2020

December

ALFA bids farewell to Postdoc Associate, Jamal Toutouh. We wish him the  best of luck on his new adventure. 
 

Natural and Artificial Intelligence
Una-May O'Reilly
IEEE SSCI 2020: Virtual Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence

 

November

Scalable Machine Learning, Evolutionary Algorithms, and Frameworks
Erik Hemberg for Una-May O'Reilly
AAAI Fall Symposium Series: The 2nd Workshop on Deep Models and Artificial Intelligence for Defense Applications: Potentials, Theories, Practices, Tools and Risks 

 

October

Adversarial Artificial Intelligence
Una-May O'Reilly
Keynote Speaker, 8th National Seminar of Applied Computational Intelligence in Mexico

 

September

The Importance of Diversity in AI and Healthcare Panel
Una-May O'Reilly
STEMM MIT CSAIL AI in Healthcare Summit
 

Introduction to Applied Machine Learning Community of Research
Protecting Malware Detectors from Attack
Una-May O'Reilly
CSAIL Alliances Annual Meeting
 

MITx Harvard Women in AI Interview Series Una-May O'Reilly Interviewed by Jackie Valeri, MIT Ph.D. Candidate

ALFA welcomes new MEng students Sanja Simonovikj, Diana Flores, Urmi Mustafi, all of which were previously UROPs with ALFA; new SDM student Byeong Jo Kong, and returning SDM student Afra Ansaria; new SuperUROPs Alexandra Dima, Sabrina Tseng, and Tamara Mitrovska; returning UROPs Rene Silva, Kate Xu, and Ashwin Srinivasan. Robert Gold returns as a research intern.
 

ALFA welcomes a new Postdoc Associate, Chathika Gunaratne. Previously, we hosted Chathika as a visitor, he was also a collaborator on one of our projects over the summer.
 

We bid farewell to visiting students: Jaeyoon Kim, University of Korea, Seoul Korea; Hannah Burd,  Dartmough College; Jake Springer, Swarthmore College, and Shasha Shahkov, Williams College.

 

August

Artificial Adversarial Intelligence
Una-May O'Reilly
Keynote Speaker, Machine Learning Workshop ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 2020
 

July

Artificial Intelligence and Malware Detection
Una-May O'Reilly
MIT Horizon - Expert Sessions
 

The Dynamics of Intelligent Cyber Adversaries
Una-May O'Reilly
Plenary Speaker, New England Complex Systems Institute International Conference on Complex Systems (NECSI-ICCS) 2020
 

Women in AI - Interview Series
Una-May O'Reilly
MIT Women in Machine Learning Group
 

Darktrace In Conversations With
Una-May O'Reilly
Dartrace Digital Event Series
 

The Neural Basis of Comprehending Programs
Shashank Srikant
Brown University Reading Group
 

We bid farewell to Dirk Schweim, visiting PhD student from the Computer Science Department on Information Systems, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz Germany

June

We welcome summer UROPs: Tamara Mitrovska, Rene Reyes, Kate Xu and Boom Tiankanon. Michal Shlapentokh-Rothman returns as a post-graduate researcher for a partial summer term. We welcome visitors: Shasha Shashkov Williams College undergrad, Jake Springer Swarthmore College undergrad. We welcome back Hannah Burd, as a visiting undergrad student from Dartmouth College and Robert Gold as a research intern.
 

 

May

The Promise of AI: Cyber, Healthcare, and the New World
Una-May O'Reilly
Wired-Dartrace Panel Discussion, Cybersecurity Livestream
Related article "AI Will Be A Crucial Tool in the Fight Against Next-Generation Security Threats"
 

Chathika Gunaratne joins ALFA on a Quest for Intelligence project entitled Reopening COVID Risk Forecasting System
 

Jamal Toutouh "Algorithms Inspired by Nature & Deep Learning" Communidad ECUSA, 2019 #Evisibility-TV goes to MIT! Dr. Jamal Toutouh welcome us to chat about Artifical Intelligence and neuronal networks. Jamal explained how mathematical methods inspired by nature can help us solving day-to-day problems. Jamal dared to dream and believe in himself and now is working on what passionate him the most.

 

 

April

Check out the new Summer UROP and Fall SuperUROP projects!
 

Una-May O'Reilly "The Status of Artificial Intelligence" ZDNet, April 2020 Tonya Hall speaks with Dr. Una-May O'Reilly to learn more about the current status of artificial adversarial intelligence and the strengths of adversarial dynamics over model-based malware detectors.

 

February

We welcome Chathika Gunaratne, visiting postdoc from Complex Adaptive Systems Lab, University of Florida, Orlando Florida USA
 

ALFA welcomes back students for the Spring 2020 semester
 

We welcome Dirk Schweim, visiting PhD student from the Computer Science Department on Information Systems, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz Germany

 

January

ALFA welcomes a new group member, Bryn Reinstadler - PhD Candidate in Machine Learning.

 

 

2019

October

Una-May is reconized for oustanding contributions in 2018 peer review by Nature Research journals!
 

Artificial Adversarial Intelligence
Una-May O'Reilly
MIT Horizon live event webinar, Cambridge MA USA

Jitesh Maiyuran, Ayesha Bajwa, Ana Bell, Erik Hemberg, Una-May O'Reilly awarded Best Student Paper Award for How Student Background and Topic Impact the Doer Effect in Computational Thinking MOOCs, presented by Erik Hemberg during the conference IEEE LWMOOCS 2019 Milwaukee, 25th of October, 2019.

 

 

September

Artificial Adversarial Intelligence: What Star Wars Teaches Us About Adversarial Dynamics
Una-May O'Reilly
Symposium and Inaugural Speech for Prof. Dr. Peter A.N. Bosman: Back to the Future and Beyond; Traversing the Ever-evolving Landscape of Evolutionary Algorithms
Delft University of Technology, Delft Netherlands
 

ALFA welcomes new M.Eng and SuperUROP students to the group
 

Representation Learning for Code Malware Sanja Simonovikj, ALFA UROP IBM AI Research Week, AI Horizons Colloquium Poster Social MIT Samberg Conference Center, Cambridge MA

 

August

We welcome Nicolas Lesimple, visiting Master's student, from L’Ecole Polytechnique Federale (EFPL) de Lausanne, Switzerland
 

July

Dr. Jamal Toutouh is awarded the Fellow of the Month of the Marie Sklodowska Curie Alumni Association -North America Chapter
 

June

Flipping Sign Bits is All You Need to Craft Black-Box Adversarial Examples
Abdullah Al-Dujaili
ICML Security Vulnerabilities of Machine Learning Systems Workshop, Long Beach CA USA
See a the video of Abdullah's talk HERE

We welcome Dr. Şebnem Özdemir, Assistant Professor from Istinye University, Istanbul Turkey
 

May

Spatial Coevolutionary Deep Neural Networks Training
Jamal Toutouh
Universidad de la Republica, Montevideo Uruguay

An Artificial Coevolutionary Framework for Adversarial AI
Jamal Toutouh
Universidad de la Republica, Montevideo Uruguay

An Artificial Coevolutionary Framework for Adversarial AI
Erik Hemberg
MIT - Lincoln Lab, Cambridge MA USA

Artificial Adversarial Intelligence for Cybersecurity
Una-May O'Reilly
IBM, Tokyo Japan

April

We welcome a new Postdoctoral Fellow to the group Dr. Behnaz Bostanipour, from University of Lausanne, Switzerland, sponsored by the Postdoctoral Mobility Fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

 

March

Flipping Sign Bits is All You Need to Craft Black-Box Adversarial Examples
Abdullah Al-Dujaili
IBM Research, Cambridge MA USA

Technology Trends in Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Una-May O'Reilly
Canadian Embassy of the USA, Washington DC USA

Adversarial Dynamics; Anticipicating The Next Move
Una-May O'Reilly
AI/ML Cyber Defense Ops, Workshop on Implications of AI and Cybersecurity, R&D and Emerging Areas Panel
NASEM AI and CyberSecurity Workshop, Washington DC USA

We welcome Sagar Biswas, visiting student from Manipal University, Jaipur India in collaboration with Hong Kong University, Hong Kong HK

 

January

Artificial Adversarial Intelligence
Una-May O’Reilly
AAAI-19, 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Honolulu HI USA

 

2018

 

November

Computer Systems Arms Races Una-May O’Reilly Dalhousie University, Halifax Canada Keynote Speaker: The ACM Canadian Celebration of Women in Computing, Halifax Canada

 

October

 

September

We welcome a new group member, Jamal Toutouh, Post-doctoral Fellow from Universidad de Malaga, Spain

 

August

July

We welcome Yanbang Wang and Ignavier Ng, undergrad students from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology under the HKUST-MIT IROP exchange program

We welcome Gili Rusak, undergraduate from Stanford University and Joseph Ortiz, graduate student from Oxford for a summer research internships

 

June

February

 

January

 

2017

October

ALFA welcomes Yuanzhe "Aaron" Chen, a visiting PhD student from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, working on a collaborative MOOC project with ALFA and Infolab.

 

September

ALFA hosts Marc Schoenbauer of INRIA French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control  for a talk titled: Getting Hints From Random Walks in Optimization and Deep Learning.

ALFA hosts Crosswords Cybersecurity London for a Workshop in CyberSecurity AI at MIT

ALFA welcomes new UROPS, SuperUROPs, and MEng students to the group!

 

August

ALFA bids farewell to Mucong "John" Ding from HKUST.

ALFA welcomes Shashank Srikant, MIT PhD candidate and new member of ALFA Group.

ALFA celebrates their teamwork and summer efforts with a Group Retreat to Sunapee, NH

 

July

ALFA welcomes Dr. Edilberto Amorim as Research Affiliate. Dr Filho is a clinical fellow from MGH Boston and recipient of an MIT-Philips research award. He will be mentored by Una-May in his project: Dynamic EEG signatures underlying coma recovery after cardiac arrest: a machine learning approach.

ALFA bids farewell to Mahek Maheshwari and Robert Gold, high school summer interns

 

June

ALFA welcomes Dennis G Wilson, ALFA UROP alum and PhD canidate from the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse as a guest speaker at CSAIL.

ALFA welcomes summer UROPS Carina Quiroz and Alyssa Weiss for Hacker'sHeaven.

ALFA welcomes Steven Rivera and Dennis Garcia as summer Research Assistants!

ALFA welcomes visitors Alessandro DePalma and Ruggiero Dargenio from Eldgenossische Technische Hochsule (ETH), Zurich Switzerland for a 6 month stay to work on their theses.

ALFA welcomes M. John Ding, undergrad from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, who will work with ALFA in collaboration with the "Understanding and improving student enagagement in MOOCS and designing technology enablers for scaling MOOC data research" project sponsored by HKUST under the MISTI China Award.

ALFA welcomes Mahek Maheshwari from Harmony School of Advancement in Houston, TX for a sumer internship!

Congratulations to Bryce Kim on his promotion to Research Associate with ALFA!

 

May

Congratulations to MIT undergrads with the completion of their undergrad degrees: Abigail Choe, Hugo Zul, Marcos Pertierra, Alex Huang, Tiange "Alice" Zhan.

Congratulations to ALFA MEng Seniors, Steven Rivera, Austin Liew, Anthony Erb Luogo and Dennis Garcia on completing their theses!

Congratulations to Bryce Kim on his successful PhD thesis defense and completion of his PhD thesis!

ALFA welcomes Clara Li and Alex Chang from Weston High School for a 3 week internship.

 

March

New UAP projects to be added soon. In the meantime, please visit the EECS website for more info.

We welcome Stjepan Picek from KU Leuven, Belgium to his new position as post-doctoral associate with ALFA.

 

February

Congratulations to Dr. Erik Hemberg for his promotion to Research Scientist!

 

January

ALFA bids farewell to visitors Pasquale Salza of University of Salerno and Dr. Sarah al Hamoud of Saudi Arabia. We wish them the best of luck!

 

2016

August 2016:

Bryce Kim won the National Science Foundation (NSF) Award for Young Professionals Contributing to Smart and Connected Health link.

 

Spring 2016

Congrats to Masters: John O'Sullivan (M.Eng), Benjamin Schreck (M.Eng), Yonlin "Jason" Wu (M.Eng), Neha Patki (M.Eng), Brian Sun (M.Eng), Fahad Alasoun (SM, CDO); SuperUROP: Nathan Landman, Zara Permual, William Spitzer, Fernando Torja, Hannah Pang, Nicole Schmidt, Anying Li; UROP: Anthony Liu, Alexandra Suorakov, Xueqi Fan, Justine Jang

 

2015

Fall 2015

Congratulations to Dr. Erik Hemberg on being accepted into the 2015-2016 MIT Translational Fellows Program, an activity of the MIT Innovation Initiative.

ALFA's 2015 Summer and Fall publication and conference schedule is mostly determined. See ALFA's Publications page for the details.

Coverage in the New York Times and elsewhere of the STEALTH project.

Coverage in MIT News and elsewhere on the Data Science Machine.

Summer 2015

Farewell to Dr. Ignacio Arnaldo and best wished for his new position at Pattern Ex.

Farewell to Jacob Rosen and best wishes for his new job at MITRE.

Workshop on Data Privacy, Singapore

O'Reilly talks at NUS, NTU

Spring 2015

Congratulations to Franck Dernoncourt on completing his S.M. Thesis.

Jacob Rosen received Best Thesis Award from the Technology and Policy Program at MIT EDS department for his thesis "Computer Aided Tax Avoidance Policy Analysis".

Congratulations to ALFA's graduates: Bryan Collazo, Max Kanter, Alex Wang, Edwin Zhang (MEng,EEC) and Jacob Rosen (Master's TPP).

 

We welcome Nicole Hoffman to our team as Project Assistant to ALFA.

 

 

2014

Fall 2014

Una-May O'Reilly gave a talk entitled MOOCS: Research Collaboration, Data Privacy and the Role of Technology at an NSF Meeting on IRB, privacy and big data in Education.

Una-May O'Reilly gave a seminar entitled Formulating (big) Data Science Innovations for All as part of the speaker series at Dalhousie University's Institute for Big Data Analytics.

At the CSAIL BigData Initiative's Fall meeting:

1. Erik Hemberg and Jacob Rosen presented a poster entitled Concurrent Search of Tax Evasion Schemes and Tax Non-Compliance Indicators,co-authored with Una-May O'Reilly (ALFA) and Geoffrey Warner and Sanith Wijesinghe of MITRE.

2. Franck Dernoncourt fielded a poster entitled Learning wavelet parameters using Gaussian process in massive signal data sets, co-authored by Kalyan Veeramachaneni and Una-May O'Reilly

3. Kalyan Veermachaneni gave a presentation on Recommending Models for Big Data

4. Una-May O'Reilly participated in the Panel on Data Privacy speaking on Privacy and Online Learner Data

ALFA research on MOOC student drop out prediction was highlighted with a guest post on the edX blog.

 

August 2014: ALFA welcomes a number of visitors. Sherif Halawa joins us from Stanford University. He is a member of the Lytics Lab. Varun Aggarwal, an alum of the group joins us from Aspiring Minds, India. Sylvain Cussat-Blanc joins us from University of Toulouse.

 

July 2014: Una-May O'Reilly and ALFA visitor Prof. Krzyztof Krawiec of won best paper in the Genetic Programming track at GECCO 2014. The paper, entitled "Behavioral Programming: A Broader and More Detailed Take on Semantic GP" will shortly be available via a free download link to the ACM digital library posted on our Publications page.

 

March 20 Una-May, leader of ALFA, just returned from a two week trip to Asia. In Hong Kong she gave talks at both Hong Kong PolyU and Chinese UHK on ALFA's MoocDB and MoocVIZ projects.

Una-May was accompanied by ALFA postdoc Erik Hemberg to Shantou University (STU), China on the same trip. The duo kicked off Week 1 of their new blended learning course. The course pilots a novel blended learning architecture. Five days of lectures and labs are face to face and on the STU campus during each of the first and final week of the course. Sandwiched in-between are 8 weeks of online learning via the OpenEDX platform. The course technically focuses on Evolutionary Processes and Computation with an eye to explicating the connection between evolutionary algorithms, artificial intelligence and evolutionary systems in action around us. It also emphasizes the importance of how learning takes place, encouraging reflection and introducing diverse learning activities including active learning, role play learning and peer teaching.

 

March 15 ALFA will present 3 papers at EuroGP in Granada, Spain in April. Post-doc Nacho Arnaldo and ALFA visitor Krzysztof Krawiec will attend. The three papers are listed on the ALFA publications page.

 

Feb 28 ALFA bids a fond farewell to our visitor Prof. Krzysztof Krawiec of Poznan University of Technology, Poland. Krzysztof co-published 4 papers with ALFA members during his Fullbright Scholars visit. For these publications, see the ALFA publications page.

 

Feb 27 ALFA's MOOC research team is discussed in a blog post authored by Dr. Lori Breslow. The post, entitled 'Working Across Disciplines to Improve Education appears in the Inside Higher Ed's BlogU.

 

January 15 Dr. O'Reilly traveled to Taipei, Taiwan. At the Changing How the World Learns Symposium she presented a talk entitled Knowledge Mining Online Learning Data.

 

January 7 Dr. O'Reilly gave a talk, entitled Comparative Effectiveness using MIMIC II Clinical Data. It was presented at Critical Data: Secondary Use of Big Data from Critical Care.

 

2013

Fall-Winter 2013

December 20: ALFA was featured on the blog of the Teaching and Learning Lab of MIT. See a post written by Jennifer DeBoer, entitled Facilitating Education Research in the MOOC Space.

 

December 15: Dr. O'Reilly gave an MIT XTALK Series lecture entitled MoocDB: Taming MOOC Big Data while Fostering Collaboration in Online Education Research.

 

December 10: Dr. O'Reilly gave an invited talk at the Machine Learning for Clinical Data Analysis and Healthcare - NIPS 2013 Workshop. It was entitled Secondary Use of Physiological Waveforms for Evidence-Generated Medicine.

 

November 13: Dr. O'Reilly gave at talk entitled MoocDB: A Framework for Collaborative Online-Learning Behavioral Research at the BigData@CSAIL MIT Big Data Initiative at CSAIL Annual Member Meeting.

 

October 28: Dr. O'Reilly gave a talk entitled Knowledge Mining Blood Pressure Waveforms: The GigaBEATS Project at the Quantitative Medicine Series.

August 2013

ALFA warmly welcomes Dr. Nacho (Ignacio) Arnaldo as a new post-doctoral associate. Nacho hails from the Parallel Architectures and Bioinspired Algorithms group at the Departamento de Arquitectura de Computadores y Automática of Universidad Complutense de Madrid . He brings expertise in approaching optimization problems with a combination of Evolutionary Computation and GPU computing.

 

ALFA warmly welcomes two Fullbright Award visitors. We will host Prof. Krzysztof Krawiec from Poznan University of Technology, Poland for 6 months. Prof. Conor Ryan from University of Limerick, Ireland will join us for 4.5 months.

July 2013

Dr. O'Reilly visited Taipei for the 2013 MIT ILP-EPOCH Taiwan Symposium. She gave a talk on Scalable Machine Learning to Exploit Big Data for Knowledge Discovery.

From July 5-8, Dr. O'Reilly represented ALFA at the annual premier conference on evolutionary computation GECCO in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

• During the first part of the meeting, devoted to tutorials and workshops,

  • Dr. O'Reilly gave a tutorial introduction to Genetic Programming. Powerpoint slides of this tutorial are available in the GECCO companion proceedings from the ACM Digital Library.

  • co-organized the enthusiastically received first meeting for Women@GECCO.

  • presented a paper entitled Efficient Training Set Use for Blood Pressure Prediction in a Large Scale Learning Classifier System at the International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems, co-authored with ALFA members Erik Hemberg, Kalyan Veeramachaneni, Franck Dernoncourt and Mark Wagy.

  • gave an invited talk on FlexGP at the Symbolic Regression Workshop, co-authored with Kalyan Veeramachaneni, Owen Derby and Dylan Sherry, entitled FlexGP and Ensemble-Based Symbolic Regression.

• Over the latter course of the conference, she

  • attended the editorial board meetings for Evolutionary Computation and Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines and the ACM SigEVO executive board meeting.

  • judged the HUMIES competition with Professors Erik Goodman, Wolfgang Banzhaf and Darrell Whitley

  • presented a paper, co-authored with Kalyan Veeramachaneni and Owen Derby, entitled Learning Regression Ensembles with Genetic Programming at Scale in the Genetics-Based Machine Learning Track.

• ALFA was also superbly represented by co-author Prof. Sylvain Cussat-Blanc, who presented a paper, co-authored by Dennis Wilson, E. Awa, Kalyan Veeramachaneni, and Una-May O'Reilly, entitled On Learning to Generate Wind Farm Layouts. This paper was the nomination from the Generative Developmental System Track for Best Paper Award.

 

ALFA Research Scientist Dr. Kalyan Veeramachaneni, Post-doctoral Associate Dr. Zach Pardos and graduate student Franck Dernoncourt attended the first annual MoocShop at Artificial Intelligence in Educational Data Mining. Dr. Veeramachaneni presented their co-authored paper entitled MOOCdb: Developing Data Standards for MOOC Data Science.

ALFA Research Scientist, Dr. Kalyan Veeramachaneni attended the 2013 International Conference on Machine Learning Workshop on Healthcare. The ALFA group paper, co-authored with Alexander Waldin and Una-May O'Reilly was entitled Learning Blood Pressure Behavior from Large Physiological Waveform Repositories.

June 2013

Owen Derby was awarded his M.Eng and received second place in the MIT EECS department's Charles and Jennifer Johnson Master of Engineering Thesis Prize for Computer Science for his thesis entitled FlexGP: A Scalable System for Factored Learning in the Cloud .

 

Dr. O'Reilly hosted a CSAIL Industry Affiliates Program virtual meeting on June 19. The topic was Scalable Systems for Large Scale Machine Learning. A recording of the meeting is available to IAP members on the CSAIL IAP website.

May, 2013

Dr's. Una-May O'Reilly and Erik Hemberg taught a week long, intensive course from May 6-10 on Evolutionary Processes and Systems at Shantou University, China.

Dr. O'Reilly was a speaker at the Stanford Medical School's Big Data in BioMedicine Conference. Her talk, on May 22, 2013, was entitled The GigaBeats Project: Knowledge Discovery Methods for Blood Pressure Waveforms.

Dr. O'Reilly was a speaker at the Spring CSAIL Industry Affiliates Program meeting. At the May 29th session on Applied Algorithms and Machine Learning she presented a talk entitled FlexGP: A Scalable System for Factored Learning on the Cloud.

April 2013

ALFA leader, Una-May O'Reilly was awarded the EvoStar Award for Outstanding Contribution of Evolutionary Computation in Europe. Una-May received the award at the 2013 EvoStar Conference reception at the glittering Vienna City Hall. Elena Marchiori also received the EvoStar award.

Dr. Una-May O'Reilly addressed the 2013 Information and Communication Technologies Conference, hosted by MIT at the Tang Center, with a talk entitled Divide and Conquer' Machine Learning to Exploit Big Data Knowledge Discovery. A video recording of this talk is available from the MIT Industry Liaison Program. Date: April 24, 2013. Attach:ICT-OREILLY-2013.pptx.pdf

April 4, 2013: ALFA Group M.Eng student Owen Derby presented his co-authored paper at Evo-Applications, in the EvoPAR track. It is entitled Cloud Driven Island Model Genetic Programming by Owen Derby, Kalyan Veeramachaneni, Erik Hemberg, and Una-May O'Reilly. Follow our publications link on the sidebar for more information.

 

April 4, 2013: ALFA Group leader, Una-May O'Reilly presented a poster on a co-authored paper entitled Large Scale Island Model CMA-ES for High Dimensional Problems by Dennis Wilson, Kalyan Veeramachaneni, and Una-May O'Reilly also in the EvoPAR track of the Evo-Applications conference. Follow our publications link on the sidebar for more information.

 

January 2013: We have a new name! ALFA: Any Scale Learning for All is now the group formerly known as Evolutionary Design and Optimization. During the years our research agenda has extended beyond evolutionary computation approaches to design and optimization. The new name subsumes the old and adds emphasis to data or algorithms of any scale. It expresses our burgeoning interests in machine learning and MOOC learning. The "for all" highlights our commitment to application domains of social value such as healthcare, energy and education.

 

2012

December 1, 2012: Una-May has returned from the Oxford-Stanford Conference on Big Data: Challenges and Opportunities for Human Health where she presented the EC-Star platform.

Feb 8, 2013: We updated our UROP, MEng and UAP projects link. We're looking forward to interacting with MIT students keen to learn more about machine learning and evolutionary computation -- with additional emphasis on big data analytics and application-driven problem solving.

 

Nov 29, 2012: At Oxford University, group leader, Una-May O'Reilly addressed the Oxford-Stanford Conference on Big Data: Challenges and Opportunities for Human Health. Her presentation described how the EC-Star platform would be of service to this community.

 

October 23-24, 2012: Group leader, Una-May O'Reilly gave a presentation on the FlexGP project at the annual GE Whitney Symposium held at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, NY. 

The 2012 Symposium topic area was analytics, modeling, simulations, and decision-making in the age of industrial internet, big data, cloud, and supercomputing.

 

October 1, 2012: We've recruited David Xiao as a UROP to investigate a project in the context of our cloud-scale machine learning agenda. Another UROP, Ms.Diyang Tang will examine how well statistical machine learning methods for wind resource methods work on limited data collected from real wind farm sites.

 

Sept 28, 2012: We were honored to host Prof. Petros Drineas of Renssalaer (RPI). Prof. Drineas presented a talk entitled Randomized Algorithms in Linear Algebra and Applications in Data Analysis.

 

Sept 26-27, 2012: Dr. O'Reilly attended the VMWare Research Symposium.

 

Sept 23, 2012: EvoDesignOpt was admirably represented by new group member, Dr. Erik Hemberg, in the Presidential Inauguration Fall Beaver Dash where the race distance was 5k and a few smoots. Erik's time was 3rd in his class.

 

Sept 18, 2012: SUPER Super UROPS: Congratulations to Ulziibayar Otgonbaatar and Sebastian Leon for acceptance of their super UROP project proposals. Sebastian's project is entitled Mining data from MIT EdX. He will work with us to data mine 6.002X course data. Ulzi's project is entitled Building an Elasticity Module for Flex-GP. He will investigate extending our cloud-based version of FlexGP to elastically scale (i.e. contract and expand the number of learners simultaneously networked to work on a problem) in response to cloud compute prices (or price surrogates).

Sebastian has been chosen to receive funding through the EECS Research and Innovation Scholars Program (RISP) and has been named an MIT EECS Undergraduate Research and Innovation Scholar. Ulzi has been will receive funding and has been named an MIT EECS - VMWare Undergraduate Research and Innovation Scholar. The Super UROP projects, with addition of other program requirements will support Ulzi and Sebastian in earning a Certificate of Advanced Undergraduate Research.

 

August 20, 2012 New Research Opportunities

With the Fall 2012 semester just around the corner we've identified a number of projects on different aspects of large scale machine learning and evolutionary algorithms. These projects are primarily aimed at MIT Juniors, Seniors, MEng, though keen sophomores can apply. For more details please click here.

 

August 6, 2012 End of Summer

The summer is drawing to an end. We've welcomed Manushaqe (Manjola) Muco and Carah (Meijuan) Yan for short term (summer long) membership. Dennis Wilson joined us on a MIT Energy Initiative UROP while Owen Derby jump-started his M.Eng work on FlexGP. We will miss Mark Wagy and wish him the best at UVM in their Ph.D. program. In the Fall we welcome back Owen Derby and greet for the first time Dr. Erik Hemberg who will be a post-doctoral associate, Franck Dernoncourt who starts his EECS PhD and Monica Vitali who is visiting from Politecnico Milano. In November, Alex Waldin will visit from ETH Zurich. We congratulate Dr. Kalyan Veeramachaneni on his promotion to Research Scientist too!

Don't forget to check out our updated research opportunities! They are intended for talented MIT students. Visitors to our group from beyond MIT are rare and typically require an established relationship.

 

April 14, 2012

Member of the Evolutionary Design and Optimization Group just won the best paper award in the EvoPAR track of the Evo-Applications conference. EvoPAR is devoted to Parallel Evolutionary Algorithms. The conference was held in Malaga, Spain, April 11-14, 2012. The paper is entitled FlexGP: Genetic programming on the cloud and is co-authored by Dylan Sherry, Kalyan Veeramachaneni, James McDermott and Una-May O'Reilly. We will shortly have a link to the paper on our publications page.

 

January 24, 2012

MIT news published a spotlight article on our research on knowledge mining from sensory evaluation data. Read the full article here.

The paper referred to in the spotlight article is Knowledge mining sensory evaluation data: genetic programming, statistical techniques and swarm optimization, authored by Kalyan Veeramachaneni, Ekaterina Vladislavleva and Una-May O'Reilly. A camera ready version can be downloaded here. The copy of record appears in Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines here.