About IWLCS 2014
Since Learning Classifier Systems (LCSs) were introduced by Holland (1976, 1978) with the aim of creating cognitive systems which used evolutionary computation to learn to perform a certain task by interacting with its environment, the LCS paradigm has broadened greatly into a framework encompassing many representations, rule discovery mechanisms, and credit assignment schemes. LCSs are a very active area of research, with interesting, newer approaches that have shown not only to be competitive with respect to state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, but also to be very flexible approaches capable of solving a wide variety of real-world problems that range from data mining to automated innovation and online control. Among the many different approaches, XCS (Wilson, 1995) has recently received a special amount of attention due to its ability to solve problems that previously eluded solution.
The current edition will be the 17th edition of the workshop, which 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 2013.
Topics
In general, the workshop aims at discussing any advances in the LCS and evolutionary learners fields. Topics of interests include but are not limited to:
- Paradigms of LCS (Michigan, Pittsburgh, ...)
- Theoretical developments (behavior, scalability and learning bounds, ...)
- Representations (binary, real-valued, oblique, non-linear, fuzzy, ...)
- Types of target problems (single-step, multiple-step, regression/function approximation, ...)
- System enhancements (competent operators, problem structure identification and linkage learning, ...)
- LCS for Cognitive Control (architectures, emergent behaviors, ...)
- Applications (data mining, medical domains, bioinformatics, intelligence in games ...)
- Optimizations and parallel implementations (GPU, matching algorithms, ...)
Workshop Format
The format of the workshop will be set to encourage discussion. After a brief welcome, there will be presentations of the accepted papers followed by a discussion on the presented topic. At the end of the workshop, we will reserve some time to have a round table where we can brainstorm and discuss any LCS topic.