David B. Fogel

Nils Barricelli - artificial life, coevolution, self-adaptation

Nils Aall Barricelli was one of the pioneers in evolutionary computation. His publication of Esempi Numerici di processi di evoluzione, a study in what would now be called artificial life, in the journal Methodos, in 1954 is perhaps the earliest published record of an evolutionary simulation. The paper was republished in 1957 in English, and detailed the results of programs that were run at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, in 1953.

Newly elected CIS Administrative Committee Members (2009-2011)

Jim Bezdek University of West Florida, USA Jim received the PhD in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University in 1973. Jim’s history: past president of NAFIPS (North Amer ican Fuzzy Information Processing Society), IFSA (International Fuzzy Systems Association) and the IEEE CIS (Computational Intelligence Society): founding editor the Int’l. Jo. Approximate Reasoning and the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems: fellow of the IEEE and IFSA: recipient of the IEEE 3rd Millennium, IEEE CIS Fuzzy Systems Pioneer, and IEEE CIS Rosenblatt medals. Jim’s interests: woodworking, optimization, motorcycles, pattern recognition, cigars, clustering in very large data, fishing, co-clustering, blues music, and visual clustering.

President's farewell message [President's Message]

For the past two years, its been my privilege and honor to be your societys president. The honor has been made all the greater because we are a society of volunteers, each giving of our time and knowledge to others in the hopes that collectively we can make things better. None of us is here because we have to be here; were here because we want to be here. And its my belief that we have the most outstanding volunteers in any society that Ive ever known.

Looking ahead in 2009 [President's Message]

As we start a new year, its good to look at whats ahead for 2009 for the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. Some pertinent deadlines come up early in the year, so having them in mind now may be helpful.

George Friedman-evolving circuits for robots [Historic Perspective]

Many years ago, George Friedman analyzed this problem and developed what was, in essence, a blueprint for designing an adaptive neural control circuit for mobile robots based on natural selection. Friedmans objective was to investigate the possibility of borrowing from nature to develop goal-seeking machines. He noted that in a constant environment, natural evolutionary processes lead to a series of individuals that converges on a type that is more appropriate (better fitted) for survival