This page is mainly for prospective graduate students, Ph.D. or Msc., who are considering working with me.

First, make sure you take a look at the "Research" section of this site to see what topics I am currently working on. It is a good idea to get in touch ahead of time and provide me with a specific idea of what you are interested in.

I am available to supervise the following kind of projects in both the Computer Science & Information Technology programs;

This page is still in its infancy so you will not find much of interest here for now. However, do not hestiate to drop me a line if you have any questions

This page provides links to a few resources which I generally share with my graduate students. their relevance might vary depending on your experience with different aspects of graduate student life at USF.

Getting Started with Evolutionary Algorithms

If you are to work with me on Evolutionary Algorithms, I strongly suggest you download the following and start playing with them ASAP.

If you are focussing on a Genetic Programming topic, then the following are good additional starting points;

For a first reading, consider the following chapters to give you a bit of perspective on what EAs are, what problems they are able to tackle, and what are the simpler methods to which they would be compared; in [1] read chapters 0, 1 and 2, then in [3] read chapters 1 and 2.

Armed with this context, you may then jump in to get an overview of the overall structure of an EA; in [1] read chapter 3, then in [3] read chapter 3.

At this point, the next step will be to get some hands-on experience with running an experiment with an Evolutionary Algorithm. First, go to USF Research Computing website and activate your account on their CIRCE cluster. This will provide you with a remote Linux workstation where you will be able to run your experiments. In your account, download and install the ECJ Software.

Then, work through the ECJ tutorials available at https://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/ecj/docs/. The first two tutorials are a good way to apply what you’ve learned in the above readings; [Tutorial #1] [Tutorial #2]

Next, you should download the exp-run.sh and exp-analyze.sh Bash scripts that you will find in Alessio SourceForge Repository. These require both R and GNUPLOT which should already be available on CIRCE.

You should adapt the above scripts to the specifics of your own development environment and re-run the tutorials. This will allow you to start organizing your work by separating the ECJ source tree, which we will never modify, from the source tree where you will be keeping your own contributions. I recommend you open your own personnal sourceforge or github repository and keep your work on it. Email me the link and I will add it to your page on this site.

Read, Read... Read some more...

The USF Library provides you with free access to PDF resources from the following links when you login via VPN or on the campus wireless networks. Use them :)

[IEEE Xplore] [ACM Digital Library] [CiteSeerX] [Springer Verlag] [USF Tampa Library]

In addition, the following are commonly used by researchers worldwide.

[Research Gate] [DBLP] [Google Scholar]

In addition, other teams in the department hold weekly seminar that you might want to attend when the topics are of interest to you;

[CSE Computer Vision] [USF Interdisciplinary Data Sciences Consortium]

Do not forget to also read well ;p

[How To Read Research Papers] According To Andrew Ng (Stanford Deep Learning Lectures)

Other Resources

Other USF Resources

USF Administrative Resources

Various opportunities for graduate students at USF;

Writing Resources - The USF library grants you access, when logged in on campus, to many publications from Springer Verlag. We will talk about topic-specific resources when we start working together, but the following might be of general use;

Here is a chronological list of the graduate students I have supervised;

Dmytro Vitel
Masters in Computer Science, started spring 2018, "Genetic Programming Techniques to Evolve Distracters for Parsons Puzzles". [EvoTutoring SVN] [SourceForge]
Stephen Kozakoff
Ph.D. in Computer Science, pre-quals, Tentative Topics; "Injection of Partial Symmetries in Evolutionary Fitness Landscapes". [SourceForge] [GitHub].
Masters in Information Technology, 2015, "Evolving Parsons Puzzles" [EvoTutoring SVN].
Bari A.T.M. Golam
Ph.D. in Computer Science, started fall 2014, "Interactive Fitness Domains in Competitive Coevolutionary Algorithms" [EvoTutoring SVN] [SourceForge] [GitHub] [Google Scholar] [LinkedIn].
Himank Vats
Masters in Information Technology, 2018, "EvoParsons - Docker Containers & JavaFX User Interface". [EvoTutoring SVN] [SourceForge]
Kok Cheng Tan
Masters in Information Technology, 2017, "Educational Data Mining of Student vs. Parsons puzzles Interaction Logs from the Epplets.org Intelligent Tutoring System". [Epplets.org].
Mathew McDermott
Masters in Information Technology, 2013, "Agricultural Mobile Electronic Inspection Prototype".