Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva

Please Note

ALERT! This person can no longer be contacted through the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington
Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva profile picture

Qualifications

BE Hons in Software Engineering (VUW), PhD in Software Engineering (VUW, pending graduation)

Research Interests

I have been working with Evolutionary Computation (EC) since I started my PhD at Victoria University of Wellington in 2014. I have now successfully defended my thesis and I am awaiting graduation. The key idea of EC is to generate an initial set of solutions—a population—for a particular optimisation problem. Then, using Darwinian principles, the fittest candidates in this population are chosen for reproduction, resulting in a new generation of fitter candidates. This process is repeated for many generations, gradually refining the quality of the solutions.

The focus of my thesis has been on using EC to perform what is known as Web service composition, which consists of combining several simpler functionality modules (i.e. Web services) into an application that accomplishes a more complex predefined task. My goal was to create a system that can automatically assemble a workflow of services such that the expected outputs are correctly produced, while also favouring services with the best possible non-functional attributes (e.g. lowest latency, lowest financial cost). I have found that EC is well suited to this problem, as it can efficiently produce correct solutions and optimise their quality attributes.

Next I would like to broaden my research to consider other aspects of artificial intelligence, as I am interested in all facets of this area. One interesting direction would be to combine EC with other techniques such as neural networks, reinforcement learning, and heuristic search methods. Another promising application of EC is to real-life problems where there is immediate feedback and concrete value added to a product/system, such as Big Data processing.

Publications

  1. Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva, Hui Ma, and Mengjie Zhang. " A Graph-based Particle Swarm Optimisation Approach to QoS-Aware Web Service Composition and Selection." 2014 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC). IEEE, 2014. 3127-3134.
  2. Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva, Xiaoying Gao, and Peter Andreae. " Wallace: Incorporating Search into Chatting." PRICAI 2014: Trends in Artificial Intelligence. Springer International Publishing, 2014. 842-848.
  3. Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva, Hui Ma, and Mengjie Zhang. " A GP Approach to QoS-Aware Web Service Composition and Selection." Simulated Evolution and Learning . Springer International Publishing, 2014. 180-191.
  4. Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva, Hui Ma and Mengjie Zhang. " A GP Approach to QoS-Aware Web Service Composition including Conditional Constraints". Proceedings of 2015 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2015). Sendai, Japan. 25-28 May, 2015. 2113-2120.
  5. Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva, Hui Ma and Mengjie Zhang. " GraphEvol: A Graph Evolution Technique for Web Service Composition". Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Database and Expert System Applications (DEXA 2015). Valencia, Spain. 1-4 September, 2015. 134-142.
  6. Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva, Yi Mei, Hui Ma, Mengjie Zhang. " Particle Swarm Optimisation with Sequence-Like Indirect Representation for Web Service Composition". Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimisation (EvoCOP2016), Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Porto, Portugal. 30 March - 1 April, 2016. 202-218.
  7. Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva, Hui Ma, Mengjie Zhang. " Genetic programming for QoS-aware web service composition and selection". Soft Computing. 2016. pp. 1-17 DOI: 10.1007/s00500-016-2096-z.
  8. Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva, Yi Mei, Hui Ma, Mengjie Zhang, " A Memetic Algorithm-Based Indirect Approach to Web Service Composition". Proceedings of 2016 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC). Vancouver, Canada. 24-29 July, 2016. 3385-3392.
  9. Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva, Hui Ma, Mengjie Zhang. " A Graph-based QoS-Aware Method for Web Service Composition with Branching". Proceedings of the 2016 on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion (GECCO'16). Denver, Colorado (CO), USA. 20-24 July, 2016. 131-132.
  10. Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva, Hui Ma, Mengjie Zhang, Sven Hartmann. " Handling Branched Web Service Composition with a QoS-Aware Graph-based Method". Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies (EC-Web'16). Porto, Portugal. 5-8 September, 2016. 154-169.
  11. Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva, Yi Mei, Hui Ma, Mengjie Zhang, " Evolutionary Computation for Automatic Web Service Composition -- An Indirect Representation Approach," Journal of Heuristics, DOI: 10.1007/s10732-017-9330-4, 2017, Springer.
  12. Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva, Yi Mei, Hui Ma and Mengjie Zhang. "Fragment-based Genetic Programming for Fully Automated Multi-Objective Web Service Composition". Proceedings of 2017 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2017). Berlin, Germany. 15-19 July, 2017. 353-360.
  13. Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva, Ewan Moshi, Hui Ma and Sven Hartmann. "A QoS-Aware Web Service Composition Approach Based on Genetic Programming and Graph Databases". Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2017), Part II. Lyon, France. 28-31 August, 2017. 37-44.
  14. Alexandre Sawczuk da Silva, Hui Ma, Yi Mei, Mengjie Zhang. "A Hybrid Memetic Approach for Fully Automated Multi-Objective Web Service Composition". Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS'18). San Francisco, CA, USA. 2-7 July 2018. 26-33.

Datasets

Please follow the link to download WSC-2008 and WSC-2009.

Awards

  • Runner-Up for Best Paper Award at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Web Services for work entitled “A Hybrid Memetic Approach for Fully Automated Multi-Objective Web Service Composition” (July 2018).
  • Recipient of the Victoria Doctoral Submission Scholarship (April 2018).
  • Runner-up award for Best Paper at the 2017 IEEE Postgraduate Day for work entitled “Fragment-based Genetic Programming for Fully Automated Multi-Objective Web Service Composition” (4 September 2017, Palmerston North, New Zealand).
  • Recipient of Victoria University’ s 2016 Postgraduate Research Excellence Award (1 December 2016, Wellington, New Zealand).
  • Runner-up award for Best Paper at the 2016 IEEE Postgraduate Day for work entitled “Handling Branched Web Service Composition with a QoS-Aware Graph-based Method” (30 August 2016, Wellington, New Zealand).
  • Nomination for Best Paper Award at the 16th European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimisation for work entitled “Particle Swarm Optimisation with Sequence-Like Indirect Representation for Web Service Composition” (March 2016).
  • Runner-up award for Best Paper at the 2015 IEEE Postgraduate Day for work entitled “GraphEvol: A Graph Evolution Technique for Web Service Composition” (20 October 2015, Palmerston North, New Zealand).
  • Recipient of the Victoria Doctoral Scholarship (August 2014).
  • Recipient of the 2013/2014 Victoria Summer Research Scholarship.
  • Included on the 2013’s Dean’s List for Engineering Faculty as recognition of excellence in academic achievement.

Academic Reviewer Contributions

  • IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) – February 2019.
  • IEEE Access – February 2019.
  • IEEE Access – December 2018.
  • IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence – October 2018.
  • The 31st Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence – August 2018.
  • IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) – February 2018.
  • Swarm and Evolutionary Computation (SWEVO) – July 2017.
  • International Conference on Simulated Evolution and Learning (SEAL) – July 2017.
  • International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE) – July 2017.
  • International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE) – September 2016 (artefact evaluation).
  • Applied Soft Computing – July 2016.
  • International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA) – May 2016.
  • IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) – February 2016.
  • Natural Computing Journal (NACO) – September 2015.
  • International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER) – May 2015.
  • IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing – January 2015.
  • Journal of Computers (JPC) – August 2014.
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