Trevor Collins, a final year PhD student in KMi, has won the ‘Best Student Paper Award’ at this year’s IEEE World Congress On Computational Intelligence held in Anchorage, Alaska (May 4-9, 1998). This congress is made up of three conferences on: Evolutionary Computation, Neural Networks and Fuzzy Systems. Trevor won his award for his paper entitled ‘Understanding Evolutionary Computing: A hands on approach’, which describes how his novel software visualizations aid in the development and use of evolutionary programs.
Evolutionary computing is the study of robust search algorithms based on the guiding evolutionary principal of ‘survival of the fittest’. Developers and researchers in this field often experience difficulties in applying their algorithms to new problems and find it hard to understand the search paths their programs take. Trevor’s PhD attempts to alleviate these problems by providing a structured framework for visualizing the execution of evolutionary algorithms and programs.
Relevant sites/links:

• Trevor Collins’ home page
• IEEE World Congress On Computational Intelligence