i++ School Newsletter

Week commencing 25 May 2009

Previous Newsletters

Essex Team Wins Algorithm Competition at Congress of Evolutionary Computation 2009 in Norway

MOEA/D, invented by Dr Qingfu Zhang and his students, was ranked first among 13 entries in the unconstrained multiobjective evolutionary algorithm competition in CEC 2009 last week.  More technical details of their algorithm can be found in the following research papers:

H. Li and Q. Zhang,  Multiobjective Optimization Problems with Complicated Pareto Sets,  MOEA/D and NSGA-II, IEEE Trans on Evolutionary Computation, vol. 12,  no 2,  pp 284-302, 2009.

Q. Zhang and  H. Li,  MOEA/D: A Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm Based on Decomposition, IEEE Trans. on Evolutionary Computation, vol.11, no. 6, pp712-731  2007

CSEE had a very strong presence at the conference, with tutorials from Riccardo Poli, Edward Tsang, and Simon Lucas, and with Simon Lucas  as the Competitions Chair.

Essex Robotics is on the Map of the New Economic UK Atlas

The UK’s business landscape will have its biggest shake up since the industrial revolution, according to HSBC’s Future of Business report released on 29 May 2009. Unveiling a new map of the nation, the report uncovers a number of entrepreneurs as follows:

• Robotics (Edinburgh, Birmingham, Essex, London, Manchester, Plymouth)
• Biotech (York and Dundee)
• Nanotech (Oxford, Cambridge, Newcastle, Durham, Bristol, London)
• Stem cell research (Edinburgh, London, Cambridge, Liverpool, Manchester)
• Nutraceuticals (Dundee/Southampton)
• Renewable energies (London, Wales, Cornwall, Glasgow)
• Cybernetics (Reading)
• Gaming (Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow)

Essex Robotics is one of new centres for robotics identified in the report. More details can be found on the website.

Experiment in software engineering demonstrates 76% productivity gains with the TTP Toolkit

A controlled experiment testing the benefits that Java programmers gain from using the Two-Tier Programming Toolkit has recently been concluded with very positive outcome. Results indicate with high confidence (p-value=0.02) that the current prototype of the TTP Toolkit, developed in our department, cuts more than three quarters of the costs of tasks associated with software maintenance and significantly improves software quality after only one hour of training in its use after a minimal investment in training (one hour).
 
Read the full report here.

Accepted and Published Papers

S.-M. Zhou and J.Q. Gan, Extracting Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy rules with interpretable submodels via regularization of linguistic modifiers, IEEE Trans. on Knowledge and Data Engineering (Accepted for publication).

T. Geng and J.Q. Gan, Planar biped walking with an equilibrium point controller and state machines, IEEE/ASME Trans. on Mechatronics (Accepted for publication).

C.S.L. Tsui, J.Q. Gan, and S.J. Roberts, A self-paced brain-computer interface for controlling a robot simulator: An online event labelling paradigm and an extended Kalman filter based algorithm for online training, Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing, vol. 47, no. 3, pp. 257-265, 2009.

S.-M. Zhou, J.Q. Gan, L. Xu, and R. John, Fuzziness index driven fuzzy relaxation algorithm and applications to image processing, Annals of Operations Research, vol. 168, no. 1, pp. 119-131, 2009.

PhD CEEC 2009 - Call For Papers

The submission deadline for papers has been extended to 12 June. Please click here for more information.