Dr. Luca Manzoni, University of Milan-Bicocca
LECTURE 1: Tuesday 19 May, 14:00-17:00, P01, "Introduction to Genetic
Algorithms and Genetic Programming"
This lecture, targeted towards computer scientists with no genetic algorithms
background, will introduce two families of algorithms inspired by the Darwin's
theory of evolution: Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Genetic Programming (GP). GA
and GP have been applied successfully to numerous domains. In both GA and GP
the main idea is to have a collection of feasible solutions to a problem (called
population) that are improved by mimicking natural selection, reproduction
(called crossover), and mutation. The lecture will introduce both the standard
algorithms and some of the most known variations. I will provide an
introduction to GA and an overview of the basic terminology. Then, I will talk
about crossover and selection methods, and real-coded GA. We will then dive
into genetic programming (GP), see how to represent programs as trees and how
to adapt the crossover and mutation operators, initialise GP populations with
different generation methods. We will then talk about the problem of bloat and
some possible solutions to it. Finally, I will provide an overview of linear GP,
grammar-based GP, cartesian GP.
LECTURE 2: Wednesday 20 May, 8:00-11:00, P18, ”Semantic operators in
Genetic Programming”
Genetic Programming (GP) is a bio-inspired method to find solutions to
optimisation problem by evolving a pool of candidate solutions with operators
inspired by Darwin's evolutionary theory. Semantic operators are a key to
increase the performance of GP. While in the years some new operators were
presented, none of them was satisfactory due to the trial-and-error approach
used to generate new solutions. Recently, Moraglio and coworkers introduced
semantic operators based on the idea of geometric operator (i.e., operators that
are specifiable as "operations" on a metric space). These new operators were
well received for their nice theoretical properties and, more recently, Vanneschi
and coworkers had shown that they can also be efficiently implemented. The
lecture will introduce the geometric operators, the semantic space and the
semantic operators, and, finally, the geometric semantic GP.
Dr. Luca Manzoni’s short CV
Luca Manzoni obtained its Ph.D. in computer science in 2013 under the
supervision of Prof. Leonardo Vanneschi at the Università degli Studi di MilanoBicocca, Milan, Italy. After obtaining its Ph.D. he spent a year as a postdoc at the
Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France before returning in Milan where
he currently has a postdoctoral position. During its Ph.D. he was a visiting
student at the Istituto Superior Técnico, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Lisbon,
Portugal, at the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK, and
he obtained a JSPS Postoctoral Fellowship For Foreign Researchers to spend the
last part of its Ph.D. at the Osaka Electro-Communication University in Japan. In
2013 he won the best paper award at European Conference on Genetic
Programming (EuroGP 2013).