Page last updated 18 Apr 2003.

Papers and Talks

This is a partial collection of my papers and talks.

Recommender Systems and Text Analysis

I gave a talk on recommender systems, web use, and text analysis at the Internet Archive's 2000 Colloquium and was the organizer for the session with Larry Page (Google) and Udi Manber (Yahoo).

More recently, I gave an invited talk at the Research Library Group (May 2001) about search and recommendation systems for scholars and library users.

Genetic Algorithms

There's my thesis proposal (dvi) which is all about improving reinforcement learning in a classifier system using ideas from the field of Genetic Programming.

Here is the abstract for my paper in the AAAI Fall Symposium on Genetic Programming, held at MIT in November, 1995. Here are the slides (BinHexed Powerpoint Viewer format) from my presentation.

If you don't have the Powerpoint Viewer, there are downloadable viewers for the Mac and PC somewhere on Microsoft's FTP archive. I will put in the exact link soon. Note that my slides use a font for the bullets that isn't on most systems.

Data Mining

I also have a paper on data mining using data-parallel genetic programming. This paper appeared in the Santa Fe Institute's 1993 Lecture Notes on Complex Systems. The book was published in 1995 and should be available. Here's the citation.

In this paper, I developed a system to do data mining on a fairly large (multi-gigabyte) database of credit-card transactions. The task was to classify customers and predict their future behavior. I did this work at Thinking Machines as part of the Darwin team.

Optimization

Here's one of the 60 comparator 16-input sorting networks (eps) Hugues Juillé and I described in our poster at ALife IV.

This is the first time we know of that a computer has equalled human performance on the 16-input sorting network task. In fact, the same system has found a 13-input network that is shorter than the one listed in Knuth's Sorting and Searching.

A draft of the paper is available in PostScript form.

Miscellaneous

I wrote an article for Wired Magazine (v6.10) on Compaq's Itsy, a collateral ancestor of Compaq's iPaq handheld. Here's a link to the online copy.

I published a book review in the Whole Earth Review (v. 88, p. 103). The book, "Digital Woes", is about the risks of computers. It contains excellent case studies of computers failing in life or death situations. If you read the comp.risks newsgroup, you ought to take a look at this book.

Here's an introductory talk on Classifier Systems that I gave to Jordan Pollack's Evolutionary Computation class at Brandeis. It's available in the following formats: [ PostScript | DVI ]. Note -- the DVI version is missing some figures.

Patrick Tufts