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
>