http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~dwcorne/dwc-ice.gif        Professor David Wolfe Corne

            Telephone :           +44 (0)131 451 3410

            Fax :                    +44 (0)131 451 3327

            Email:                 dwcorne@macs.hw.ac.uk

            Diary:   when at HW next few weeks / how I spend my time

             

 

I  work within the most exciting and diverse Intelligent Systems Group.  I moved to Heriot-Watt fairly recently, and am building up my own group within ISG, and will be more than delighted to hear from Phd candidates or others who would like to consider working with me.  Here are some handy links:

Research

MSc information

Journal boards

My u/g and p/g teaching material

Publications

Links

Diaspora

Research Student Resources/

Conferences

Most cited

 Research Integrity (updated 02/03/07)

Talks /  Other

Papers I should have cited

Research             

My interests: Evolutionary computation, data mining, bioalgorithmics, bioinformatics, directed evolution, neural computation, multi-objective algorithms and theory, scheduling, web intelligence.

Here is a page with the basic details of some current projects in which I am involved. Over time I will develop a full record of past projects, but it may be difficult to find that time -- I'm so busy being involved in these current projects!

Teaching and Admin             

Here is all my current teaching material

Currently I am the Director of Studies for each of the following MSc Programmes:

Other MSc-relevant things:

Professional Activities

Editorial Boards (current)

Ex-Editorial Boards (retired after serving a few terms)

 

Invited Talks

Plenaries:

  • Doctoral Summer School, Iasi, June 2010 (Romania)
  • LION (Learning and Intelligent Optimization) 2010 (Italy)
  • IEEE Symposium on Multic-Criteria Decision Making, 2009, Nashville (USA)
  • NABIC (Nature and Biologically Inspired Computing) 2009 (India)
  • Unconventional Computing 2008 (Austria)
  • IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2008, (Hong Kong)
  • Adaptive Computation in Design and Manufacture 06 (UK)
  • Intelligent Systems Design and Application 05 (Poland),
  • Evolution Artificielle 05 (France),
  • Hybrid Intelligent Systems 03 (Australia),

Keynotes:

  • China/UK Workshops on Nature Inspired Computing (04 – 2 talks, 06 – 1 talk, USTC, China);
  • Workshop on Bio-inspired Biocomputing, 2006 (at PPSN, Iceland)

Invited Tutorials: :

  • PPSN 2008 (Dortmund), on Bioinformatics
  • PPSN 2002 (Spain), on Bioinformatics
  • IEEE CEC 2002 (USA), on Evolutionary Scheduling
  • IEEE CEC 2003, Australia, on Bioinformatics
  • IEEE CEC 2004 (San Diego); on Bioinformatics
  • MOPGP 2006 (France, presented by Joshua Knowles, `semiplenary' on Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimisation)
  • PPSN 2006 (Iceland), on Bioinformatics

 

Conferences

Conference Steering Committee Memberships

· EMO: Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization (from 2001)

· (PATAT: Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling (1997—2002; resigned 2002))

· PPSN: Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (from 2002)

· EvoBio: Evolutionary Computation in Bioinformatics (from 2006)

General Chair

· co-chair (with C. Dhaenans and L. Jourdan), Symposium on Metaheuristics and Knowledge Discovery, at META-2010, Tunisia

· co-chair (with P. Frisco, A.Reynolds) AISB 2009 Symposium on Evolutionary Design of Complex Systems

· co-chair (with P. Frisco), Workshop on Membrane Computing 2008, Edinburgh

· Vice chair 2007 International Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Methods, at WorldComp'07, Las Vegas.

· Vice chair 2007 International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology,, at WorldComp'07, Las Vegas

· (co chair with Gwenn Volkert and Jagath Rajapakse) 2007 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Hawaii, US

· (co-chair, with Elena Marchiori) 2007 EvoBIO: 6th European Workshop on Evolutionary Computation in Bioinformatics, Valencia, Spain

· (co-chair, with Elena Marchiori) 2006 EvoBIO: 5th European Workshop on Evolutionary Computation in Bioinformatics, Budapest, Hungary

· 2005 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Edinburgh, UK

· (co-chair, with Elena Marchiori) 2005 EvoBIO: 4th European Workshop on Evolutionary Computation in Bioinformatics, Lausanne, Switzerland

· (co-chair with Gary Fogel) IEEE CIBCB 2004: IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

· (co-chair, with Mario Koeppen and A. Abraham) Hybrid Intelligent Systems 2004, Kitakyushu, Japan

· (co-chair, with Elena Marchiori) 2004 EvoBIO: 3rd European Workshop on Evolutionary Computation in Bioinformatics, Coimbra, Portugal

· (co-chair, with Elena Marchiori) 2003 EvoBIO: 2nd European Workshop on Evolutionary Computation in Bioinformatics, Essex, UKl

· (co-chair, with Elena Marchiori) 2002 EvoBIO: 1st European Workshop on Evolutionary Computation in Bioinformatics, Birmingham, UK

· (co-chair, with Andrew Martin, 2001 AISB Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Bioinformatics, Birmingham, UK

· (co-chair, with George Smith and Martin Oates) 2000 EctelNET: 1st European Workshop on Evolutionary Computing in Telecommunications, Birmingham, UK

· (co-chair, with Peter Bentley) 1999 AISB Workshop on Creative Evolutionary Systems, Sussex, UK

· (co-chair, with Jon Shapiro) 1997 AISB Workshop on Evolutionary Computing, Manchester, UK

        Technical Chair

· (Technical co-chair) IEEE CIBCB 2005: IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology

· 2004 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics & Computational Biology, San Diego, October 2004

· (Technical co-chair, Europe) 2004 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Portland, Oregon, USA

      Workshops Chair     

· 2002 PPSN VII , in Granada, Spaiin

· 2000 PPSN VI, Paris, France

· 2000 SAB, Paris, France

            Program Committee / Advisory Board Memberships

  • approx. 150 and growing.

Bodies, Working Groups, Committees,  …

·             Member of the EPSRC College, from 2002 to date (renewed 2010)

·             Member of the International Association for Pattern Recognition Technical Committee on Pattern Recognition for Bioinformatics

·             (Co-Chair, IEEE Task Force on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics) (until 2004 or so?)

·             Co-Chair, with Elena Marchiori, of the EvoNet Working Group on Bioinformatics

·             (Co-Chair, with George Smith, of the EVONET Working group on Telecomms) (until 2002)

·             Steering Committee Member of Hans-Georg Beyer’s Evolutionary Algorithms Glossary project

External Examining

  •             1998—2001 MSc in Data Mining and Knowledge Extraction, UEA, UK
  •  2004+    MSc in Intelligent Interactive Systems (and some related MScs), Plymouth
  • 2007+    certain MSc courses at Birmingham       
  •             PhDs -- Aarhus, Denmark (3), Aberystwyth (1), Birmingham (1 - Mphil), Coventry (1 - Mphil), Essex (1), Exeter (1), Hong Kong P.U. (2), IIT Kharaghpur (1), Kent (1), Leeds (3),  Liverpool (1),   Napier (2), Portsmouth (1), U. of Queensland (1), Sheffield (1 - Mphil), Surrey (1), UCL (1), UEA (1), UWE (3)

Publications

A reasonably up-to-date list is here:

Most cited seems to be: Knowles, J.D. and Corne, D.W. (2000) Approximating the non-dominated front using the Pareto Archived Evolution Strategy, Evolutionary Computation, 8(2):149-172. ISSN 1063-6560 -- with 957 citations as of March 2011; here is a pre-publication version -- the final version can be obtained from the journal's web site;  the first paper describing the PAES algorithm (in CEC'99) has 502 citations to date.

My first edited book: Corne, D. Dorigo, M., Glover, F. (eds) (1999) New Ideas in Optimization, McGraw-Hill, 525pp. has ~483 citations to date (447 plus more cites of it with various different versions of title and set of editors!).  Meanwhile my edited book with Peter Bentley Creative Evolutionary Systems has ~229 citations, and, Evolutionary Computation in Bioinformatics (ed. G. Fogel, D. Corne) has 126 citations.

Another with >300 citations is: Corne, D.W., Knowles, J.D. and Oates, M.J. (2000). The Pareto-Envelope based Selection Algorithm for Multiobjective Optimisation, in Schoenauer, M., Deb, K., Rudolph, G., Yao, X., Lutton, E., Merelo, J.J. and Schwefel, H-P. (eds.) Parallel Problem Solving from Nature - PPSN VI, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 869--878. ISBN 3-540-41056-2 --- which has 378 citations to date; this describes another novel MOEA called PESA. The next version, PESA-II, has 212 citations.

Another with >200 citations is: H-L Fang, P.M.Ross, D.Corne, ``A Promising GA Approach to Jon Shop Scheduling,Rescheduling and Open-Shop Scheduling Problems'', in Proc. 5th ICGA, Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 375--382, 1993. This has 261 citations to date. The ideas developing in that work were the roots of what is commonly known now as `hyperheuristics' -- the next step on the way was:  Fang, Corne, Ross, "A Promising Hybrid GA/Heuristic Approach to Open Shop problems, Proceedings of ECAI 94: 11th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, A. Cohn (ed.), pp. 590--594, John Wiley and Sons Ltd, 1994. -- this one has just 61 citations to date, and the last publication in this line before   `hyperheuristics' started to get really noticed (Peter coined this term soon after and got funding for an EPSRC project to start developing it further).

Another with >200 citations is:  Knowles, J.D., Corne, D.W. (2002) On Metrics for Comparing Non-Dominated Sets , Proc. of the 2002 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Press, pp. 711-716, ISBN 0-7803-7278-6, 2002. -- with 257 citations; this work assesses the relative merits of various metrics for comparing performance in multi-objective optimisation -- since this involves comparing sets rather than solutions, it is a much more complex matter than the case in single-objective optimisation.

Another with >200 citations is:  Knowles, J.D., Corne, D.W. (2000) M-PAES: a memetic algorithm for multiobjective optimization, Proc. of the 2000 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Press, -- with 214 citations; this work introduced the first (we think) memetic algorithm (hybrid of population based and local search) for multiobjective optimisation.

Another with >100 citations is: J. Knowles and D. Corne (2003) ‘Properties of an adaptive archiving algorithm for storing nondominated vectors’. IEEE Trans Evolutionary Computation, 7(2), pp. 100-116.  ISSN 1089-778X This has about 119 citations so far, and was awarded the `Outstanding Paper prize for the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Compution, 2003 issues'; in it we derive a range of relatively useful (considering there was very little previously) and entirely new observations concerning the business of maintaining a good approximation to the Pareto Set while your optimiser is running.

Notable newer papers whose work is seeming to catch on include: 

With 99 citations already, this one is one of my favourite candidates for catching on : 

Knowles, J.D., Watson, R. and Corne, D. (2001) Reducing Local Optima in Single-Objective Problems by Multiobjectivization, in Zitzler, Deb, Thiele, Coello, Corne (eds.), Evolutionary Multi-Criterion optimization, Springer LNCS 1993, pp. 269--283. ISBN 3-540-41745-1  -- it is about an idea for using multiobjective search in certain ways to address single objective problems, and indeed it certainly seems to help, and I think there are deep interesting reasons for this that we haven't really explored.

 

Anther candidate for catching on is: Sinka, M.P., and Corne, D.W. (2005), The BankSearch web document dataset: investigating unsupervised clustering and category similarity, in Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 28 (2):129—146.  ISSN 1084-8045 This only has 6 citation to date, but it is the `proper' journal paper introducing a dataset (and more) that was first in

Sinka, M.P., Corne, D.W. (2002) A large benchmark dataset for web document clustering, in Abraham, A., Ruiz-del-Solar, J., Koeppen, M. (eds.), Soft Computing Systems: Design, Management and Applications, Volume 87 of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, ISBN: 1 58603 297 6, 2002, pp. 881-890. which has 78 citations to date. It is a really useful document dataset for certain web intelligence investigations and folk are beginning to use it. Unfortunately the link given in the paper to the dataset is no longer active, however Statlib has it here.

Indulge me by allowing a mention of, my first ever paper in my main field, which is: 

D.Corne, H-L. Fang, C.Mellish: ``Solving the Modular Exam Scheduling Problem with Genetic Algorithms'', in {\em Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems}, P. Chung, G. Lovegrove, M. Ali (eds.), Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, pp. 370--373, 1993. This has ~71 citations to date -- it was the very early days of stochastic automated timetabling, and we were the second  to do it with EAs (there was earlier work by Abramson and Abela on smaller problems) and this was our first (but not most cited) publication on it. It arose from Fang's MSc work. A later paper in that line from the same era is Fast Practical Evolutionary Timetabling, (Corne, Ross, Fang), Evolutionary Computing
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1994, Volume 865/1994, 250-263, with 98 citations.

Finally, there is more and different current and recent work that I think is very important, innovative, etc, and may have a chance of real impact, but I will only put them here if and when they get to 20 or more citations. And of course there is past work that I think should be cited more (I mean, don't people realize how great it is that we have a free lunch in multi-objective optimisation!) -- however, I guess we all feel this way ...:).

Some Ex-Students

If you are an ex-student of mine (re MSc or PhD thesis supervision), but are not on this list, please tell me what you are up to now. If you are on this list, please provide an update!

  • I helped supervise Emma Collingwood's   MSc at Edinburgh with Peter Ross, she then took over my research associateship there at the Deprtment of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh, became Emma Hart, and is now a Professor at Napier University. 
  • Phil Dixon did his PhD with me and Martin Oates at Reading, and now works for Raven Research, doing both hardware and software for embedded equipment control and PC based control apps, adding to the product range at Raven Micro.
  • Osama Embarak did his PhD with me roughly 2007—2011, on a method for personalisation and adaptation of recommendations for websites, without violating user privacy concerns. Osama is now a Senior Lecturer in the UAE.  
  • Hsiao-Lan Fang did his PhD with Peter Ross and me at Edinburgh, and then went back to Taiwan to work for a large corporation.
  • Jonas Gamalielson, was in the Bioinformatics Group at the University of Skövde (along with Zelmina, see above), and successfully passed his PhD viva here at HW in August 2009 - his PhD invents and tests teh novel notion of aligning bioinformatic pathways; I had the privelege of being his `official' supervisor, although Jonas was largely autonomous with day to day support from Bjorn Olsson, at Skovde. I expect Jonas to shortly obtain a permanet faculty position in Sweden.
  • She Ri Gu Leng finished his PhD with me in 2010/11, on combinations of learning and evolution for large-scale optimization. He now works for the Chinese Data Ministry in Beijing.
  • Sarah Gulliford did her PhD at the Joint Department of Physics, Institute of Cancer Research and Royal Marsden Hospital, supervised by myself and Steve Webb; she then had a number of offers, finally taking up a post in radiology at Warwick Hospital (I think ... Sarah, I've lost your email -- please remind me if you see this).  
  • I supervised Mark Jones' MSc thesis in 1998. He has been working for Tradeweb based in the City Of London since ~2002; Mark's role is C++ Developer/Manager leading the team responsible for developing and supporting Tradeweb's dealer trading software for European and Asian fixed-income markets.
  • Both Dae Gyu Kim and Luis Francisco Gonzalez Hernandez moved on from their MScs supervised by me at Edinburgh to do PhDs at the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences , University of Sussex at Brighton. Dae Gyu now works for a large corporation in Seoul
  • Joshua Knowles  did his PhD at Reading with me, and was then a Marie Curie Research Fellow at IRIDIA , and is now a David Phillips Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. We remain in a fruitful collaboration, but not as fruitful as his with Julia Handl, which gave rise on 25/09/06 to Luca.  
  • Dome Lohpetch finished his PhD with me in 2011 on data mining and optimization in finance - he is now a Lecturer in Bangkok, starting up a research group in computational intelligence.
  • Zelmina Lubovac, now a postdoc in the Bioinformatics Group  at the University of Skövde, finished here PhD in early 2008 - I had the privelege of being her `official' supervisor, although the day to day supervision was done by Bjorn Olsson, at Skovde, where Zelmina was based throughout. My job was to advise now and then, mainly in later stages.
  • Silang (Robert) Luo successfully passed his PhD viva in July 2009, with a PhD thesis that sets out an essential but overlooked notion in feature selection techniques for large datasets. Basically, to choose the right feature selection method, you should really look at some basic statistics of the dataset itself first. Robert and I continue to work together while he seeks a position in the UK.
  • Andrew Meade did his PhD with me and with Richard Sibly at Reading; he is now a Research Fellow in Biological Sciences at Reading.
  • Martin Oates was a part-time PhD student with me while working for BT, he has since taken up the research life full time, or as full time as possible while you have a barn and other farm buildings to feed and children to build; he is an autonomous research fellow. working with me 20% time at the moment. Martin's thesis was the closest I have ever known to needing no corrections. In the end, he had to change the title, but nothing else.
  • Sarah Price did her MSc project with some aid from me at Edinburgh, was the `Webspinner' for Fife College, and worked at the Institue for Computer-Based Learning at Heriot Watt University; she is now in a management role working for JISC in the area of IT Provision in further education.
  • Carey Pridgeon got his PhD in June 2008; during and since he does substantial personal research which we are hoping to get funds for, not least applications of his nmod system (which started as his u/g project at Reading)
  • Graham Rollings did his PhD at the University of Exeter, starting while I was there, and finishing with me helping remotely; this was about figuring out the locations of collections of sensors (e.g. they may be being blown all over the place within a cloud) based on RF signals. He successfully passed his viva in early 2012.
  • Mark Sinka did his Phd with me at Reading, sponsored and part-working for BankSearch, and now works for Mirago.
  • Mark Shackelford did his PhD with me at Reading, and then did a visiting research fellowship at UWE with Ian Parmee, and is now CEO of Advanced Computational Technologies; he also writes and sells Feng Shui ware. Martin Oates did his PhD with me at Reading, and is now an autonomous research with affiliations to our charity, Evolsolve, and writing lighting control software for a startup company.
  • Alasdair Turner did his MSc with me at Edinburgh and then became a Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science, UCL.
  • Xu Wang has just been awarded his PhD on Artificial Intelligence for Financial Time Series Prediction, which he started at the University of Reading in 2002; I had the pleasure of working with him for the first year of his PhD, but then I left Reading, and Graham Megson took him through successfully to the end. Xu is now a Senior Officer with the Bank of China!.

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