In Search of Evolutionary Hotspots
A quick approachable summary of my research on spatial evolutionary hotspots.
What's holding Artificial Life back from open-ended evolution?
Anya Vostinar, Charles Ofria, and I lay out our thoughts on how to study open-ended evolution. Cross-posted on The Winnower, so it has a DOI.
BEACON Researchers at Work: Spatial Dynamics of Evolution
In this post for the BEACON blog, I discuss why spatial dynamics are relevant to study in digital environments, and how I became interested in them in the first place.
Highlights from GECCO 2015
Summaries of some of my favorite talks at GECCO 2015.
Spatial Co-Evolution in Age-Layered Planes
In this post on the Devolab blog, I summarize Robin Harper’s paper on his Spatial Co-evolution in Age-Layered Planes algorithm, which curbs both code bloat and overfitting in genetic programming.
Building an Inclusive Departmental Community {Paper Summary}
In this post on the Devolab blog, I summarize a paper by members of the Swarthmore College Computer Science Department summarizing the measures they have taken to build an inclusive departmental community and documenting their efficacy (spoiler warning: it worked!).
Avida/Software Carpentry Hybrid Workshop
I tried teaching a Software Carpentry workshop aimed specifically at setting people up to do research with Avida. Here's how it went.
Are Stommel plots a useful tool for thinking about evolution?
Some musings on importing Stommel plots, a popular tool in spatial ecology, into evolutionary biology.
How to have a useful conversation about work/life balance
Anya Vostinar and I discuss what factors make these discussions more or less effective, in the context of organizing a workshop we ran at GECCO
Sturgeon quest: Why exploratory hypotheses rock!
Sometimes coming up with an arbitrary destination is the easiest way to start a journey.
3 things I learned from Software Carpentry instructor training
Software Carpentry's instructor training is really well put-together - here's a smattering of cool things I learned!
7 under-appreciated pieces of software for doing science efficiently
Seven of my favorite pieces of software that don't get as much love as they deserve
Identifying field-of-origin bias
When we import methods from other fields, do we sometimes not think to adapt them to their new context as well as we could?
Fun with GECCO 2014, ALife 2014, and Zotero Paper Machines
I used the Zotero Paper Machines add-on to explore the proceedings of GECCO 2014 and ALife 2014 and draw some comparisons.
Finding Your Perfect Interdisciplinary Graduate Program
Finding a graduate program that is a good fit for interdisciplinary research interests can be challenging. In this post on the Devolab blog, I attempt to make it a little more approachable by sharing what techniques ultimately worked for me.
Whenever I have a really hard time making something work, I try to write a blog post about it to save others the trouble. Some of these are also weekly quick tips on using R, written for a course I took on Spatial Ecology.
Javascript testing on Travis-CI with Karma and Mocha
Turns out setting up automated testing of a C++ library designed to compile to Javascript is a little tricky. This blog post walks through the best process I found.
Making Efficient Animations in Matplotlib with Blitting
Matplotlib is a powerful Python library for scientific visualizations. It has an animation module, but the documentation for this module is not great. The blitting feature is critical to making animations that render in a reasonable amount of time. Here, as a future note to myself and others, I explain how to use it.
Making Presentations with RMarkdown using Slidify
Slidify is a really cool R library for making presentations in RMarkdown
Using Rmarkdown without re-running long commands
Quick explanation of RMarkdown caching features
Taking control of ggplot legends and colors for multiple series
Any time I want to do something fancy witha ggplot legend I need to re-remind myself how. This blog post does that.
Debugging R Functions
Quick intro to some basic debugging techniques in the context of R.
An Academic Christmas Carol
For the 2014 holidays on the Devolab blog, I adapted A Christmas Carol to an academic setting in which it highlights the importance of work/life balance and open science.