Jorge Tavares

Hi, my name is Jorge Tavares and I am a Computer Science PhD student, in the area of Evolutionary Computation, at the University of Coimbra.

The main topic of my thesis is to study the influence of genetic representations on complex combinatorial optimization problems. At the present, I am applying fitness landscapes analysis to a set of linear and non-linear representations for different problems.

This study is related to one of my main interests for future research: self-organizing evolutionary algorithms. The objective is to provide a basic representation framework for developing and studying these types of algorithms. Also, I would like to explore links between complex systems (mainly self-organization and regulatory networks) with the problem of evolving representations in evolutionary algorithms.

The answers to Dan Rockmore's questions are:

1. What topics do you have some expertise in and would you be willing to help others learn them?

• Evolutionary Computation and Bio-inspired Computing
• Artificial Intelligence in general (Agents, Neural Networks, Machine Learning, etc)

2. What do you want to learn?

• Landscapes Analysis and Information Theory
• Self-Organization and Regulatory Networks

3. Do you have any projects that would benefit from interdisciplinary approach?

• Bringing more biology to the design and analysis of Evolutionary Algorithms

4. Do you have any ideas for what sort of project you would like to attack this summer?

• To explore links between Complex Systems and Evolutionary Computation

5. What's your favorite "big problem"?

• P vs NP
• The construction of artificial intelligent beings

6. If you were given the opportunity to see where we were in one hundred years with respect to progress on one problem/subject, what would it be?

• Besides the previous two, I wonder if we will be in The Diamond Age