I’m back in Dublin from my two-week expedition to New Zealand, the main reason for which was (ostensibly) to attend the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation in Wellington. I’ve been back since Saturday actually, so by now the worst of the jet lag is behind me and it’s time to do a write-up of my doings and dealings down under. Besides NZ, I had the opportunity to pay a quick visit to Australia as well, since I had a stopover in Sydney that lasted from 6am to 6pm – plenty of time to catch a train from the airport to Circular Quay and snap some smug selfies with the famous opera house prominently in the background.

Having the long break between flights in Sydney proved a good decision, because even though the final hop from Sydney to Wellington was a relatively short one, by this point I had already flown seven and a half hours from Dublin to Dubai, followed by a two-hour stopover before the connecting flight to Sydney, which was just shy of fourteen hours. As a result of all this I wasn’t in much of a mood to do any more flying until I was well and truly rid of the stiffness of body and mind that comes from spending 20-plus hours seated inside a cramped aluminium tube in the sky, and a few hours of sightseeing on foot on what turned out to be a pleasantly warm and sunny day helped a great deal in achieving that. Another move I thanked myself for was having purchased access to the Qantas business lounge at Sydney airport, allowing me to enjoy such welcome luxuries as a comfy chair, a barista-made espresso and a nice shower before facing the world outside.

With the combined effect of the flight and transfer times and the 11-hour time difference, I arrived in Wellington near midnight on the evening of Sunday the 9th, having departed from Dublin on Friday evening. Monday the 10th was the first day of the conference, but it was all tutorials and workshops, none of which were particularly relevant to my own research, so I gave myself permission to sleep in and recharge before attempting anything resembling work. In fact the only “conference sessions” I attended on that first day were lunch and afternoon coffee; the rest of the time I spent at the venue I just wandered around Te Papa, exploring the national museum’s fascinating exhibitions on the nature, culture and history of New Zealand.

On the second day I began to feel the effects of jet lag for real, but I thought it was time to be a good soldier and check out some presentations. Although I don’t really do evolutionary computation myself, it has various applications that interest me professionally or personally, so it wasn’t too hard to find potentially interesting sessions in the programme. The highlight of the day for me was a session on games where there was, among others, a paper on evolving an AI to play a partially observable variant of Ms. Pac-Man; being a bit of a retrogaming geek, I found it quite heartwarming that this is an actual topic of serious academic research!

On the third day I forced myself to get up early enough to hear the plenary talk of Prof. Risto Miikkulainen, titled “Creative AI through Evolutionary Computation”. I was especially looking forward to this talk, and I was not disappointed: Prof. Miikkulainen built a good case for machine creativity as the next big step in AI and for the crucial role of evolutionary computation in it, with a variety of interesting supporting examples of successful applications. I am inclined to agree with the audience member who remarked that the conclusions of the talk were rather optimistic – it’s quite a leap from optimising website designs to optimising the governance of entire societies – but even so, a highly enjoyable presentation. Later that day there was a special session on music, art and creativity, which I also attended, but my enjoyment of it was hampered by my being in acute need of a nap at this point.

The fourth and final day of the conference I mostly spent preparing for my own presentation, which was in the special session on ethics and social implications of computational intelligence. This took place in the late afternoon, so the conference was almost over and attendance in the session was predictably unimpressive: I counted ten people, including myself and the session chair. Fortunately, numbers aren’t everything, and there was some good discussion with the audience after my talk, which dealt with wearable self-tracking devices and the problems that arise from the non-transparency of the information they generate and the limited ability of users to control their own data. I also talked about the problems and potential social impact of analysing self-tracking data collaboratively, tying the paper up with the work I’m doing in the KDD-CHASER project.

After the conference I proceeded to have a week’s vacation in NZ, which of course was the real reason I went to all the trouble of getting myself over there. While it’s not a huge country – somewhat smaller than my native Finland in terms of both area and population – I still had to make some tough choices when deciding what to see and do there, and I came to the conclusion that it was best to focus on what the North Island has to offer. I rode the Northern Explorer train service to Auckland and spent three nights there before working my way back to Wellington by bus, stopping along the way to spend two nights in Rotorua. From Wellington I did a day trip by ferry to Picton, a small town in the Marlborough Region (of Sauvignon blanc fame) of the South Island.

On Friday, two weeks after my departure from Dublin, I started my return journey, this time via Melbourne and with no time to go dilly-dallying outside the airport between flights. I boarded my flight in Wellington feeling a little sad to be leaving NZ so soon, but also satisfied that I’d made the most of my time there. I might have been able to fit in some additional activities if I’d travelled by air instead of overland, perhaps even another city, but I like to be able to view the scenery when I’m travelling, and there was no shortage of pretty sights along the train and bus routes. The conference also left a positive feeling: the programme was interesting, the catering was great and the choice of venue just brilliant. Above all, I’m happy to be done with all the flying!