Bellissima notizia!  Way to go and congratulations!
Claudio 

--
Sent from my iPhone


> On Jul 25, 2016, at 9:11 PM, Sean Luke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> GMU has won a 3-year NSF CRI for ECJ, our evolutionary computation and metaheuristics toolkit (genetic algorithms, etc.).  
> 
> Because NSF told me in no uncertain terms that (of course) they would NOT award our team two parallel CRIs :-) this means that our NSF CRI proposal for MASON will not be awarded, at least this year.
> 
> Still, you might be interested below.
> 
> Sean
> 
> 
> Begin forwarded message:
> 
>> From: Sean Luke <[log in to unmask]>
>> Subject: ECJ toolkit wins National Science Foundation grant
>> Date: July 25, 2016 at 2:40:47 PM EDT
>> To: ECJ Evolutionary Computation Toolkit <[log in to unmask]>, genetic programming <[log in to unmask]>
>> 
>> George Mason University has won a 3-year NSF grant specifically to enhance the ECJ evolutionary computation toolkit into a broad-based library useful to the entire metaheuristics community.
>> 
>> 
>> HOW YOU CAN HELP US.
>> 
>> We need two things:
>> 
>>    1. We need suggestions for what we should do beyond the list below (which is a summary of roughly what we proposed).  In order to convert ECJ into a general-purpose toolkit that could serve as a central library to the generl metaheuristics community, what is missing from our proposed work below?  What would you like to see?
>> 
>>    2. We'll be building a board of "power users" of ECJ to assess the work and make recommendations here and there.  It'll be infrequent and minimal work on your part, but it's important for us.  I would like you to recommend (directly to me) people to be on that board.  Yes you can recommend yourself.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Here's what we have proposed.  What do you think should also be there?
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> 
>> 1. Make ECJ More Robust
>>    1A. Construct a test harness for ECJ
>>    1B. Make distribution-based system tests for ECJ
>>    1C. Make unit tests for ECJ
>> 
>> 
>> 2. Add Metaheuristics Frameworks to ECJ
>>    2A. Build an Efficient Single-State optimization package (for hill-climbing simualted annealing, tabu search, etc.)
>>    2B. Build a Combinatorial Optimization package (for GRASP, AS, ACS, and likely certain more recent ACO algorithms -- suggestions?)
>>    2C. Abstract and extend the Model Fitting Package beyond CMA-ES (probably to PBIL, UMDA, BIPOP-CMA-ES or AMaLGaM IDEA -- suggestions?)
>>    2D. Build tools to permit hybrid architectures (ILS, memetic algorithms), building off if our mete-evolution facility. Suggestions of specific algorithms to include?
>>    2E. Add NEAT
>> 
>> 
>> 3. Make ECJ Easier to Use
>>    3A. Eclipse integration (wizards, code skeletons)
>>    3B. Very significantly revise and update ECJ's GUI 
>> 
>> 
>> 4. Make ECJ More Useful for Analysis
>>    4A. Facilities to dump statistics directly to R.
>>    4B. Integrate standard implementations of statistical analyses, such as T-tests etc.
>>    4C. Add significant number of vector benchmarks, from BBOB etc.
>>    4D. Work with representation-specific communities (notably GP, ACO, NEAT) to add often-used benchmark problems.
>> 
>> Sean
>>