John Woodward

The Division of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (http://www.nottingham.edu.cn/) has a number of openings for PhD students in Computer Science in the area of Machine Learning. The PhD scholarships are funded (some fully funded and some partially funded) by the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. There is no deadline for receiving applications, however, the main admission dates are October, January, March and June of each year. Candidate are encouraged to propose their own projects. Suggested projects include

Applicants should have a degree in Computer Science or a related discipline. A strong programming background is required and a good mathematics background is desirable. Excellent communication skills and a high level English are required (please include evidence of you English language ability e.g. IELTS). Interested candidates are encouraged to make initial inquires to Dr John Woodward john.woodward@nottingham.edu.cn. Appilcations should include a cover letter, a CV and a research statement. Further details of these projects can be obtained by emailing me. Please state where you first saw this advertisement.

For other opportunities at UNNC please see the staff homepages.

The homepage of the project undertaken during my Post-Doc with ASAP is here

1. E. K. Burke, M. Hyde, G. Kendall, G. Ochoa, E. Ozcan, and J. Woodward (2009). A Classification of Hyper-heuristics Approaches, Handbook of Metaheuristics, International Series in Operations Research & Management Science, M. Gendreau and J-Y Potvin (Eds.), Springer. pdf.
2. E. K. Burke, M. R. Hyde, G. Kendall, G. Ochoa, E. Ozcan and J. R. Woodward (2009) Exploring Hyper-heuristic Methodologies with Genetic Programming, Computational Intelligence: Collaboration, Fusion and Emergence, In C. Mumford and L. Jain (eds.), Intelligent Systems Reference Library, Springer, pp. 177-201 pdf.

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   Book Reviews

3. Automating the Design of Data Mining Algorithms by Alex Frietas and Gisele Pappa for Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines on line.

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   Journal Articles

4. Prediction of Personal Routes Based on Route Patterns Ling Chen, Qian Ye, Gencai Chen, and John Woodward on line. Information Sciences Received 31 July 2009; revised 1 October 2010; accepted 27 November 2010. Available online 7 December 2010.
5. E. K. Burke, M. Hyde, G. Kendall, J. Woodward Automating the Packing Heuristic Design Process with a Genetic Programming Hyper-Heuristic (in review Evolutionary Computation)
6. Woodward, J., Evans A., Dempster, P. A Syntactic Justification Of Occam's Razor (in review)
7. Is Natural Evolution an Efficient Paradigm For Program Induction; A Critique of Genetic Programming, (in review)
8. Burke, E. K. and Hyde, M. R. and Kendall, G. and Woodward, J., A Genetic Programming Hyper-Heuristic Approach for Evolving Two Dimensional Strip Packing Heuristics, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (to appear)", 2010.
9. Physics Letters B, Vol 227, number 1, 17 August 1989. (WA76 Collaboration). Observation of centrally produced ?/f2(1720) in the reaction at 300 GeV/c. download.

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   Conference Papers

10. Rodriguez, R. & Woodward, J. (2011) Linear Genetic Programming with Multiple Outputs (in review, conference paper)
11. John Woodward and Jerry Swan. Why Classifying Search Algorithms is Essential. 2010 International Conference on Progress in Informatics and Computing. PIC-2010. pdf.
12. John Woodward and Amin Farjudian. Artificial Life, The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Kolmogorov Complexity. 2010 International Conference on Progress in Informatics and Computing. PIC-2010. pdf.
13. John Woodward. The Necessity of Meta Bias in Search Algorithms. International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Software Engineering 2010. CiSE 2010. pdf.
14. John Woodward and Nabil Gindy A Hyper-Heuristic Multi-Criteria Decision Support System for Eco-efficient Product life Cycle. International Conference on Responsible Manufacturing 2010 Ningbo China word.doc. slides.
15. Woodward J. Computable and Incomputable Search Algorithms and Functions. IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Intelligent Systems (IEEE ICIS 2009) November 20-22,2009 Shanghai, China. pdf.
16. Woodward, J. & Bai, R. (2009) Why Evolution is not a Good Paradigm for Program Induction; A Critique of Genetic Programming 2009 World Summit on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (2009 GEC Summit) June 12-14 Shanghai, China published by the ACM Digital Library, indexed by SCI and EI. pdf. slides.
17. Woodward, J. (2009) A Canonical Representation for Genetic Programming at 2009 World Summit on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (2009 GEC Summit) June 12-14 Shanghai, China published by the ACM Digital Library, indexed by SCI and EI. Winner of Best Paper in Conference pdf. slides. best paper.
18. Burke E. K., Hyde M., Kendall G., and Woodward J. R. Scalability of Evolved On Line Bin Packing Heuristics Proceedings of Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2007 September 2007 ps. pdf. slides. poster.
19. Poli R., Woodward J. R., and Burke E. K. A Histogram-matching Approach to the Evolution of Bin-packing Strategies Proceedings of Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2007 September 2007 pdf.
20. Burke E. K., Hyde M., Kendall G., and Woodward J. Automatic Heuristic Generation with Genetic Programming: Evolving a Jack-of-all-Trades or a Master of One Proceedings of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2007 London UK. pdf. slides. poster.
21. John R. Woodward, Complexity and Cartesian Genetic Programming. European Conference on Genetic Programming 2006, 10-12 April 2006, Budapest, Hungary. ps. pdf. Springer. slides.
22. John R. Woodward, Invariance of Function Complexity under Primitive Recursive Functions. Accepted at European Conference on Genetic Programming 2006, 10-12 April 2006, Budapest, Hungary. pdf. Springer.
23. John Woodward, Evolving Turing Complete Representations, Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Canberra, Australia, 8th - 12th December 2003 Nominated Best Paper in Conference. pdf.
24. John Woodward, GA or GP, that is not the question, Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Canberra, Australia, 8th - 12th December 2003 ps. pdf.
25. (with James Neil) No Free Lunch, Program Induction and Combinatorial Problems, Genetic Programming 6th European Conference, EuroGP 2003 Essex, UK, April 2003. ps. pdf.
26. Modularity in Genetic Programming, Genetic Programming 6th European Conference, EuroGP 2003 Essex, UK, April 2003. ps. pdf.

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    Workshop Papers

27. John Robert Woodward and Jerry Swan. Automatically designing selection heuristics. In GECCO 2011 1st workshop on evolutionary computation for designing generic algorithms, pages 583-590, Dublin, Ireland, 2011. pdf.
28. Woodward, J., Parkes, A., Ochoa, G. (2008) A Mathematical Formalization of Hyper-Heuristics. Workshop on Hyper-Heuristics Automating the Heuristic Design Process http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gxo/hhworkshop.html. , presented at 10th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving From Nature (PPSN-08) September 13-17, 2008 Technische University Dortmund, Germany. Highest scoring paper. pdf.
29. Woodward, J., Evans A., Dempster, P. (2008) A Syntactic Justification of Occam's Razor. October 31 to November 2, 2008 2008 Midwest, A New Kind of Science Conference Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana pdf. powerpoint slides.
30. John Woodward, Complexity and Cartesian Genetic Programming. Accepted at The 5th annual UK Workshop on Computational Intelligence, London, Sept 5-7 2005. pdf.
31. John Woodward, Invariance of Function Complexity under Primitive Recursive Functions. Published at The 5th annual UK Workshop on Computational Intelligence, London, Sept 5-7 2005. pdf.
32. John Woodward, Design, Complexity and Abstraction. Design out of complexity workshop. Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management Conference (CUPUM) and the AHRB/EPSRC Embracing Complexity in Design (ECiD) Research Cluster, 2nd July 2005 pdf.
33. John Woodward, Lateral non-classical thinking. The Grand Challenge in Non-Classical Computation International Workshop 18-19th April 2005 pdf.
34. J. Woodward, Simple Incremental Testing, Genetic and Evolutionary Computation 2004 Conference June 26-30 2004, Seattle, Washington USA. Late breaking papers ps. pdf.
35. J. Woodward Evolving Turing Complete Representations, Published at The 2003 UK Workshop on Computational Intelligence 1 - 3 September 2003 University of Bristol.
36. J. Woodward, Function Set Independent Genetic Programming, Genetic and Evolutionary Computation 2004 Conference June 26-30 2004, Seattle, Washington USA. Workshop on Modularity, Regularity, and Hierarchy in Evolutionary Computation ps. pdf.
37. J. Woodward, GA or GP, that is not the question, Published at The 2003 UK Workshop on Computational Intelligence 1 - 3 September 2003 University of Bristol.
38. John R. Woodward and James R. Neil No Free Lunch, Program Induction and Combinatorial Problems, pdf. The 2002 UK Workshop on Computational Intelligence (UKCI 2002) Birmingham.

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    Extended Abstracts

39. John Woodward. The Use of Foreign Language Teaching Techniques in the Computer Science Laboratory to Support Oral Presentation and Group Work. The second English for Special Purposes in Asia Conference 2nd ESP in Asia Conference. pdf.

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    Theses

40. Phd Thesis, The University of Birmingham, School of Computer Science, (2005) Algorithm Induction, Modularity and Complexity pdf. Under supervision of Xin Yao.
41. MSc Thesis, The University of Birmingham, School of Computer Science, (1997) The Use of Genetic Programming to Control a Sheep-Dog. Under supervision of Aaron Sloman.

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    Books

42. John R. Woodward Program Induction, Complexity and Occam's Razor: The Induction of Computable Functions, Modularity and No Free Lunch Theorems. LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing (29 July 2010) ISBN 978-3-8383-8934-9. order at Amazon.

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    Technical Reports

43. Edmund K. Burke, Matthew Hyde, Graham Kendall Gabriela Ochoa, Ender Ozcan and John Woodward. A Classification of Hyper-heuristic Approaches. Computer Science Technical Report No. NOTTCS-TR-SUB-0906241359-0664 2009 pdf.