News

2022-12-05 Finally building a house in Cologne - we document the process in a blog! Wir bauen ein Haus in Koeln mit Viebrockhaus - und dokumentieren den Bau in einem Blog! 2008-08-23 It's great that so much information is available nowadays, but many pupils and students abuse ease of access for mindless shake or even copy & paste plagiarism. To help teachers stop this pratice, my new online service automatically detects plagiarism. The web pages are SeeSources.com or PlagiatCheck.de (for a German version, now even linked to by Bild newspaper). 2008-04-08 New paper to be presented at WCCI 2008, in the CEC Special Session on Evolving Gene Regulatory Networks. It describes work on the effects of smooth binding with dynamic affinity on the evolvability of networks (see associated webpage). 2007-08-10 Different people - same great experience. This year's international volunteer camp took place in a Kindergarten where we improved the outside playing area. With participants from 9 countries there was good fun and a lot to learn, but see for yourself on the camp's webpage. 2006-11-24 idiofact.de, my newest project is online! The web page provides the user with computer assisted generative design facilities. Good designs can be e-mailed or printed on textiles. In the long run however, the idea of Individual design - simple and fast! through machines is far more general. 2006-06-25 On July 28th I will give a talk on Evolutionary Robustness of Differentiation in Genetic Regulatory Networks as part of GWAL-7, the 7th German Workshop on Artificial Life. You can already have a look at the corresponding webpage which also has a preprint of the paper. 2005-08-19 Some of the work on synchronization via oscillator coupling I have done at Fraunhofer Institute AIS now gets published in an ECAL 05 paper (Steffen Wischmann's Swarm Robotics section has videos, paper preprint). 2005-04-10 After some problems on the first two days of the RoboCup German Open 2005, today, at the completing demostration game, we were in top form. First playing a draw against Freiburg, in the penalty shoot-out our RoboSapien Humanoids scored and won. Additionally the Brainstormers 2D simulation league team placed first using the hybrid strategy developed in my BSc thesis (beside other improvements, admittedly). 2005-01-30 Buy your tickets soon - on April, 10th at the RoboCup German Open 2005: Freiburg vs. Osnabrueck These two RoboSapien teams will then play the first (official) soccer match among humanoid robots ever! (Spiegel magazine, in German) 2004-11-16 The webpage showing how our class iteratively makes a poor piece of toy hardware a first class soccer player was finally set up. 2004-07-06 Robocup 2004 is over. Although the final against team STEP was lost, being runner-up is still a great achievement. After all it was worth investing lots of hours into re-programming our Brainstormers team! (ZDNet, Wikipedia - both in German; results and logfiles) 2004-04-18 Hauke and myself are facing the challenge to enable Martin Riedmiller et al's Robocup team Brainstormers to be World champions in the Portugal 2004 competition. 2003-12-07 6th German Workshop on Artificial Life, GWAL-6, 14.-16.04.2004 in Bamberg Hope to meet you there!

2009-06-05 Viva over - Yesterday I successfully defended my PhD thesis Evolvability of Computational Genetic Regulatory Networks! It is available as HTML or pdf document. (The picture was taken at the award ceremony in November.) 2008-05-26 Differentiated multicellularity from scratch, with autonomously generated diffusion gradients, is here - presentation is in August at ALife XI, but you can try the interactive web page already now! 2007-09-28 We are at the 8th International Conference on Systems Biology, ICSB 2007. Here are the slides for our tutorial on Genetic Algorithms and their Application to the Artificial Evolution of Genetic Regulatory Networks. The extended abstract for my poster is here. 2007-02-13 Aloha! I am going to Hawaii; of course to a confernce, the first IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life. On April 2nd I will report our results on applying topological and lesioning analysis to evolved network populations. Our findings show that similar functionality can be realised by many subgraph patterns instead of convergence on one. (Webpage) 2006-07-29 Our international volunteer work camp in Deetz is over. We learned a lot not only about how to run a farm but also different cultures and countries. My hope is that this experience was at least as good for you as it was for me! Some infos and photos are available at deetz.panmental.de. 2005-12-15 The first results of my PhD research on Genetic Regulatory Networks, here used to model the evolution of biological clocks (e.g. our day/night rhythm), today got accepted for the 2006 Aritificial Life X conference. (Preprint and webpage with supplementary information available). 2005-08-07 Finally Brainstormers 2D made it: RoboCup 2005 simulation league world champions (logfiles, our team description paper). 2005-03-19 Handed in my BSc thesis on Cooperative Reinforcement Learning in Multiagent Systems. It is available as PDF and HTML docs, in German with an English abstract (our RoboCup team description paper 2005 gives some information in English, though). 2004-11-17 The article we wrote on filtering Spam E-Mail with Support Vector Machines was published. It is available online, look for "Volume 8-2004". Likewise is the program itself. 2004-10-30 Buying a 100 Euro toy RoboSapiens and replacing the head by a PDA which sends IR commands gets you an autonomous Humanoid. We aim at having (and winning) a soccer match against Freiburg in February 2005; all start from scratch and use the same hardware. A webpage showing advances will be set up soon. 2004-04-19 dpa (Deutsche Presse Agentur/German Press Agency) wrote an article on our SpamStop approach, which was not very exact but got reprinted by lots of news magazines though. 2004-01-14 We (Chriss, Tobias and I) got admitted to present our SpamStop project on Cebit 2004 on federal state lower saxonys universities fair stand. (Web page, listing University of Osnabrueck) 2003-12-04 In case you have some time you really should take five minutes to read about Noam Chomskys birthday! (Should you for some reason not have specific interest in Linguistics you might want to skip those paragraphs)