This July the HOWS team presented two papers at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2019) in Prague, Czech Republic.

Matt Johns presented a paper entitled Augmented Evolutionary Intelligence: Combining Human and Evolutionary Design for Water Distribution Network Optimisation in the Real-World Applications track. The paper describes recent work conducted on the HOWS project which combines user interaction, machine learning and evolutionary algorithms to improve the way water distribution network optimisation is conducted.

Nick Ross presented a paper entitled Human-Evolutionary Problem Solving through Gamification of a Bin-Packing Problem at the Interactive Methods workshop (iGECCO 2019). The paper explores the use of gamification as a mechanism to extract problem-solving behaviour from human subjects through interaction with a gamified version of the bin-packing problem, with heuristics extracted by machine learning. These heuristics are used to augment an evolutionary algorithm to improve search performance.