Alex A. Freitas

Peter J. Bentley

Jon Timmis

Colin G. Johnson

Mathieu Capcarrere

TheArti?cialLifetermappearedmorethan20yearsagoinasmallcornerofNew Mexico, USA. Since then the area has developed dramatically, many researchers joining enthusiastically and research groups sprouting everywhere. This frenetic activity led to the emergence of several strands that are now established ?elds in themselves. We are now reaching a stage that one may describe as maturer: with more rigour, more benchmarks, more results, more stringent acceptance criteria, more applications, in brief, more sound science. This, which is the n- ural path of all new areas, comes at a price, however. A certain enthusiasm, a certain adventurousness from the early years is fading and may have been lost on the way. The ?eld has become more reasonable. To counterbalance this and to encourage lively discussions, a conceptual track, where papers were judged on criteria like importance and/or novelty of the concepts proposed rather than the experimental/theoretical results, has been introduced this year. A conference on a theme as broad as Arti?cial Life is bound to be very - verse,but a few tendencies emerged. First, ?elds like ‘Robotics and Autonomous Agents’ or ‘Evolutionary Computation’ are still extremely active and keep on bringing a wealth of results to the A-Life community. Even there, however, new tendencies appear, like collective robotics, and more speci?cally self-assembling robotics, which represent now a large subsection. Second, new areas appear.

8th European Conference, ECAL 2005, Canterbury, UK, September 5-9, 2005, Proceedings

Advances in Artificial Life

Simon H. Lavington

Mining Very Large Databases with Parallel Processing addresses the problem of large-scale data mining. It is an interdisciplinary text, describing advances in the integration of three computer science areas, namely `intelligent' (machine learning-based) data mining techniques, relational databases and parallel processing. The basic idea is to use concepts and techniques of the latter two areas - particularly parallel processing - to speed up and scale up data mining algorithms. The book is divided into three parts. The first part presents a comprehensive review of intelligent data mining techniques such as rule induction, instance-based learning, neural networks and genetic algorithms. Likewise, the second part presents a comprehensive review of parallel processing and parallel databases. Each of these parts includes an overview of commercially-available, state-of-the-art tools. The third part deals with the application of parallel processing to data mining. The emphasis is on finding generic, cost-effective solutions for realistic data volumes. Two parallel computational environments are discussed, the first excluding the use of commercial-strength DBMS, and the second using parallel DBMS servers. It is assumed that the reader has a knowledge roughly equivalent to a first degree (BSc) in accurate sciences, so that (s)he is reasonably familiar with basic concepts of statistics and computer science. The primary audience for Mining Very Large Databases with Parallel Processing is industry data miners and practitioners in general, who would like to apply intelligent data mining techniques to large amounts of data. The book will also be of interest to academic researchers and postgraduate students, particularly database researchers, interested in advanced, intelligent database applications, and artificial intelligence researchers interested in industrial, real-world applications of machine learning.

Mining Very Large Databases with Parallel Processing

This book integrates two areas of computer science, namely data mining and evolutionary algorithms. Both these areas have become increasingly popular in the last few years, and their integration is currently an active research area. In general, data mining consists of extracting knowledge from data. The motivation for applying evolutionary algorithms to data mining is that evolutionary algorithms are robust search methods which perform a global search in the space of candidate solutions. This book emphasizes the importance of discovering comprehensible, interesting knowledge, which is potentially useful for intelligent decision making. The text explains both basic concepts and advanced topics

Alex A. Freitas

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