Island models
	Island models in Evolutionary Computation are models in which multiple populations evolve on their own and sporadically exchange information by sending migrants. Such models not only allow for distribution of computation on many machines, but also behave qualitatively differently. In my PhD thesis I am trying to gain a deeper understanding of the behavior of island models. The first part of experiments has a goal of analyzing the relations between various parameters of island models and assessing their mutual importance. Some results were published in a GECCO 2005 paper. I believe that an important aspect of island models is a possible diversification between evolutionary processes on populations. Enforcing heterogeneity between populations should enhance some unique features of island models, and therefore heterogenous island models are worth study. Some experiments were published in a PPSN 2004 paper. The general plan for my PhD was published in Graduate Student Workshop at GECCO 2005 (here).
Inventor
	Inventor is a system for evolutionary computation written in Java, based on ECKit, and is general enough to customize it easily to different engineering domains. It can use multiple populations with migrations. Inventor can also run simple multi-objective evolutionary algorithms and coevolutionary algorithms. The software is capable of working with or without the Graphical User Interface, and supports distributed computation through a computer network using JavaSpaces.
Water network vulnerability assessment
	The aim of this project was to find vulnerabilities in the water network of a size of a small town. We used an artificial network designed specially for this purpose. We studied both the impact of possible contaminant spread in the system, as well as effects of breaking (and cutting off) pipes on the system pressure. Assuming the possibility of a malicious attack, we used coevolution to design possible security scenarios. These evolved counter-measures often turned out better than manually designed security plans.