About the International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems
Workshop Topic
Since Learning Classifier Systems (LCSs) were introduced by Holland (1977) as a way of applying evolutionary computation to machine learning problems, the LCS paradigm has broadened greatly into a framework encompassing many representations, rule discovery mechanisms, and credit assignment schemes. Current LCS applications range from data mining to automated innovation to on-line cognitive control. Classifier systems are a very active area of research, with newer approaches, in particular Wilson's accuracy-based XCS (Wilson, 1995), receiving a great deal of attention. LCS are also benefiting from advances in the field of reinforcement learning, adaptive filtering, and machine learning. IWLCS 2009 will be the twelfth workshop of its kind. The workshop series was initiated in 1992, held at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Since 1999 the workshop has been held yearly in conjunction with PPSN in 2000 and 2002 and with GECCO in 1999, 2001 and from 2003 to 2009. Topics of interests include, but are not limited to:
- Paradigms of LCS (Michigan, Pittsburgh, ...)
- Theoretical developments (behaviour, scalability and learning bounds, ...)
- Representations (binary, real-valued, oblique, non-linear, fuzzy, ...)
- Types of target problems (single-step, multiple-step, regression/function approximation, ...)
- System enchancements (competent operators, problem structure identification and linkage learning, ...)
- Cognitive control (architectures, emergent behaviours, ...)
- Applications (data mining, medical domains, bioinformatics, ...)
The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation community
LCSs have been an integral part of the evolutionary computation field almost since its beginnings, so this workshop is very interesting for the GEC community for itself, but also because it shares many common research topics with the broader GEC field such as linkage learning, niching techniques, variable-length representations, facet-wise models, etc. Therefore it can attract a broader audience beside the own LCS practitioners. Post-proceedings of the papers accepted for the workshop are published usually every two years in the Springer LNAI book series, which is an extra element of interest for participating in the workshop.
Workshop format
This workshop is meant to be a full day workshop, with the following format:
- Brief welcome and introduction from the organizers
- Presentation of the accepted papers. In the last years there has been a regular volume of 10-15 accepted papers, divided in 4-5 sessions
- 'Show & Tell' research infrastructure (code, problem repositories ...) and teaching resources (tutorials, lectures ... )
- Brainstorming session with topics proposed by the audience
- Final session: round table, news and other discussion topics
The participation of the attendees is encouraged through most of the workshop schedule. First with the presentation of the accepted papers, and specially later with brainstorming and round table discussion sessions.