News

Researchers from the UCD Natural Computing Research & Applications Group in collaboration with Bell Labs published in the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking journal (Vol.27 Issue 1) a paper titled “Automated Self-Optimization in Heterogeneous Wireless Communications Networks” where they demonstrate that their approach to Artificial Intelligence based on Evolutionary Computation more than triples  peak data rates, and show how their approach can be used by network operators to flexibly tune the tradeoff between peak rates and fairness across all mobile network users. The research is supported by Science Foundation Ireland through an Investigator Award to Prof Michael O’Neill who is a Full Professor of Business Analytics at the UCD School of Business.

12-14 December we welcomed TPNC 2018, the 7th instance of the international conference on the Theory & Practice of Natural Computing with over 40 delegates to the UCD Natural Computing Research & Applications Group in the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School. The proceedings are published by Springer in Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume LNCS 11324.

Congratulations to David Lynch and Stefan Forstenlechner who both successfully defended their PhD theses this month on “Automated Self-Optimisation in Heterogeneous Wireless Communications Networks using Techniques from Evolutionary Computation” (Lynch) and “Program Synthesis with Grammars and Semantics in Genetic Programming” (Forstenlechner).

John Woodward (Queen Mary University London) visited our group on 9 November 2018 to give a seminar on “Genetic Improvement: Taking Real-World Source Code and Improving it Using Genetic Programming”

Prof Michael O’Neill in collaboration with the Analytics Institute and supported by EY launched the inaugural National Business Analytics Maturity Study at the National Analytics Conference held in the Mansion House Dublin on 6 November 2018

Welcome to Tomasz Pawlak who is a visiting researcher with the NCRA group funded by a grant from the  National Science Centre, Poland, grant no. 2016/23/D/ST6/03735. Tomasz will spend two weeks at UCD working with the NCRA group before returning to Poznan University of Technology in Poland. His research interests are synthesis of mathematical programming models from data, program synthesis using genetic programming, and process mining.

To celebrate 20 years since the first publication on Grammatical Evolution at the First EuroGP in 1998 in Paris, France the original authors and inventors of Grammatical Evolution have joined forces to bring together a collection of chapters contributed by leading researchers in the field of Genetic Programming.

 

The NCRA Group are delighted to host the 7th International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Natural Computing (TPNC 2018) at UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School. Takfarinas Saber will present a paper on A Hierarchical Approach to Grammar-Guided Genetic Programming The case of Scheduling in Heterogeneous Networks and Nam Le will present a paper on How the Baldwin Effect Can Guide Evolution in Dynamic Environments.

Prof Michael O’Neill’s Investigator Award (App’ED) has been shortlisted for the Science Foundation Ireland Best Reported Impact Award 2018 and includes a collaboration with Bell Labs.

The 2nd call for the ALECS Programme is now open and the deadline has been extended to 21 October 2018. This is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie COFUND Fellowship Programme coordinated by Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre. Click here for further details.