Erik Goodman's Home Page 

 


                                                                                                                                      

 


I am a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and also of Mechanical Engineering, and have also taught in Computer Science and Engineering. I co-direct MSU's Genetic Algorithms Research and Applications Group (GARAGe), which is administered jointly  by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.  In February, 2007, I was awarded the university’s highest teaching award, the Alumni Club of Mid-Michigan Quality in Undergraduate Teaching Award (photo with Pres. Lou Anna Simon at University Honors Convocation).

Professional Activities

In November, 2004, I was elected Chair of the ACM's new Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (SIGEVO), which began operation in January, 2005.  My term as chair expired in June, 2007, but I continue to serve on the executive committee.  Please bookmark the SIGEVO web pages  for many new developments concerning this new society.  I had formerly been serving as chair, since 2001, of its predecessor organization, the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation. I had been a member of the ISGEC's Executive Board since its formation, following a term as a member of the Executive Board of the International Society for Genetic Algorithms, one of the predecessor organizations of ISGEC. In 2004, I was elected a Senior Fellow of the ISGEC (see story at Fellow Press Release and photos at ISGEC Fellows Page. Through 2005, ISGEC was the sponsor of the annual GECCO (Genetic and Evolutionary Computation COnference) and of the biennial Foundations of Genetic Algorithms (FOGA) Workshop (see ISGEC web page for the current conference pages). They are now sponsored by ACM SIGEVO. ISGEC was also the key supporter of the journals Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press) and Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (Springer). I was Vice-Chair of GECCO-2000 (Las Vegas, July 8-12, 2000) and was General Chair of GECCO-2001, San Francisco, CA, July 7-11, 2001 ).  I am working with co-organizers to plan the first SIGEVO-sponsored conference in Asia, the GEC Summit, for May of 2009.

MSU's GARAGe was proud to be the host of ICGA-97 -- the Seventh International Conference on Genetic Algorithms, July 19-23, 1997, here in East Lansing. For information about that, see the ICGA web page . I served as General Chair of the 7th ICGA.

For information about internationally oriented professional activities, please see the "international" section below.

Research and Entrepreneurial Activities -- Domestic

My principal personal research interest is genetic algorithms, and in particular, parallel genetic algorithms.

My recent work with Dr. Ron Averill and his students in applying genetic algorithms for automotive structural design appears to represent a breakthrough in automating the design of structures for crashworthiness, noise, vibration, harshness, manufacturability, etc. As a result of our demonstrated success, we organized a company, Red Cedar Technology, Inc. (originally called Applied Computational Design Associates, Inc., or "ACD Associates"), which offers design services using our various GA and FEA technologies to the industrial community. Current customers come from automotive, marine, aerospace, manufacturing equipment, and civil infrastructure industries. The company is simultaneously developing software products and training to make its tools accessible to industry. The company's web page is Red Cedar Technology. Ron Averill is President, and I am Vice President and Chief Technology Officer.

Under a grant from the National Science Foundation, my co-investigator, Ron Rosenberg, research associate, Dr. Kisung Seo, and I worked with a team of outstanding students, including Jianjun Hu, Zhun Fan, and Janelle Shane, on using genetic programming for automated design of multi-domain systems (electrical, mechanical, etc.), including mechatronics.  The output of the GPBG system is a bond graph specifying the connection topology and components, including values of parameters, to implement a system with a given desired performance.  For more information about GPBG, please see these pages.  During the development of GPBG, Jianjun Hu (now at Univ. of South Carolina) created the Hierarchical Fair Competition principle, which has been shown to facilitate rapid, sustainable search in many domains of evolutionary computation, including GP and GA.  For more information, see the HFC pages.

In the early 1990’s, I wrote (in ‘C’) a package called GALOPPS, which is distributed via the net. It includes capabilities for such innovative PGA architectures as the "Injection Island GA" or iiGA, which was developed in the GARAGe, in which a hierarchy of populations, using different problem representations and/or different fitness functions and/or different local search heuristics, migrates solutions to populations using increasingly more accurate problem representations or fitness functions. My student Wang, Gang also released DAGA2, a 2-level hierarchical AND parallel GA which chooses GA operators/rates, etc., using a second level of adaptation (evaluating fitness of subpopulations in moving toward problem solution), and is "plug-compatible" with GALOPPS, for persons already using GALOPPS for simple or parallel GA work. For information regarding our GA research, please see the GARAGe web page. I am very interested now in how to best communicate information among various subpopulations simultaneously working on a problem, often with each subpopulation using a somewhat different representation of the problem or a different fitness function for evaluating solutions.

I have worked with genetic algorithms for 34 years.  I believe that my Ph.D. research, in 1970-71, was the first time a GA was used to solve a real problem (not just a test or benchmark problem).  In 1970, after taking two courses in what is now called evolutionary computation, from John Holland, I began a run of a GA (which took more than a year to complete, in a checkpoint/restart configuration, running over half the time) using a floating-point-representation GA, with Gaussian mutation of floating point variables, as part of my Ph.D. research in the Logic of Computers Group at the University of Michigan (continued on a computer at Michigan State University after my hiring there in September, 1971). I can't cite a publication on the GA methods because I couldn't manage to get it published at the time -- it was seen as pretty strange, then.  However, the 40 GA-determined rate parameters in my publications about the E. coli model were the outputs of the GA.  I used a GA in my EPA-sponsored modeling work in the 70's, with a Ph.D. student, Mehrdad Tabatabaai.  My Ph.D. student Adrian Sannier and I used a GA in what would now be called "linear genetic programming" to evolve programs governing artificial organisms, in a primitive form of A-life.  We were able to evolve two species of cooperating organisms, and eventually, a combined organism that differentiated based on its early experiences in the environment.  This work was published in the Second International Conference on Genetic Algorithms (1987) and related work appeared in other places.

From 1993-2003, I directed MSU's Manufacturing Research Consortium, which conducted research at MSU under sponsorship of industrial members, under two sequential 5-year agreements.

I have also conducted research in environmental modeling and simulation since 1972. In 1995, our Environmentally Responsible Manufacturing (ERM) team at MSU received a grant from NSF to develop tools enabling manufacturing enterprises to incorporate environmental tradeoff information directly into their existing management tools, rather than using it later in a "checkoff" process. The MSU Manufacturing Research Consortium also sponsored a related project on the "Green Supply Chain."

Teaching Activities

I am currently teaching and further developing the Senior Capstone Design Course (ECE 480) required of all Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering majors. Fall and spring semesters feature ECE Design Day, showcasing results of student project work in ECE 480 and other design-oriented courses.  ECE 480 features 5-student team design projects with a faculty facilitator, and usually sponsored by industry. It also requires individual completion of 4 laboratory projects, submission of several individual papers, several oral presentations, a series of technical and team management lectures, and a set of lectures on ethics and professionalism.  In the latest development, many of the ECE 480 teams are now multidisciplinary, including students from Mechanical Engineering and/or Computer Science.

Bill Punch (Computer Science and Engineering) and I co-teach a graduate course in evolutionary computation, CSE 848, in fall semester of even-numbered years.

I taught the senior-level course "Operating Systems Principles," CSE 410, three times for the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, in 2000-2002.

International Professional/Research/Entrepreneurial Activities

For over four years, I worked with others to establish a network of computing and training facilities in Russia and the former Soviet Union, aimed at providing engineering services for US companies, gainful employment in Russia for underemployed Russian engineers, and global team training for US engineering students. This effort, which was conducted under the name "NEWTeams," was organized primarily by Michigan State University, the University of Utah, and the Utah Russia Institute. Political problems leading to funding cuts in the the Nuclear Cities Initiative Program (US Dept. of Energy) forced abandonment of the effort, which history has since shown would very likely have had a large impact, due to the extensive outsourcing of engineering from U.S. companies to India and other places.

For about eight years, I was part of an interdisciplinary global design teaming research group, involving engineering, telecommunications, and anthropology, that conducted research, initially sponsored by EDS Asia/Pacific Division, and later, by the National Science Foundation, on the methods and tools needed for effective use of global teams for solving engineering problems, in a series of projects. The original EDS-sponsored work was called GEMS (Global Engineering Methodology Study). Subsequent work was conducted with a large international team of researchers from MSU, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, and other countries, under the name "INTEnD" -- Internationally Networked Teams for Engineering Design. From September, 1998, to September, 2001, that work was conducted under a 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation. Please see our INTEnD project site for a description of some of the software, training methods, partners, etc., which we have developed. We then continued our work on globally distributed teams of design engineers through another NSF grant in partnership with the University of Texas Pan American campus and ITESM in Monterrey, MX.

Early in 1993, the GARAGe established a sister center, the AI/CAD center at Moscow State Technical University (Bauman). During my third visit to Russia in November, 1993, we also established the Russian/American Joint Education/Research Consortium for Intelligent CAD/CAM/CAE and Genetic Algorithms ("ICAD/GA Consortium"), including teams of students and faculty members at MSTU, Nizhny Novgorod State University, Moscow Aviation Institute, Taganrog State Radioengineering University, and the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. We sponsored several years of GA research at two of those universities, which comprised the "Russian GARAGe." Kharkov State Technical University (Ukraine) became an additional member of the ICAD/GA Consortium.

In June, 1996, the MSU GARAGe organized the First International Conference on Evolutionary Computation and its Applications, EvCA96, in Moscow, Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences, June 24-27, with about 20 Western and 50 Russian participants.

In 1999, I was appointed Senior Scientific Advisor to the Utah Russia Institute, an organization which has initiated many projects involving Russian citizens with the U.S. and with Utah, in particular. It was established in 1993 by Utah's Gov. Michael Leavitt and Russia's Prime Minister, Yegor Gaidar.

Administrative Activities

From 1983 to 2002, I directed the Case Center for Computer-Aided Engineering and Manufacturing, a center established by the MSU Board of Trustees. The center was responsible for much of the early introduction of computing into the curriculum of the College of Engineering, having been established in 1978 as one of the nation's first academic centers for CAD and CAE. In the 1980's, I raised an endowment for the center that grew to over $2 million. In 1995, the center's Division of Engineering Computing Services became a free-standing unit, leaving the Case Center primarily with research/outreach duties carried out through its Manufacturing Research Consortium, Genetic Algorithms Research and Applications Group (GARAGe), International Technology Incubator, and globally distributed engineering design teams activities.

During the 1990's, the Case Center was home to the International Technology Incubator, a program that brought scientists and engineers (particularly from the Former Soviet Union) to the U.S. to work with MSU and American companies, utilizing their expertise to assist in solving the companies' problems. For example, pictured here is Prof. Stepan Radzevitch, of Dneprodzerzhinsk, Ukraine, about to leave Kokomo, IN with me, after working on improving gear manufacturing at Chrysler's Kokomo Transmission Plant. Prof. Radzevitch was in the U.S. through the center's International Technology Incubator, as a follow-on to our joint research supported under the CAST program of the National Research Council/National Academy of Engineering.

During my sabbatical leave at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1993-94, I established a Chinese GA consortium of universities working on research in genetic algorithms, including BUAA, Tsinghua University, and Zhejiang University. Both the Russian and Chinese consortia worked with and continued to develop a common set of parallel GA tools, GALOPPS, (for both PC's and workstations) that were originally developed at MSU (however, GALOPPS was frozen in the late 90’s, and no further development is ongoing with that platform). In 2000, I began additional collaborative GA research with faculty members in Shanghai (East China Normal University and Shanghai Jiaotong University) and Nanjing (Nanjing University), under sponsorship of the National Natural Science Foundation (China). In 2000, I also began working with collaborators at East China Normal University (Shanghai) and Nanjing University, on several problems employing genetic algorithms for data mining and parameter estimation problems. In January, 2002, I was named an Advisory Professor of East China Normal University, and in December, 2002, of Tongji University (Shanghai).   In 2006, I began working with Tongji University to plan an ACM SIGEVO-sponsored conference, the GEC Summit, in Shanghai in May, 2009.

In 2000, I began collaboration with Dr. Oliver Chikumbo (Bureau of Rural Services, Austrialian Government) on using genetic algorithms for forest stand management. That work is ongoing.

The Case Center also assisted the National University of Science and Technology, in Pakistan, with computer networking and related issues. When I visited Pakistan to deliver a short course on networking, I also visited Peshawar, an ancient community on the Silk Road in northwest Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan.

Items of possible interest (and, sorry, not always quite up-to-date):

Contact information:

E-Mail Address:goodman@egr.msu.edu
Office address:
(My office is actually 2308M Engineering building, but my mailing address is:)
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
2120 Engineering Building
Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824
Phone: (517) 355-6453 Fax: (517) 353-1980

Erik Goodman's Home Page / goodman@egr.msu.edu


I received the Ph.D. in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan in 1972, where I was a member of the Logic of Computers Group, in which John Holland pioneered the development of genetic algorithms. My major professor was Bernie Ziegler, an expert on the theory of simulation and on automata theory. In my dissertation research, I developed a genetic algorithm (using a floating point representation and Gaussian mutation operator) to parameterize a model of the metabolism of a bacterial cell undergoing nutritional shifts, and a simple model, using a cellular automaton, of a bacterial cell colony based upon these cells. To my knowledge, that was the first use of a genetic algorithm to solve an actual hard problem (i.e., one for which the solution was wanted, not just a study of the GA on a test problem). It ran about a year (calendar time) and over half a year (CPU time) on an IBM 1800 computer (first at UM, then at MSU).

Personal Information

I am Vice President for Technology, Red Cedar Technology (formerly Applied Computational Design Associates, Inc. or "ACDAssociates"). This company started by doing industrial consulting, exploiting methods developed in the GARAGe and the Computational Structural Mechanics Laboratory at MSU.  Red Cedar introduced its HEEDS software for automated design/optimal search to the market in 2003, after several years of internal development and consulting use.  It is now in use by many companies on a variety of design problems.  I’m active in the company, working on new releases with additional capabilities on a regular basis.

From 1997-2000, I was president of NEWTeams Training, Inc., a not-for-profit corporation established to implement a program to provide engineering design/analysis consulting services to U.S. companies, utilizing expertise of Russian engineers. These Russian experts were to receive training in remote teamwork through training by teaming with U.S. engineering students before beginning to work for companies. Funding to initiate NEWTeams was sought for many years, and appeared to be available under the US Dept. of Energy's Nuclear Cities Initiative, but a major cut in funding of that program meant that the NEWTeams effort had to be abandoned.

I was a founding member of the Bluegrass Extension Service, a 4-5-person band which played about 1,000 gigs between 1972 and 1998. After starting on banjo from 1972-78, I moved to rhythm guitar and sang lead and occasional tenor. We did a mixture of traditional bluegrass with more "modern" songs we liked, set to bluegrass instrumentation and with vocal harmonies featuring 2-4 male voices (in early years) and two male voices and one female voice (later years). We stopped playing regularly in the mid-90's, when our last banjo player left the area.

I was president of Mid-Michigan Flight, Inc., a corporation which owned and operated a Mooney M20E "Super 21" aircraft, from 1990 - 1999. I am a commercial pilot with an instrument rating. I am in the market for a share of a high-performance single-engine aircraft.

Before my son was born, I used to participate in USSA Citizens ski racing. I've given that up for a while, and now play tennis regularly.

For a few years (1994-97 or so) I sometimes spent some winter evenings, occasionally even with my son, David, working on model railroading in our basement, and I occasionally get back to that -- and hope to do it again actively at some point in the future. Some pictures of our very-much-under-construction railway are here.

I started scuba diving in Mexico in 2005, with a resort dive in Puerta Vallarta, then another in 2006 in Playa del Carmen.  In June, 2007, I did my open water certification in Cozumel, and in December, 2007, my advanced open water certification and enriched air (nitrox) certification, also in Cozumel.  They have unbelievably beautiful reefs.  In April, I dove the cenotes near Playa del Carmen – here is a picture of me in one of them.  Now that is some great diving!

My son played for several years on a premier soccer team for the Lansing area, Capital Area United ("CA United"). A few pix of him are here.  He then played soccer at East Lansing High School (freshman in 2004, JV in 2005, varsity in 2006 and 2007).  He was a co-captain in 2007, and the team made it to the state semi-finals in both 2006 and 2007!


(My name is sometimes misspelled as Eric Goodman.)