The primary objective of the App’ED project (2014-2020) is to explore the application of advanced evolutionary computation methods to real-world problems. The main method of focus is grammar-based genetic programming algorithms such as Grammatical Evolution (GE), and the headline application is designing software-defined, autonomic networks for wireless communications in collaboration with Bell Labs. The project is funded under an SFI Principal Investigator award (13/IA/1850).
App’ED project highlights to date include:
- Over 80 publications have arisen from the App’ED project research, including 2 books, over 20 journal articles, over 50 peer-reviewed conference papers, and a special issue of the Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines Journal have been published arising from App’ED research. Sample list provided below.
- A collaboration with Bell Labs has resulted in peer-reviewed publications (4 journal articles, numerous conference papers – further details below) with best paper nominations at EuroGP 2016 and EuroGP 2018, and a global Patent Application in 2018 for Methods and Systems for Network Self-Optimization using Deep Learning.
- A collaboration with ESB Networks.
- We’ve published 2 new books Natural Computing Algorithms and Handbook of Grammatical Evolution with Springer.
- Training of 3 PhD students (Stefan Forstenlechner, David Lynch & Nam Le Hai), and employment of 4 post doctoral researchers (Dr Takfarinas Saber, Dr David Fagan, Dr Michael Fenton & Dr Róisín Loughran).
- A series of Education and Public Engagement activities have taken place including:
- O’Neill was interviewed for three articles (on What is AI?, Can AI be creative?, and AI in Sport) as part of an Irish Times Special Report on Artificial Intelligence.
- With the Analytics Institute Prof O’Neill conducted the first survey of Business Analytics activity in Ireland, which was launched at the National Analytics Conference in the Mansion House, Dublin in November 2018.
- O’Neill was interviewed for the UCD Business Faculty Insights Series (November 2015).
- O’Neill was interviewed for an Irish Times special report on “Managing Big Data” (24 July 2015).
- O’Neill was interviewed on Winning Through Sophisticated Analytics for the Irish Times (20 October 2014).
- O’Neill appeared in the UCD Faces of Research video series (Sep 2014).
- Awards
- We won the Gold HUMIES Award for Human Competitive Artificial Intelligence at the ACM GECCO Conference in Prague in July 2019.
- We won the Bronze HUMIES Award for Human Competitive Artificial Intelligence at the ACM GECCO Conference in Berlin in July 2017.
- In early 2016 we won the Failte Ireland Conference Ambassador Award in recognition for hosting the ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference GECCO 2011 in Dublin, Ireland 12-16 July 2011, which attracted approximately 600 delegates from 52 countries with an acceptance rate of 38%. A photo diary is available. We are very grateful to Science Foundation Ireland and Failte Ireland for providing financial support, which resulted in GECCO netting the Irish exchequr approximately €1Million.
- The App’ED Project was shortlisted for the SFI Best Reported Impact Award 2018.
- The App’ED Project was shortlisted for the SFI Best Reported Impact Award 2016.
- Best paper award nominations include:
- Lynch D., McDermott J., O’Neill M. (2020). Program Synthesis in a Continuous Space using Grammars and Variational Autoencoders. PPSN 2020 The Sixteenth International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN XVI). Springer LNCS.
-
Le N., O’Neill M., Brabazon A. (2018). The Baldwin effect reconsidered through the prism of social learning IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation. IEEE Press.
- Saber T., Fagan D., Lynch D., Kucera S., Claussen H., O’Neill M. (2018). Multi-Level Grammar Genetic Programming for Scheduling in Heterogeneous Networks. European Conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP 2018). Springer.
- Loughran R., Agapitos A., Kattan A., Brabazon A., O’Neill M. (2016). Speaker Verification on Unbalanced Data with Genetic Programming. In EvoAPP 2016 Porto, Portugal. Springer LNCS. (Best Paper at EvoIASP 2016)
- Lynch D., Fenton M., Kucera S., Claussen H., O’Neill M. (2016). Scheduling in Heterogeneous Networks using Grammar Based Genetic Programming. In EuroGP2016 19th European Conference on Genetic Programming, Porto, Portugal. Springer LNCS.
- Invited talks:
- Prof Michael O’Neill gave an invited talk “The Elephant in the Room: Towards the Application of Genetic Programming to Automatic Programming”, Genetic Programming Theory and Practice, Ann Arbor, Michigan (May 2018)
- Prof Michael O’Neill gave an invited talk at Fidelity Investments on “Automatic Program Synthesis” (Feb 2017)
- Prof Michael O’Neill gave an invited talk at Accenture Innovation Lab on “Natural Computing” (May 2017)
- Prof Michael O’Neill gave an invited talk at Fidelity Investments Patent Festival on “Natural Computing & Smart Analytics” (10 March 2016).
- Prof Michael O’Neill gave an invited talk at Accenture Innovation Labs on “Natural Computing & Smart Analytics” (4 March 2016).
- Prof Michael O’Neill gave a presentation on “Making sense of the big data generated” as part of an event on Re-engineering Clinical Trials – Developing new therapies in a connected world. The event was jointly hosted by Enterprise Ireland and ICON Plc on St Patrick’s Day in Heidelberg, Germany. In attendance were Minister Simon Harris, the Irish Ambassador to Germany Michael Collins, and representatives from the Pharmaceutical and Medical Device sectors (17 March 2015).
- Prof Michael O’Neill gave an invited talk at the University of Exeter on “Applications of Evolutionary Design” (1 Dec 2014).
- Prof Michael O’Neill gave an invited talk at the University of York on “Applications of Evolutionary Design” (24 Nov 2014).
- The App’ED project team have organised a number of research events:
- 7th International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Natural Computing, TPNC 2018, UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, Dublin, Ireland (12-14 December 2018)
- 3rd International Conference on Computer Simulation of Musical Creativity (CSMC2018), UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School 20-22 August 2018
- MusTWork 2016 – Music Technology Workshop, UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, Dublin, Ireland (10 June 2016)
- 2nd Semantic Methods in Genetic Programming Workshop (ACM GECCO 2015), Madrid, Spain.
- 1st Semantic Methods in Genetic Programming Workshop (PPSN 2014), Ljubljana, Slovakia.
Publications Arising
Books/Edited Books
- Ryan C., O’Neill M., Collins J.J. (2018). Handbook of Grammatical Evolution. Springer.
- Fagan D., Martin-Vide C., O’Neill M., Vega-Rodriquez M.A. (2018). Theory and Practice of Natural Computing: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference TPNC 2018. , Dublin, Ireland, Springer
- Brabazon A., O’Neill M., McGarraghy S. (2015). Natural Computing Algorithms. Springer.
Peer-reviewed Journals
- O’Neill M., Spector L. (2020). Automatic Programming. The Open Issue? Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, 21(1-2):251-262.
- Loughran R., O’Neill M. (2020). Evolutionary music: Applying evolutionary computation to the art of creating music. Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, 21(1-2):55-85.
- Kampouridis M., Brabazon A., O’Neill M. (2020). Applications of Genetic Programming to Finance and Economics: Past, Present, Future. Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, 21(1-2):33-53.
- Saber T., Gandibleux X., O’Neill M., Murphy L., Ventresque A. (2020). A comparative study of multi-objective machine reassignment algorithms for data centres. Journal of Heuristics, 26(1):119-150
- Lynch D., Fenton M., Fagan D., Kucera S., Claussen H., O’Neill M. (2019). Automated Self-Optimization in Heterogeneous Wireless Communications Networks. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 27(1):419-432
- Fenton M., Lynch D., Fagan D., Kucera S., Claussen C., O’Neill M. (2019). Towards Automation & Augmentation of the Design of Schedulers for Cellular Communications Networks. Evolutionary Computation 27(2):345-375.
- Agapitos A., Loughran R., Nicolau M., Lucas S., O’Neill M., Brabazon A. (2019). A Survey of Statistical Machine Learning Elements in Genetic Programming. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation 23(6):1029-1048
- Saber T., Fagan D., Lynch D., Kucera S., Claussen H., O’Neill M. (2019). A Multi-Level Grammar Approach to Grammar-Guided Genetic Programming: The case of Scheduling in Heterogeneous Networks. Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines 20(2):245-283
- O’Neill M., Brabazon A. (2019). Business Analytics Capability, Organisational Value and Competitive Advantage. Journal of Business Analytics 2(2):160-173
- Chu T.H., Nguyen Q.U., O’Neill M. (2018). Semantic Tournament Selection for Genetic Programming based on Statistical Analysis of Error Vectors. Information Sciences, pp.352-366 Vol.436-437
- O’Neill M., Nicolau M. (2017). Distilling the salient features of natural systems: Commentary on On the mapping of genotype to phenotype in evolutionary algorithms by Whigham, Dick and Maclaurin. Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines.
- Agapitos A., Brabazon A., O’Neill M. (2017). Regularised Gradient Boosting for Financial Time-series Modelling. Computational Management Science.
- Fenton M., Lynch D., Kucera S., Claussen H., O’Neill M. (2017). Multilayer Optimization of Heterogeneous Networks Using Grammatical Genetic Programming. IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics.
- Loughran R., O’Neill M. (2017). Limitations from Assumptions in Generative Music Evaluation. Journal of Creative Music Systems, Vol.2 No.1
- Loughran R., Agapitos A., Kattan A., Brabazon A., O’Neill M. (2017). Feature Selection for Speaker Verification using Genetic Programming. Evolutionary Intelligence.
- Fenton M., McNally C., Byrne J., Hemberg E., McDermott J., O’Neill M.(2016). Discrete Planar Truss Optimization by Node Position Variation using Grammatical Evolution. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation 20(4):577-589.
- O’Neill M. (2016). Semantic methods in genetic programming. Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, 17(1):3-4.
- Nicolau M., Perez-Liebana D., O’Neill M., Brabazon A. (2016). Evolutionary Behaviour Tree Approaches for Navigating Platform Games. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.
- Byrne J., Fenton M., Hemberg E., McDermott J., O’Neill M. (2014). Optimising Complex Pylon Structures with Grammatical Evolution. Information Sciences, 316:582-597.
- Fenton M., McNally C., Byrne J., Hemberg E., McDermott J., O’Neill M. (2014). Automatic innovative truss design using grammatical evolution. Automation in Construction, 39:59-69.
- Byrne J., Cardiff P., Brabazon A., O’Neill M. (2014). Evolving Parametric Aircraft Models for Design Exploration and Optimisation. Neurocomputing, 142:39-47.
Peer-reviewed International Conferences
- Lynch D., McDermott J., O’Neill M. (2020). Program Synthesis in a Continuous Space using Grammars and Variational Autoencoders. Sixteenth International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN XVI), Leiden, The Netherlands. Springer.
- Lynch D., Ho L., MacDonald M., O’Neill M. (2020). Localisation in Wireless Networks using Deep Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks. International Joint Conference on Neural Networks IEEE IJCNN 2020, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
- Saber T., Lynch D., Fagan D., Kucera S., Claussen H., O’Neill M. (2020). Hierarchical Grammar-Guided Genetic Programming Techniques for Scheduling in Heterogeneous Networks. International Joint Conference on Neural Networks IEEE IJCNN 2020, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
- Le N., O’Neill M., Brabazon A. (2020). Social Learning vs Self-teaching in a Multi-agent Neural Network System. EvoAPPS 2020. Seville, Spain. Springer LNCS.
- Le N., O’Neill M., Brabazon A. (2019). The Evolution of Self-taught Neural Networks in a Multi-agent Environment EvoApplications 2019 Springer Leipzig, Germany
- Le N., O’Neill M., Brabazon A. (2019). How Learning Strategies Can Promote an Evolving Population in Dynamic Environments IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation IEEE Press Wellington, New Zealand
- O’Neill M., Brabazon A. (2019). Mutational Robustness and Structural Complexity in Grammatical Evolution IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation IEEE Press Wellington, New Zealand
- Lynch D., Saber T., Kucera S., Claussen H., O’Neill M. (2019). Evolutionary Learning of Link Allocation Algorithms for 5G Heterogeneous Wireless Communication Networks. ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference GECCO 2019 ACM Prague
- Le N., O’Neill M., Brabazon A. (2019). Evolutionary Consequences of Learning Strategies in a Dynamic Rugged Landscape ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference GECCO 2019 ACM Prague
- Saber T., Fagan D., Lynch D., Kucera S., Claussen H., O’Neill M. (2018). Multi-Level Grammar Genetic Programming for Scheduling in Heterogeneous Networks European Conference on Genetic Programming EuroGP 2018 Springer Parma, Italy
- Loughran R., O’Neill M. (2018). Serendipity in Melodic Self-organising Fitness 2018 AISB Convention Liverpool, UK
- Forstenlechner S., Fagan D., Nicolau M., O’Neill M. (2018). Towards Effective Semantic Operators for Program Synthesis in Genetic Programming ACM GECCO 2018 ACM Kyoto, Japan
- Lynch D., Fagan D., Kucera S., Claussen H., O’Neill M. (2018). Managing Quality of Service through Intelligent Scheduling in Heterogeneous Wireless Communications Networks IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation IEEE Press Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- Saber T., Delavernhe F., Papdakis M., O’Neill M., Ventresque A. (2018). A Hybrid Algorithm for Multi-objective Test Case Selection IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation IEEE Press Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- Forstenlechner S., Fagan D., Nicolau M., O’Neill M. (2018). Towards Understanding and Refining the General Program Synthesis Benchmark Suite with Genetic Programming IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation IEEE Press Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- Le N., O’Neill M., Brabazon A. (2018). The Baldwin effect reconsidered through the prism of social learning IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation IEEE Press Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- Le N., O’Neill M., Brabazon A. (2018). Adaptive Advantage of Learning Strategy: A study through Dynamic Landscape PPSN 2018 Springer Coimbra, Portugal
- Forstenlechner S., Fagan D., Nicolau M., O’Neill M. (2018). Extending Program Synthesis Grammars for Grammar-Guided Genetic Programming PPSN 2018 Springer Coimbra, Portugal
- Le N., Brabazon A., O’Neill M. (2018). How the Baldwin Effect Can Guide Evolution in Dynamic Environments 7th International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Natural Computing (TPNC 2018) Springer
- Saber T., Fagan D., Lynch D., Kucera S., Claussen H., O’Neill M. (2018). A Hierarchical Approach to Grammar-Guided Genetic Programming The case of Scheduling in Heterogeneous Networks 7th International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Natural Computing (TPNC 2018) Springer Dublin
- Loughran R., O’Neill M. (2018). Is Computational Creativity Domain General? 9th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC) Association for Computational Creativity Salamanca, Spain
- Forstenlechner S., Fagan D., Nicolau M., O’Neill M. (2017). A Grammar Design Pattern for Arbitrary Program Synthesis Problems in Genetic Programming EuroGP 2017 European Conference on Genetic Programming Springer Amsterdam
- Loughran R., O’Neill M. (2017). Clustering Agents for the Evolution of Autonomous Musical Fitness EvoMUSART Springer Amsterdam
- Fagan D., Fenton M., Lynch D., Kucera S., Claussen H., O’Neill M. (2017). Deep Learning through Evolution: A Hybrid Approach to Scheduling in a Dynamic Environment International Joint Conference on Neural Networks IJCNN 2017 IEEE Press Anchorage, Alaska
- Murphy R., Fagan D., O’Neill M. (2017). Gems: A Novel Method to Accelerate Evolutionary Algorithms IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2017 IEEE Press San Sebastin, Spain
- Le Nam, O’Neill M., Fagan D., Brabazon A. (2017). Social Grammatical Evolution with Imitation Learning for Real-Valued Function Estimation IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2017 IEEE Press San Sebastin, Spain
- Lynch D., Fenton M., Kucera S., Claussen H., O’Neill M. (2017). Configuring Dynamic Heterogeneous Wireless Communications Networks using a Customised Genetic Algorithm Applications of Evolutionary Computation EvoApps 2017 Springer Amsterdam
- Fenton M., McDermott J., Fagan D., Forstenlechner S., Hemberg E., O’Neill M. (2017). PonyGE2: Grammatical Evolution in Python EvoSoft Workshop, GECCO 2017 ACM Berlin, Germany
- Loughran R., O’Neill M. (2017). My Little ChucKy: Towards Live-coding with Grammatical Evolution MUME-2017 Atlanta, USA
- Forstenlechner S., Fagan D., Nicolau M., O’Neill M. (2017). Semantics-based Crossover for Program Synthesis in Genetic Programming EA2017 Springer Paris, France
- Fagan D., O’Neill M. (2017). Exploring Target Change Related Fitness Reduction in The Moving Point Dynamic Environment 6th International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Natural Computing (TPNC 2017) Springer Prague
- Wilson A., Loughran R., Fazenda B.M. (2017). On the suitability of evolutionary computing to developing tools for intelligent music production Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Intelligent Music Production Salford, UK
- Loughran R., O’Neill M. (2017). Application Domains Considered in Computational Creativity International Conference on Computational Creativity ICCC 2017 Atlanta, USA
- Lynch D., Fenton M., Kucera S., Claussen H., O’Neill M. (2016). Evolutionary Learning of Scheduling Heuristics for Heterogeneous Wireless Communications Networks. ACM GECCO 2016 Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Denver, Colorado, USA
- Nicolau M., Fenton M. (2016). Managing Repitition in Grammar-based Genetic Programming. ACM GECCO 2016 Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Denver, Colorado, USA
- Loughran R., O’Neill M. (2016). The Popular Critic: Evolving Melodies with Popularity Driven Fitness. Musical Meta-Creation (MUME), Paris
- Loughran R., O’Neill M. (2016). Generative Music Evaluation: Why do we Limit to ‘Human’? Computer Simulation of Musical Creativity (CSMC), Huddersfield, UK.
- O’Neill M., Brabazon A., Fagan D. (2016). An Exploration of Grammatical Encodings to model Six Nations Rugby Match Outcomes. IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Vancouver, Canada. IEEE Press.
- Fagan D., Fenton M., O’Neill M. (2016). Exploring Position Independent Initialisation in Grammatical Evolution. IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Vancouver, Canada. IEEE Press.
- Forstenlechner S, Nicolau M., Fagan D, O’Neill M. (2016). Grammar Design for Derivation Tree Based Genetic Programming Systems. EuroGP2016 19th European Conference on Genetic Programming, Porto, Portugal. Springer LNCS.
- Lynch D., Fenton M., Kucera S., Claussen H., O’Neill M. (2016). Scheduling in Heterogeneous Networks using Grammar-Based Genetic Programming. EuroGP2016 19th European Conference on Genetic Programming, Porto, Portugal. Springer LNCS.
- Loughran R., Agapitos A., Kattan A., Brabazon A., O’Neill M. (2016). Speaker Verification on Unbalanced Data with Genetic Programming. EvoAPP 2016, Porto, Portugal. Springer LNCS.
- Fenton M., Lynch D., Kucera S., Claussen H., O’Neill M. (2016). Evolving Coverage Optimisation Functions for Heterogeneous Networks using Grammatical Genetic Programming. EvoAPP 2016, Porto, Portugal. Springer LNCS.
- Loughran R., McDermott J., O’Neill M. (2016). Grammatical Music Composition with Dissimilarity Driven Hill Climbing. EvoMUSART 2016. Porto, Portugal. Springer LNCS.
- Fenton M., Lynch D., Kucera S., Claussen C., O’Neill M. (2015). Load Balancing in Heterogeneous Networks using an Evolutionary Algorithm. IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Sendai, Japan. IEEE Press.
- Loughran R., McDermott J., O’Neill M. (2015). Tonality Driven Piano Compositions with Grammatical Evolution. IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Sendai, Japan. IEEE Press.
- Agapitos A, O’Neill M., Nicolau M., Fagan D., Kattan A, Curran K. (2015). Deep Evolution of Image Representations for Handwritten Digit Recognition. IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Sendai, Japan. IEEE Press.
- Nicolau M., Agapitos A., O’Neill M., Brabazon A. (2015). Guidelines for defining benchmark problems in Genetic Programming. IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Sendai, Japan. IEEE Press.
- Loughran R., McDermott J., O’Neill M. (2015). Grammatical Evolution with Zipf’s Law Based Fitness for Melodic Composition. SMC 2015 The 12th Sound and Music Computing Conference Maynooth, Ireland.
- Forstenlechner S., Nicolau M., Fagan D., O’Neill M. (2015). Introducing Semantic-Clustering Selection in Grammatical Evolution. Semantic Methods in Genetic Programming Workshop at GECCO 2015, Madrid, Spain. ACM.
- Byrne J., Cardiff P., Brabazon A. O’Neill M. (2014). Evolving an Aircraft Using a Parametric Design System. 16th European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoMusArt 2014) pp.119-130, Springer .
- Byrne J., Nicolau M., Brabazon A., O’Neill M. (2014). An Examination of Synchronisation in Artificial Gene Regulatory Networks. IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Beijing. IEEE Press.
- Donne S., Nicolau M., Bean C., O’Neill M. (2014). Wave Height Quantification using Land Based Seismic Data with Grammatical Evolution. IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Beijing. IEEE Press.
- O’Neill M., Nicolau M., Agapitos A. (2014). Experiments in Program Synthesis with Grammatical Evolution: a focus on Integer Sorting. IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Beijing. IEEE Press.
Book Chapters
- O’Neill M., Fagan D. (2019). The Elephant in the Room: Towards the Application of Genetic Programming to Automatic Programming. Genetic Programming Theory and Practice XVI, pp.179–192, Springer
- Ryan C., O’Neill M., Collins J.J. (2018). Introduction to 20 Years of Grammatical Evolution. Handbook of Grammatical Evolution, pp.1-21. Springer
- Nicolau M., Agapitos A. (2018). Understanding Grammatical Evolution: Grammar Design. Handbook of Grammatical Evolution, pp.23-53. Springer
- Fagan D., Murphy E. (2018). Mapping in Grammatical Evolution. Handbook of Grammatical Evolution, pp.79-108. Springer
- Moraglio A., McDermott J., O’Neill M. (2018). Geometric Semantic Grammatical Evolution. Handbook of Grammatical Evolution, pp.163-188. Springer
- Loughran R. (2018). Grammatical Evolution and Creativity. Handbook of Grammatical Evolution, pp.341-366. Springer
- Perez-Liebana D., Nicolau M. (2018). Evolving Behaviour Tree Structures Using Grammatical Evolution. Handbook of Grammatical Evolution, p.433-460. Springer.