Alex Freitas
Reader in Computational Intelligence
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- Room
S107
School of Computing
University of Kent,
School of Computing, University of Kent
Canterbury
Kent
CT2 7NF
England
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Publications
My publications are available from the
University of Kent's Academic Repository.
In the above list of my publications the papers are NOT available on-line.
My ON-LINE List of Publications
My publications' citations in Google Scholar.
Teaching
I am currently teaching Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (a master-level module) and Natural Computation (evolutionary algorithms and swarm intelligence).
Research Interests
I belong to the following research groups:
My main research interests involve the following areas:
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery;
Bio-inspired algorithms (mainly Evolutionary Algorithms and Ant Colony Optimisation);
Bioinformatics and the Biology of Ageing;
I got my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Essex, UK, in 1997, doing research on data mining, and I have continued to do research on data mining up to the present. In terms of data mining applications, since 2005 my research has been focusing on creating new data mining methods for bioinformatics (in particular the prediction of protein functions). More recently, in the academic year 2009-10 I did a research-oriented master's degree (MPhil) in Biological Sciences at the University of Liverpool, UK. My MPhil thesis was entitlted: "A Data Mining-Based Approach for Investigating the Relationship Between DNA Repair Genes and Ageing "
(pdf).
Books
A.A. Freitas and S.H. Lavington. Mining Very Large Databases with Parallel Processing. (208 pages) Kluwer, 1998. Table of Contents and Publisher's address
A.A. Freitas. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery with Evolutionary Algorightms. (264 pages) Springer-Verlag, August 2002. Book Cover Table of Contents and Publisher's Address
G.L.Pappa and A.A. Freitas. Automating the Design of Data Mining Algorithms: an Evolutionary Computation Approach. Springer, 2010. xiii + 187 pages. Publisher's webpage about the book
Journals
I am a member of the Editorial Board of the following journals:
Intelligent Data Analysis - An International Journal
International Journal on Data Warehousing and Mining
International Journal of Natural Computation Research
International Journal of Applied Metaheuristic Computing
Current Research Grant - Predicting the volume of distribution of drugs and toxicants with data mining.
This is a two-year EPSRC-funded project carried out at the Medway School of Pharmacy. This project is funded by an EPSRC "discipline hopping" grant, which allows me to spend half of my time doing research on applying data mining to the pharmaceutical sciences, in the areas of chemoinformatics and pharmacokinetics. The project started in January 2013.
Past Research Grant - Refactoring and Neutrality in Genetic Programming
This was a 3-year EPSRC-funded project being carried out at the School of Computing, University of Kent. The principal investigator for this project was Dr. Colin Johnson, and the project involved one post-doc research associate. Broadly speaking, the goal of the project was to extend genetic programming methods with concepts and principles from refactoring techniques in software engineering and the theory of neutrality in natural evolution. The project started in February 2010 and finished in January 2013.
Past Research Grant - A Synergistic Integration of Natural and Artificial Immunology for the Prediction of Hierarchical Protein Functions
This was an EPSRC-funded multi-institutional project involving 3 institutions: the University of Kent, the University of York and the Edward Jenner Institute for Vaccine Research. The project involved 3 post-doc Research Associates, one post-doc at each institution. This project started in February 2006 and finished in November 2008.
For more information about this project, see the project's website.
Past Research Grant - Bio-inspired Classification and Data Mining Algorithms for Bioinformatics
This was an European Union Interreg III project involving 2 institutions: the University of Kent in the UK and the University of Littoral in France. The project involved 1 post-doc Research Associate at Littoral and 1 PhD student at Kent.
The project started in September 2006 and finished in August 2008.
For more information about this project, see the project's website.
Past Research Grant - eXtended Particle Swarms (XPS)
This was a large EPSRC-sponsored research project, which came out from the below-mentioned research cluster in Swarm Intelligence. The project involved 5 universities (Essex, Kent, Leeds, Goldsmith and UMIST), industrial collaboration with BTExact and several international collaborators who are key figures in the field. In total (in all the 5 universities) the project involved 5 post-docs full time for two years and 4 PhD students full time for three years. At Kent the project involved one post-doc research associate and one PhD student, and the co-investigator at Kent was Colin Johnson. This project started in October 2004 and finished in September 2007.
Past Research Grant - Research Cluster in Swarm Intelligence
I have coordinated (jointly with Colin Johnson) an EPSRC-sponsored research cluster in Swarm Intelligence in the UK, in 2003. This was a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary research cluster, involving more than 15 institutions and a good mix of computer scientists, biologists and mathematicians.
Current PhD students:
Suwimol Jungjit is doing her PhD in the area of multi-label feature selection methods for the classification of gene expression data (from microarray experiments). She started in September 2011.
Khalid Salama is doing his PhD in the area of ant colony opitmization algorithms for building Bayesian network classifiers, with applications in protein function prediction. He started in September 2011.
Danielle Newby is doing her PhD at the Medway School of Pharmacy, analying data about chemical drugs (potential medical drugs) with data mining methods (focusing on decision trees). She started in October 2011. Her principal supervisor is Dr. Taravat Ghafourian, a Lecturer at the School of Pharmacy.
Cen Wan is doing his PhD in the classification task of data mining, with applications in the analysis of data about ageing-related genes. He started in October 2012.
Former PhD students:
Dr. Carlos Silla Jr. completed his PhD in 2012. The title of his PhD Thesis was "Novel Approaches for Hierarchical Classification with Case Studies in Protein Function Prediction". Carlos is now a Lecturer in a university in Brazil.
Dr. Fernando Otero completed his PhD in 2010. The title of his PhD Thesis was "New Ant Colony Optimisation Algorithms for Hierarchical Classification of Protein Functions". Fernando is now a Lecturer at the School of Computing, University of Kent (Medway campus)."
Dr. Mudassar Iqbal completed his Ph.D. in 2009. The title of his PhD Thesis was "Machine Learning and Optimization Methods for the Prediction of Protein-Protein Interactions". Mudassar is now a post-doc research associate at University of Nottingham.
Dr. Sid Ghosh completed his PhD in 2009. The title of his PhD thesis was "A Machine Learning Approach to Robust Autonomous Detection of Defective Pixels in Image Sensor Arrays". Sid is now a post-doc research associate at University of Southampton.
Dr. Nicholas Holden completed his PhD in 2008. The title of his PhD thesis was "Improving the Hierarchical Classification of Protein Functions with Swarm Intelligence".
Dr. Gisele Pappa completed her Ph.D. in 2007. The title of her PhD thesis was "Automatically Evolving Rule Induction Algorithms with Grammar-Based Genetic Programming". Gisele is now an Associate Professor in a university in Brazil
Dr. Andrew Secker completed his Ph.D. in 2006. The title of his PhD thesis was: "Artificial Immune Systems for Web Content Mining: focusing on the discovery of interesting information".
Dr. Deborah Carvalho completed her Ph.D. in 2005. The title of her PhD thesis was "A Decision Tree/Genetic Algorithm Method for Coping with the Problem of Small Disjuncts in Data Classification" (The thesis was written in Portuguese).
Dr. Wesley Romao completed his Ph.D. in 2002. The title of his PhD thesis was "Discovery of Relevant Knowledge in Science and Technology Databases" (The thesis was written in Portuguese).
