Peter Nelson

Research Activities and Interests:

My research at UIC in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has focused on developing efficient artificial intelligence (AI) search techniques. This research has two components: basic research into developing general, efficient heuristic search algorithms, and applied research and development using heuristic search and other AI methods to solve problems in the areas of transportation, manufacturing, bioinformatics and high-availability computer clusters.

General Techniques for Improving Search Efficiency

One of our most interesting results in this area has been the development of a new heuristic search algorithm named perimeter search. This admissible technique is referred to as perimeter search since it relies on a perimeter of nodes around the goal or destination node. During the search process, generated nodes are compared to the perimeter nodes. When a match is found, the search can terminate. Analytical and experimental results were published in the Artificial Intelligence Journal showing that perimeter search is more efficient than IDA* and A* in terms of time complexity and nodes expanded for two problem domains. Additional general search results have been in the area of search algorithms that learn; a method for reducing cycles for depth-first searches on graphs; and parallel bidirectional search algorithms.

Intelligent Transportation Systems

Our Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) research involves improving the utilization and efficiency of existing roadway transportation systems using information technology. From 1991-95, I conducted ITS research for the ADVANCE (Advanced Driver and Vehicle Advisory Navigation ConcEpt) project, supported by the Illinois Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). ADVANCE equipped test vehicles in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago with on-board computers for dynamic route planning and navigation. The vehicles received real-time traffic information via RF communications from a traffic information center, allowing them to plan and update optimal routes using up-to-the-minute traffic information. The traffic information center received traffic information from the vehicles, acting as roving traffic probes, as well as from roadway loop detectors, reliable voice reports, and other sources. My laboratory’s responsibilities on the ADVANCE project were for software research and development for the traffic information center. I have also conducted several other ITS-related projects. In 1994-95 my Laboratory developed a regional Corridor Traffic Information Center for IDOT that included the first World Wide Web site to graphically display current traffic conditions, see this site for details (The CALTRANS WWW traffic map was also developed around the same time.) Our traffic map web site has over 300,000,000 hits per year. Another project, funded by the National Research Council’s Transportation Research Board, has developed powerful new data fusion techniques utilizing artificial neural networks. Reliable data fusion is critically important for advanced traveler information systems, which must continually combine semantically distinct probe, loop detector, anecdotal, and historical data into meaningful current traffic information. Another project, initiated by the FHWA and the Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin Departments of Transportation, involves the research and development of a transportation information center for the vital Gary-Chicago-Milwaukee Priority Corridor, one of the four federally-designated ITS testbed corridors. This system distributes real-time transportation and incident information throughout the corridor to agencies and the traveling public. My laboratory has also been awarded contracts to assist the Illinois Tollway Authority with the development of a state-of-the-art traffic and incident management system, and a project with the Chicago Area Transportation Study (CATS) to development an intelligent web-based ridesharing system. Additional projects include work on an incident information system for the State of Wisconsin and transit projects funded by the Federal Transit Agency through the Great Cities Universities Consortium and the Regional Transportation Authority. Additionally I am currently serving as a co-PI on a $3.2 million NSF IGERT grant (Computer Science Professor Ouri Wolfson, P.I.) in the area of Computational Transportation Science involving four UIC colleges.

Manufacturing Optimization and Knowledge Discovery

Manufacturing optimization, modeling, and knowledge discovery research has been supported by Motorola for the last ten years. This work involves optimizing the assignment of components to the feeder slots of high-speed “chip shooters” (devices which place IC chips onto printed wire circuit boards) in a high-mix manufacturing environment. A variety of AI methods (e.g., genetic algorithms, tabu search, neural networks, and rule-based systems) have been utilized to consistently produce near-optimal results for high-speed placement over a wide class of machines. The methods and software we have developed are currently being used in Motorola factories around the world. This work has included balancing and optimizing a complete assembly line and generalizing our machine specific work into a flexible simulation and optimization toolkit. Extensions to this work include the development of the data mining software for design and manufacturing, and meta-knowledge extraction and management for SMT optimization.

Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health National Center for Human Genome Research to develop a DNA restriction mapping tool. This tool automates the process of inferring DNA restriction maps from DNA segmentation data. We have studied the utility of certain AI techniques in this domain, namely Pratt’s separation theory (to guarantee optimal use of the data), Dempster and Shafer’s theory of evidence (for reasoning with uncertain data), and heuristic search guided with neural networks to traverse the search space efficiently. Our restriction mapping tool has been downloaded by numerous molecular biology laboratories around the world from our homepage. More recent efforts have focused on using data mining for understanding the mechanisms of evolution and adaptation of organisms to the environment by identification of evolutionary variations of enzymes using advanced data-mining approaches. Protein classification is an important method for automated protein function prediction. In 2006 and 2007, I also served as one of the seven founding board members for the Chicago Biomedical Consortium Proteomics and Informatics Scientific Board, in response to a $25 million biomedical research gift from the Searle Funds given jointly to UIC, University of Chicago and Northwestern University.

High-Availability Computer Clustering

Work in the area of highly available computer clustering has been supported by Sun Microsystems and the National Science Foundation. High availability (HA) in a cluster is achieved through redundancy; all critical resources have designated redundant resources that can take over the service responsibilities of the original resource in case of a failure. Our work involves applying constraint logic programming (CLP), rule-based systems and heuristic search techniques to the configuration and failure handling in HA clusters.

THESES

• “Parallel Bidirectional Search using Multi-Dimensional Heuristics,” Ph.D. Dissertation (Advisor: Lawrence Henschen), Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, 1988.
• “A Parallel A* Algorithm,” M.S. Thesis (Advisor: Lawrence Henschen), Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, 1986.

BOOKS

• R. Person, B. Weil, S. Nelson, P. C. Nelson, P. Aiker, T. Stanley, and D. Ewing, Using 123 Release 3. Que Publishing, 896 pages, May 1989.
• BOOK CHAPTERS
• E. Torres, P. Nelson, N. Rouphail and J. Raj “Estimating Link Delays for Arterial Streets,” Urban and Regional Transportation Modeling: Essays in Honor of David Boyce (edited by Der-Horng Lee) Edward Elgar Publishing (2004) pp. 177-209.
• John F. Dillenburg and Peter C. Nelson, “Data Handling in Intelligent Transportation Systems,” to be published in Wiley Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Engineering (edited by Benjamin Wah) John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2004).
• Peng Fan, James G, Haran, John Dillenburg, and Peter C. Nelson, “Cluster-Based Framework in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks,” 4th International Conference on AD-HOC Networks & Wireless, October 6-8, 2005, Cancun, Mexico, published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, ISSN: 0302-9743, Volume 3738 / 2005, pp. 32-42.

JOURNAL PAPERS

• A.A. Toptsis, C.T. Yu, and P.C. Nelson, “Computing the Transitive Closure of Symmetric Matrices,” Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series, Springer-Verlag Vol. 468, (1990) pp. 174-183.
• T. Murata, P. C. Nelson, and J. Yim, “A Predicate – Transition Net Model for a Multiple Agent Planning System,” Information Sciences, Vol. 57-58, (1991) pp.361-384.
• P. C. Nelson and A. A. Toptsis, “Unidirectional and Bidirectional Search Algorithms,” IEEE Software, Vol. 9 No. 2, March (1992) pp. 77-83.
• P. C. Nelson and A. A. Toptsis, “Wave-Shaping in Multiprocessor Bidirectional Heuristic State Space Search,” Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Springer-Verlag Vol. 541, (1991) pp. 92-104.
• J.F. Dillenburg and P. C. Nelson, “Improving the Efficiency of Depth-first Search by Cycle Elimination,” Information Processing Letters, Vol. 45, No. 1, (1993) pp. 5-10.
• A. A. Toptsis and P.C. Nelson, “Parallel Bidirectional Heuristic State Space Search,” Heuristics, Vol. 6, No. 4, (1993) pp. 40-49.
• J.F. Dillenburg and P. C. Nelson, “Perimeter Search,” Artificial Intelligence Journal Vol. 65, (1994) pp. 165-178.
• J. Inglehart and P.C. Nelson, “On the limitations of automated restriction mapping,” Computer Applications in the Biosciences Vol. 10, no. 3, (1994) pp. 249-261.
• J. Yim, P. C. Nelson, and T. Murata, “Predicate – Transition Net Reachability Testing Using Heuristic Search,” Transactions of The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan, Vol. 114-C, No. 9 (1994) pp. 907-913.
• P. C. Nelson and C. Lain, “Heuristic Improvement through Triangulation,” Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 7, No. 2, (1995) pp. 345-359.
• J.F. Dillenburg and P. C. Nelson, “Improving Search Efficiency Using Possible Subgoals,” Mathematical and Computer Modelling, Vol. 22, No. 4-7, (1995) pp.397-414.
• A. Dikos, P.C. Nelson, T. Tirpak and W. Wang, “Optimization of PCCA in High-Mix Environments Using Genetic Algorithms,” Annals of Operations Research, Vol. 75, (1997) pp. 303-324.
• J.A. Inglehart, P.C. Nelson and Yibo Zou, “Mapper: An Intelligent Restriction Mapping Tool,” Bioinformatics, Vol. 14 No. 2 (1998) pp. 101-111.
• J.A. Inglehart and P.C. Nelson, “Solving Systems of Difference Constraints Constrained by Random Variables,” Heuristics, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1998) pp. 1-14.
• P.V. Palacharla and P.C. Nelson, “Application of fuzzy logic and neural networks for dynamic travel time estimation,” International Transactions in Operational Research (special issue Operations Research Methods in Intelligent Transportation Systems), Vol. 6, No. 1 (1999) pp. 145-160.
• W. Wang, P.C. Nelson and T. M. Tirpak, “Optimization of High-Speed Multi-Station SMT Placement Machines Using Evolutionary Algorithms,” IEEE Transactions on Electronics Packaging Manufacturing, Vol. 22, No. 2 (1999) pp. 137-146.
• P. Csaszar, T. M. Tirpak, and P.C. Nelson, “Object-Oriented Simulator Design for an Automated High-Speed Modular Placement Machine Family,” SIMULATION, Vol. 73, No. 6 (1999) pp.341-351.
• P. Csaszar, T. M. Tirpak, and P.C. Nelson, “Optimization of a High-Speed Placement Machine Using Tabu Search Algorithms,” Annals of Operations Research, Vol. 96 (2000) pp. 125-147.
• P. Csaszar, P. C. Nelson, R. R. Rajbhandari, and T. M. Tirpak, “Optimization of Automated High Speed Modular Placement Machines Using Knowledge-Based Systems,” IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Part C: Applications and Reviews, Vol. 30, No. 4, November 2000. pp. 408-417..
• Chi Zhou, Peter C. Nelson, Thomas M. Tirpak, Weimin Xiao and Spencer A. Lane, “An Intelligent Data Mining System for Drop Test Analysis of Electronic Products Manufacturing,” IEEE Transactions on Electronics Packaging Manufacturing, Vol. 24 No. 3, (July 2001) pp. 222 -231.
• Thomas M. Tirpak, Pradosh Kumar Mohapatra, Peter C. Nelson, and Rajan R. Rajbhandari, “A Generic Classification and Object-Oriented Simulation Toolkit for SMT Assembly Equipment,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics – Part A: Systems and Humans, Vol. 32, No. 1, (January 2002), pp. 104-122.
• Chi Zhou, Weimin Xiao, Peter C. Nelson, and Thomas M. Tirpak, “Evolving Accurate and Compact Classification Rules with Gene Expression Programming,” IEEE Trans. of Evolutionary Computation, Vol. 7, No. 6, (December 2003), pages 519 – 531.

CONFERENCE PAPERS

• P. C. Nelson and L. J. Henschen, “Parallel Bidirectional Heuristic Searching,” Proceedings of Canadian Information Processing Society 5, (Edmonton, Alberta) 1987, pp. 117-124.
• P. C. Nelson, “Parallel Heuristic Search Using Islands,” Proceedings of Fourth Conference on Hypercubes, Concurrent Computers, and Applications, (Monterey, California) March 1989, pp. 909-916.
• P. C. Nelson and L. J. Henschen, “Multi-Dimensional Heuristics,” Proceedings of Eleventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (Detroit, Michigan) August 1989, pp. 316-321.
• T. Murata, P. C. Nelson, and J. Yim, “A Predicate – Transition Net Model for Single Agent Planning,” Proceedings of AI, Simulation and Planning in High Autonomy Systems Conference, ( Tucson, Arizona) March 1990, pp. 98-107.
• A.A. Toptsis, C.T. Yu, and P.C. Nelson, “Computing the Transitive Closure of Symmetric Matrices,” Proceedings of International Conference on Computing and Information (ICCI 90), ( Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada) May 1990, pp. 149-154.
• P. C. Nelson and J. Dillenburg, “Experimental Analysis of Heuristic Island Search,” Proceedings of The Fifth Rocky Mountain AI Conference, (Albuquerque, New Mexico) June 1990, pp. 231-238.
• A.A. Toptsis, C.T. Yu, and P.C. Nelson, “Benchmarking Two Types of Restricted Transitive Closure Algorithms,” Proceedings of IEEE COMPSAC 1990, October 1990, ( Chicago, Illinois) pp. 375-381.
• P. C. Nelson, J. F. Dillenburg, and L. Dubinsky, “HSAS: A Heuristic Development Tool,” Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Tools for Artificial Intelligence, ( Washington, D.C.) November 1990, pp. 478-484.
• T. Murata, P. C. Nelson, and J. Yim, “Predicate-Transition Net Reachability Testing Using Artificial Intelligence Search Techniques,” Proceedings of Third International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, (Skokie, Illinois) June 1991, pp. 160-165.
• P. C. Nelson and A. A. Toptsis, “Superlinear Speedup Using Bidirectionalism and Islands,” Proceedings of 12th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence – Workshop on Parallel Search, (Sydney, Australia) August 1991, pp. 129-134.
• P. C. Nelson and A. A. Toptsis, “Search Space Clustering in Parallel Bidirectional Heuristic Search,” Proceedings of 4th University of New Brunswick Artificial Intelligence Symposium, (Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada) September 1991, pp. 563-573.
• J. Inglehart and P.C. Nelson, “LinkFinder: An Expert System that Constructs Phylogenic Trees,” Proceedings of 2nd NASA CLIPS Conference, ( Houston, Texas) August 1991, pp. 199-208.
• P.C. Nelson and J. Warpinski, “NMESys: An Expert System for Network Fault Detection,” Proceedings of 2nd NASA CLIPS Conference, ( Houston, Texas) August 1991, pp. 52-57.
• A. Kirson, B. Smith, D. Boyce, P. Nelson, J. Hicks, A. Sen, J. Schofer, F. Koppelman, C. Bhat, “The Evolution of ADVANCE,” Proc. of 3rd International Conference on Vehicle Navigation and Information Systems, Sept. 1992, pp. 516-522.
• P. C. Nelson, P. Petrov, and P. Pollock, “Assigning Segment and Link Identifiers for ADVANCE,” Proceedings of Intelligent Vehicles 93 Symposium, ( Tokyo, Japan) July 1993, pp. 152-156.
• P. C. Nelson, J. Dillenburg, and C. Lain, “Vehicle-Based Route Planning in Advanced Traveler Information Systems,” Proceedings of Intelligent Vehicles 93 Symposium, ( Tokyo, Japan) July 1993, pp.370-372.
• P. C. Nelson and P. Palacharla, “A Neural Network Model for On-line Data fusion in ADVANCE,” Proceedings of Pacific Rim Transportation Technology Conference, ( Seattle, Washington) July 1993, pp. 237-243.
• N.M. Rouphail and P.C. Nelson, “Data Fusion for an ATIS Operational Test: Description and Computational Issues,” Proceedings of the First Congress on Computing in Civil Engineering, ( Washington D.C.) June 1994, pp. 1532-1535.
• P. Palacharla and P.C. Nelson, “Understanding Relations between Fuzzy Logic and Evidential Reasoning Methods,” Proceedings of Third IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, ( Orlando, Florida) June 1994, pp. 1933-1938.
• P. Palacharla and P.C. Nelson, “Evidential Reasoning in Uncertainty for Data Fusion,” Proceedings of Fifth International Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems, ( Paris, France) July 1994, pp. 715-720.
• P. Palacharla, P. Nelson and V. Sisiopiku, “Data Fusion Using Fuzzy-Valued Logic,” Proceedings of 1994 Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, ( Paris, France) October 1994, pp. 115-119.
• V. Sisiopiku, P. Palacharla and P.C. Nelson, “Fuzzy Reasoning Model for Converting Loop Detector Data into Travel Times,” Proceedings of 27th ISATA Advanced Transport Telematics/ Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems Conference, (Aachen, Germany) November 1994, pp. 373-380.
• J. Dillenburg, C. Lain, P.C. Nelson, and D. Rorem, “The Design of the ADVANCE Traffic Information Center,” Proceedings of the 5th Annual Meeting of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America, ( Washington D.C.) March 1995, pp. 321-327.
• P. Palacharla and P.C. Nelson, “On-line travel time estimation using fuzzy neural networks,” The Second World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems, (Yokohama, Japan) November 1995, pp. 112-116.
• P. Mohapatra, P. C. Nelson, T. M. Tirpak, and P. Csaszar, “A Generic Simulation and Optimization System for Chip Placement Machines,” Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Technology (CIT’ 99), ( Bhubaneswar, India), December 1999, pp. 1-17.
• P.C. Nelson, T. M. Tirpak, W. Wang, and P. Mohapatra, “Optimization of Gantry Type SMT Placement Machines Using Genetic Algorithms,” Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Engineering of Intelligent Systems (EIS 2000), ( Paisley, Scotland), June 2000, pp. 404-412.
• T.M. Tirpak, A.J. Aswani, and P.C. Nelson, “Optimization of Revolver Head SMT Machines using Simulated Annealing,” 25th International Electronics Manufacturing Technology Symposium, (Santa Clara, California), October 2000, pp. 214-220.
• Peter Csaszar, Peter C. Nelson and Thomas M. Tirpak, “Tabu Search for Rugged Search Spaces with Multiple Symmetric Basins,” 17 th International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence: Workshop on AI in Manufacturing, ( Seattle, WA), August 2001, pp. 46-51.
• Chi Zhou, P.C. Nelson, W. Xiao, and T. M. Tirpak, “Discovery of Classification Rules by Using Gene Expression Programming,” to appear at International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IC-AI’02), Las Vegas, U.S.A., June 24-27, 2002, pp. 1355-1361.
• T. Tirpak, G. Sundaresan, C. Zhou, and P.C. Nelson, “Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithm – Expert System Solution for Optimizing SMT Placement Machines,” to appear at International Conference on Information and Knowledge Engineering (IKE’02), Las Vegas, U.S.A., June 24-27, 2002, pp. 674-679.
• C. Zhou, and P.C. Nelson, “Predicting Traffic Congestion Using Recurrent Neural Networks,” 9 th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems, Chicago, October 14-18, 2002, electronic proceedings.
• J. Dillenburg, O.Wolfson, and P. Nelson, “The Intelligent Travel Assistant,” The 5 th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, ( Singapore), September 2002, pp. 691-696.
• G. Trajcevski, O. Wolfson, B. Xu and P. Nelson, “Real-Time Traffic Updates in Moving Objects Databases,” 5th International Workshop on Mobility in Databases and Distributed Systems, in conjunction with the 13th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, September 2002, Aix en Provence, France, electronic proceedings.
• J.F. Dillenburg, P.C. Nelson, O. Wolfson, O. Yu, A.P. Sistla, S. McNeil, A. Ouksel, Xu and J. Ben-Arie, “Applications of a Transportation Information Architecture,” Proc. of IEEE Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control (ICNSC04), March 2004, Taipei, Taiwan, pp. 480-485.
• Xin Li, Chi Zhou, Peter C. Nelson, and Thomas M. Tirpak. “Investigation of Constant Creation Techniques in the Context of Gene Expression Programming,” Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2004), June 26-30,2004, Seattle, Washington, USA.
• Zhuli Xie, Xin Li, Barbara Di Eugenio, Weimin Xiao, Thomas M. Tirpak, and Peter C. Nelson. “Using Gene Expression Programming to Construct Sentence Ranking Functions for Text Summarization,” 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-2004), August 23-27, 2004, Geneva, Switzerland, pp. 1381-1384.
• Marcin Kadluczka, Peter C. Nelson and Thomas M. Tirpak, “N-to-2-Space Mapping for Visualization of Search Algorithm Performance,” 15 th IEEE Conference on Tools for Artificial Intelligence, November 2004, Boca Raton, FL, pp. 508-513.
• Zhuli Xie, Weimin Xiao, Thomas M. Tirpak, and Peter C. Nelson. “Using Noun Phrase Centrality to Identify Topics for Extraction Based Summaries,” IASTED International Conference on Knowledge Sharing and Collaborative Engineering, November 21-24, 2004. Virgin Islands, USA, pp. 89-94.
• Thomas M. Tirpak, Juan Lopez, and Peter C. Nelson, “Factory Doctor: A Decision-Support System for Electronics Manufacturing Optimization” 3rd International CIRP Conference on Reconfigurable Manufacturing, (electronic proceedings) May 10-12, 2005, in Ann Arbor, MI.
• Xin Li, Chi Zhou, Weimin Xiao, Peter C. Nelson, “Prefix Gene Expression Programming,” accepted for publication in Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2005) , June 25-29, 2005, Washington D.C., USA.
• James Haran, Peng Fan, Peter C. Nelson, John F. Dillenburg, “An Intelligent Vehicle Approach To Mobile Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks,” The Second International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO 2005), September 14-17, 2005, Barcelona, Spain, pp. 224-230.
• Peng Fan, James G, Haran, John Dillenburg, and Peter C. Nelson, “Cluster-Based Framework in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks,” 4th International Conference on AD-HOC Networks & Wireless, October 6-8, 2005, Cancun, Mexico, pp. 32-42.
• Robert Grossman, Michal Sabala, Anushka Aanand, Steve Eick, Leland Wilkinson, Pei Zhang, John Chaves, Steve Vejcik, John Dillenburg, Peter Nelson, Doug Rorem, Javid Alimohideen, Jason Leigh, Mike Papka, Rick Stevens, “Real Time Change Detection and Alerts from Highway Traffic Data,” The 2005 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing (SC ’05), November 12-18, 2005, Seattle, WA, USA, pp.69. (Received SC’05 HPC Analytics Challenge Award).
• Xin Li, Chi Zhou, Weimin Xiao, and Peter C. Nelson, “Direct Evolution of Hierarchical Solutions with Self-Emergent Substructures,” The Fourth International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA’05), December 15-17, 2005, Los Angeles, CA, USA, pp. 337-342.
• Peng Fan, James G, Haran, John Dillenburg, and Peter C. Nelson, “Traffic Model for Clustering Algorithms in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks,” IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference 2006 (CCNC2006)
• January 8-10, 2006, Las Vegas, NV, USA, pp. 168-172.
• Zhuli Xie, Barbara Di Eugenio, Peter C. Nelson, “Adaptive Learning in Machine Summarization,” Nineteenth International FLAIRS Conference (FLAIRS 2006) May 11-13, 2006, Melbourne Beach, FL, USA, pp. 180-181.
• Qiongyun Zhang, Chi Zhou, Weimin Xiao, Peter C. Nelson and Xin Li, “Using Differential Evolution for GEP Constant Creation,” to appear as a late breaking paper at Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2006), July 8-12, 2006, Seattle, Washington, USA.
• Peter C. Nelson, Kenneth P. Dallmeyer, Lukasz M. Szybalski, Tom P. Palarz, Michael Wieher “Spamalot: A Toolkit for Consuming Spammers’ Resources,” to appear at 3rd Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS 2006), July 27-28, 2006, Mountain View, California, USA, pp. 134-136.
• Peng Fan, James G. Haran, John F. Dillenburg, Peter C. Nelson, “An Improved Compound Clustering Algorithm in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks,” to appear at 9th International Conference an Applications of Advanced Technology in Transportation 2006 (AATT06), August 13-16, 2006, Chicago, IL, USA.
• James G. Haran, John F. Dillenburg, Peter C. Nelson “Real-time Image Processing Algorithms for the Detection of Road and Environmental Conditions”, to appear at 9th International Conference an Applications of Advanced Technology in Transportation 2006 (AATT06), August 13-16, 2006, Chicago, IL, USA.
• Xin Li, Chi Zhou, Weimin Xiao, and Peter C. Nelson, “Introducing Emergent Loose Modules into the Learning Process of a Linear Genetic Programming System,” to appear at The Fifth International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA’06), December 14-16, 2006, Orlando, FL, USA.
• Peng Fan, Abolfazl (Kouros) Mohammadian, Peter C. Nelson, James Haran, John Dillenburg, “A Novel Direction Based Clustering Algorithm in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks” to appear at the 86th Annual Transportation Research Board Meeting, January 2007, Washington, DC, USA.
• Zhuli Xie, Barbara Di Eugenio and Peter Nelson, “From Extracting to Abstracting: Generating Quasi-abstractive Summaries,” submitted to Human Language Technologies: The Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT 2007), April 22-27, 2007, Rochester, NY, USA.

Northwestern University Evanston, Illinois Ph.D. in Computer Science June 1988 M.S. in Computer Science August 1986

North Park College Chicago, Illinois B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics May 1984