David Fogel Gives Keynote Lecture and Serves as Honorary Chairman of 2003 Hybrid Intelligent Systems Conference in Melbourne, Australia

Melbourne, Austrailia - Dr. David Fogel, CEO of Natural Selection, Inc.^®, gave the keynote address to the attendees of the Third Hybrid Intelligent Systems Conference (HIS2003), held at the city conference center for Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Dr. Fogel, who was the honorary chairman of the conference, spoke about the opportunities for hybridizing evolutionary computation and object neural networks for pattern discovery and pattern recognition in gaming and intelligent control. His talk also focused on the definition of intelligence and intelligent behavior, with an aim on viewing these terms in light of adapting stimulus-response patterns in light of goals in a range of environments. “I was very encouraged to see such an enthusiastic audience in attendance here. Almost every successful application of computational intelligence techniques to today’s challenging problems demands a hybrid approach. The papers at this conference display a broad range of combinations of techniques and also indicate the strength of research being conducted in this area by researchers in Australia, as well as other parts of the Pacific Rim, India, and Southeast Asia.” Dr. Fogel’s talk highlighted his recent experiments on evolving neural networks for playing chess and checkers, as well as the history of evolutionary algorithms applied to problems in pattern recognition and engineering.

The conference was organized primarily by Prof. Kate Smith of Monash University in Australia, Prof. Lakhmi Jain of University of South Australia, Prof. Ajith Abraham of Oklahoma State University in the USA, and Prof. Mario Koeppen of Fraunhofer IPK Berlin, Germany. The conference attracted an international audience of about 120 attendees, with plenary talks given by noted researchers including Prof. David Corne of the U.K. on bioalgorithmics and Prof. Graham Williams of Australia on data mining, among others. “It was my pleasure to be the honorary chairman of this important event, with such outstanding participants in every capacity,” said Dr. Fogel. Plans for next year’s conference are ongoing.