The 2009 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games

I have just arrived in Milan for the 2009 CIG (Computational Intelligence and Games) conference. This was a conference that Simon Lucas and I started in 2005. Simon is now editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Games. The 2005 conference, I believe, was partly responsible for paving the way to enabling this journal to be established. I am fortunate enough to serve as an Associate Editor for the journal.

As I said above, the first conference (actually it's a symposium, as the correct title is The IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games) was held in 2005 in Essex (UK). The original plan was to hold the symposium every two years, but it was so successful that we decided to hold it again in 2006. This time, Sushil Louis and I chaired it. It was held at the University of Reno in Nevada.

In 2007 it was held in Hawaii, as part of the then newly formed Computational Intelligence Symposium Series of conferences (CISS). Simon, again chaired this symposium, along with Sung-Bae Cho and Alan Blair. Actually, at the 2007 CISS, I chaired the associated scheduling conference (Computational Intelligence in Scheduling (CISched).

In 2008, CIG was held in Perth, Australia, chaired by my good friends Luigi Barone and Phil Hingston.

The sympsium has now moved to Milan (chaired by Pier Luca Lanzi). It has certainly done the rounds (Essex, Reno, Hawaii, Perth and Milan) and, having been to all of them, I know from first hand experience that it is going from strength to strength.

Looking at this years program it promises to be a very interesting week. If you have an interest in computational intelligence or games, take a look at http://www.ieee-cig.org/.

Football (Soccer) Prediction: Development Framework (#001)

As the new football (soccer in the USA) season approaches I am trying to get a football prediction system up and running. I think I will struggle to get it ready for the start of the new season (which starts Aug 7th) but that is not so important as this is mostly a research project. In any case, the system I have in mind will take a few weeks before it is usable as I need to get some results posted for the prediction system to work on.

I did a quick check on how much time I have spent so far on the programming. As a rough estimate, I think it is about 100 hours, mostly (if not all) at weekends. I still have a lot to do but I almost have the "football framework" that I need. That is, I can read in the data that I have been collecting, generate a league table for a given date in the season and collate various other statistics that I will eventually need. I also have various data structures that I will "pass around" the prediction part of the system.

I reckon that I need about another 20 hours and then I'll have the framework completed. Then I can start to work on the prediction parts of the system.

One thing that I need to implement is an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). I have one from another project I worked on (stock market forecasting) but I want to re-engineer it. At the moment the ANN is only a feed forward network as it was used in an evolutionary setting. That is, the predictions were evolved rather than a more traditional training mechanism.
One thing lacking in my ANN class (I program in C++) is a back propagation training (BP) mechanism So, apart from tidying up the code, I also want to implement a back propagation method, as this seems one potential way to carry out the prediction.

So I have my work cut out over the coming weeks, but I hope that it will be interesting and, you never know, it might just work.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog.

Through this blog I'd like to discuss areas that are related to my research interests.

I will post on an irregular basis as, I am guessing, that there will be more important things to do on many days but I hope to post regularly enough to make it worth visiting every so often.