft Settlement Generation group published a summary of the past challenges, which I usually participate with international interns. This is another really cool piece of work:

• "Impressions of the GDMC AI Settlement Generation Challenge in Minecraft", Christoph Salge, Claus Aranha, et al., Foundations of Digital Games, 2022-09

About City Generation, this year I started a partnership with USP to work on generative urban design. Luiz will join our laboratory next year as a MEXT scholar, so I expect to see much more of this:

• "An agent-based approach to procedural city generation incorporating Land Use and Transport Interaction Models", Luiz FSE dos Santos, Claus Aranha, Andre PLF de Carvalho, SBC-ENIAC, 2022-10:

In the last year and a half, Yifan has started a very cool work on a continuiously improving GP system, and got some initial publications on that. I hope to continue working on this in 2023.

• "Incorporating sub-programs as knowledge in program synthesis by PushGP and adaptive replacement mutation", Yifan He, Claus Aranha, Tetsuya Sakurai, GECCO, 2022-07

• "Knowledge-Driven Program Synthesis via Adaptive Replacement Mutation and Auto-constructed Subprogram Archives", Yifan He, Claus Aranha, Tetsuya Sakurai, IEEE-SSCI, 2022-12

Last but not least, the paper that gets the prize for most interesting figures, Fabio's work on soft robots. I do hope some of the new students pick up on his work after he graduates.

• "Co-evolving morphology and control of soft robots using a single Genome", Fabio Tanaka and Claus Aranha, IEEE-SSCI, 2022-12: