Abstract
(Englisch)
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EvoNet is the european network of excellence on evolutionary computing. After its establishement and during the first two years of activity the main goals were: coordination of basic research activities and facilitate technology transfer of new methodologies and techniques to the industry in the European Union. During this time tEvoNet saw the setup of coordination groups for education, research, communication and industrial liaison. To this end, several coordination meeting and industry awareness events have been organized all around Europe. All the best european academic groups in evolutionary computation belong to EvoNet and a growing number of industrial partners have joined the network. Apart from this focused events, other means have been employed to disseminate the information: the Evonews newsletter, the EvoNet Web site and the EvoNet Flying Circus, an itinerant showcase of methodologies in the field of artificial evolution.
On the swiss side, we have been very active during this period, contributing to several events. Among these a major one has been the International Conference ICES (International Conference on Evolvable Systems: from Biology to Hardware) which has been held in Lausanne in September '98 and sponsored by EvoNet. The Swiss EvoNet node is also active in two special EvoNet interest groups: the Evoelec group and the Genetic Programming group. Evoelec is devoted to the investigation of new evolutionary paradigms for the constrauction of reconfigurable and evolvable circuits and machines. In this promising field the EPFL/UNIL groups are on the leading edge of the research and the EvoNet management insisted for having our groups on the board. The Genetic Programming group helds together the most active european research groups in the exploding field of genetic programming, a discipline initiated in the US in the early nineties. Our groups at the University of Geneva and the University of Lausanne are very active in the field. Besides, the swiss project recipient has been an invited speaker at two EvoNet industry awareness meetings. The first is New Trends in evolutionary computing: algorithms and applications that was held in Dortmund in February '99 and jointly organized by EvoNet and the european network Ingenet. The second event will took place in Finland in Mai '99 and has seen the participation of academic partners as well as members of the european industry. It is to be noted that the swiss EvoNet partners now cover the University of Lausanne, the EPFL, the University of Geneva and IDSIA Lugano on the academic side, while the CSEM of Neuchâtel is active on the industrial applications side.
More recently, a partnership called CoIL between four networks of excellence has begun. These are EvoNet, MLNet, NeeuroNet and ERUDIT. By joining forces and promoting cooperation and cross-fertilization between their respective fields it is hoped that Europe will take the lead in these new fields coolectively called soft computing.
The swiss recipient has been active belonging to several committees and being on the board of several international events. For instance, he will be co-chair of the EuroGP conference to be held in Milan in 2001. New avenues of research have been open in the field of genetic programming and in parallel evolutionary computation in collaboration with research groups in Spain and Italy. In the same way, a number of applications in the financial, electronical and medical fields have been performed, with good results. Among the many publications that have resulted from these activities a new book on soft computing published by Springer is to be noted. The other swiss groups belonging to the network have also benefitted from the association, in particular in the field of reconfigurable and evolvable circuits, a new promising technology for more adaptive machines and hardware.
On the whole the EvoNet experience has been very fruitful and has opened the way for several collaborations with european partners on interesting and important subjects, both in theory and applications.
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