I make it a habit to really focus on long term goals. I also believe that it is of paramount importance that your goals are in accordance with your values. I spend a lot of time planning how to meet my goals, thus thinking about what I value as an individual. One of the things that I have long believed was something that I value is innovation. I was reading a paper today from Martin Pelikan and David E. Goldberg. These are 2 innovators in the world of machine learning, in particular – Pelkin is renown for his work on estimation of distribution algorithms and Goldberg is one of the foremost figures in the world of genetic algorithms and several related and sub-fields.

In any case – something in this paper struck me:

“Innovation can be though of as a model of genetic algorithms and genetic algorithms can be thought of as a model of innovation.” 

I wonder if some part of my core values has drawn me to this aspect of evolutionary computation. The job of an evolutionary algorithm is really to innovate – to find something that is innovative enough to learn how to better handle a particular problem.

Just some random musing on innovation….

-Chris

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As I was doing some reading this week, I realized how thankful I have been for some excellent resources. I wanted to take a moment to enumerate a few machine learning resources that have been immensely helpful in the past few years of practical application of many machine learning projects.

IEEE
Computer.org
IEEE Computational Intelligence Society
MIT Journal of Evolutionary Computation
Journal of Machine Learning Research
Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory (IlliGAL)

There is a LOT more out there. These resources have provided the lions share of material needed to work on cutting edge machine learning. In particular:

EDAs (Estimation of Distribution Algorithms)
MOOs (Multiobjective Optimizers)
Fuzzy Classifiers
Bayesian networks
AISs (Artificial Immune Systems)

Thanks and kudos to all the people working so hard at universities around the world and in other research areas. These people provide the work needed to bring these tools, devices and techniques into practical application.

-Chris

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