Me, Myself, I, etc.

It's now three weeks since I handed in my PhD thesis. I'm still trying to find out how to wind down; I don't think I've ever been as exhausted as right after handing it in.

The title of the thesis is "Optimization, Imitation and Innovation: Computational Intelligence and Games". It contains the experimental sections of most of the papers I've published so far (I had to omit the Sudoku ones to keep the thesis focused, and also to keep the length down - it is already quite a massive heap of paper). It also contains a number of background chapters situating my research in the context of evolutionary robotics and of game AI, and trying to define some sort of taxonomy of apporaches to computational intelligence and games.

I will of course make it available for download from my home page, but not until I've finished my corrections, which will be issued when I've had my viva, which I really hope will take place in early September. Oh yes, and I need to pass the viva as well. Fingers crossed. In the meantime, if you're interested in a copy of the uncorrected version, just mail me.

Assuming I pass my viva, I will then start my new job as a posdoctoral researcher at IDSIA in Lugano, Switzerland, in November. There, I will be working with Juergen Schmidhuber, who is quite famous for his work on reinforcement learning and recurrent neural networks. The place is full of other intelligent people doing great research as well, such as Faustino Gomez doing very interesting work on neuroevolution. That I'm excited about this goes without saying.