Pascal Francq's WikiCS

1 Presentation

This is a technical wiki dedicated to my research. It is conceived as a set of on-line articles describing my latest work.
Historically, my research focuses on developing and implementing genetic algorithms to solve optimization problems. At some time, I use them to group users profiles to build communities of interests (for which I developed two genetic algorithms). From that point, I extend my research to information science in general. In parallel, I work also on the societal impacts of information technologies in general, and the Internet in particular. This part of my research is not included here since I published a book on that topic in two volumes: Internet : La construction d’un mythe and Internet : Le caractère fétiche.

2 Projects

I currently work on two interconnected projects:
  • The R library, a set of libraries that provides a number of open source C++ tools to develop applications. In particular, it contains the different genetic algorithms that I developed.
  • The GALILEI framework, an open software research platform around information science. In practice, it is a set of C++ libraries based on the R library. Developers can use the API provided to create their applications. In the future, it is plan to develop a server that will provide a Web services interface.
An older project is the VLSI library which goal was to provide an placement algorithm for integrated circuits. This project is no longer developed, but it will be documented as an application of the 2D Genetic Algorithms (2D-GA) still maintained.
The specificity of this wiki is to mix articles and documentation of the corresponding source code.

3 How does it work?

The wiki is divided in articles and API documentation. The former are a set of documents created with LyX, a graphical frontend for LaTeX. They are written as small journal articles. The latter describe the C++ classes and their members: the nature of their parameters, what they returned, and some information on their implementation. This documentation is useful for someone that will develop applications using the R and the GALILEI libraries. Potential links between documentation and articles are added.
Periodically, the wiki is recreated. Doxygen analyzes the source code to build the API documentation in HTML, and eLyXer generates HTML from the LyX documents. To generate the formula for HTML, eLyXer uses MathJax. A little script parses then the HTML pages generated and created the necessary hyperlinks.

4 Warnings

It will take some times before I will finish to describe the current state of my research. Several algorithms and models implemented in the source code are actually not documented. Moreover, some articles present some ongoing work.
WikiCS uses sometimes MathML to encode the formulas and SVG for the images since these W3C recommendations are integrated in several free browsers (such as Firefox 4.0).
Dr. Pascal Francq
Last update: Sat, 11 Sep 2021 18:15:13.
WikiCS contains 28 articles and documents 314 classes.