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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, April 30, 2007 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Melanie Mitchell

"Genetic Algorithms"

ABSTRACT -- Abstract: Genetic algorithms (GAs) are a class of machine learning methods based on ideas from natural genetics and evolution. Applications of GAs range from automated engineering design to modeling of evolutionary processes. In this talk I will introduce genetic algorithms and their applications, and will talk in detail about my own research on designing "cellular array" architectures for decentralized, distributed computing. I will also describe a variation of genetic algorithms - co-evolutionary computing - which is inspired by host-parasite competition in nature. We have found that co-evolutionary computing methods are dramatically more successful than traditional GAs on a number of problems. I will discuss these results and our investigations into the reasons for the striking success of co-evolution.

SPEAKER -- Melanie Mitchell received a a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 1990. Her dissertation work with Douglas Hofstadter was on cognitive modeling of analogy-making. She has held faculty or research positions at the University of Michigan, the Santa Fe Institute (as Director of the Institute's Adaptive Computation Program), the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the OGI School of Science and Engineering at the Oregon Health & Science University. She is currently Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University.

Dr. Mitchell has been the recipient of a University of Michigan Regents' Fellowship, a Fellowship in the Michigan Society of Fellows, and a 21st Century Research Award Grant from the J. S. McDonnell Foundation. She has also served on the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute. In 1997 she was selected to give the Ulam Memorial Lectures in Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute.

Dr. Mitchell is the author of Analogy-Making as Perception (MIT Press, 1993) and An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms (MIT Press, 1996). She is a co-editor of Adaptive Individuals in Evolving Populations: Models and Algorithms (Addison Wesley, 1996) and Perspectives on Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems (Oxford University Press, 2005). She is also the author of over 60 research papers in the fields of machine intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems.




Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov