Dr. David Fogel Gives Keynote Lecture at ICONIP/SEAL/FSKD 2002

Singapore -- Dr. David Fogel, CEO of Natural Selection, Inc.^®, delivered a keynote lecture at the joint meeting of the 2002 International Conference on Neural Information Processing, the 2002 Simulated Evolution and Learning conference, and the 2002 Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery conference, held at the Orchid Country Club today. His talk, titled “Remembering Alex Fraser and Explorations in Learning without Human Expertise,” was offered in two parts. The first part focused on Alex Fraser's pioneering efforts in evolutionary computation dating from 1957-1970. Fraser, who passed away in July, was one of the first to suggest and implement computer simulations of genetic systems that incorporated multiple individuals, recombination, mutation, inversion, and even a framework for placing evolutionary simulations in the context of adaptive purposive systems. His work from the 1950s and 1960s in Sydney, Australia was recognized by the IEEE Neural Networks Council with their pioneer award in evolutionary computation, presented at the 1999 Congress on Evolutionary Computation. The second part addressed the application of evolutionary computation to address problems for which human expertise may be insufficient or unavailable. In contrast to traditional artificial intelligence methods, which rely on capturing human expertise, evolutionary algorithms can be used to bootstrap knowledge from an environment over a series of generations. Dr. Fogel reviewed results from the Blondie24 series of checkers experiments, in which a computer evolved a neural network that can compete at the level of human experts. "I was very pleased to have this opportunity to address over 800 delegates to this important joint meeting in computational intelligence," Dr. Fogel remarked. "It was important for us to recognize Alex Fraser's contributions to evolutionary computation and look to the future of what evolutionary algorithms can bring to machine learning applications." Additional information regarding the joint meeting can be found at http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/nef/

Natural Selection, Inc.^® was founded in 1993 to address complex problems in industry, medicine, and defense. The company possesses unique expertise in computational intelligence techniques, including evolutionary computation, neural networks, and fuzzy logic. The corporation's research efforts support the discovery of new pharmaceuticals, the automated detection and diagnosis of breast cancer from film-screen mammograms, optical character recognition, and a variety of military and industrial projects.

For more information, please contact:

Dr. David B. Fogel,
Chief Executive Officer,
Natural Selection, Inc.,
3333 N. Torrey Pines Ct.,
Suite 200,
La Jolla, CA, 92037
tel: (858) 455-6449
fax: (858) 455-1560
dfogel [at] natural-selection.com