The short story: PLoS ONE just published our new paper Advantages of Task-Specific Multi-Objective Optimisation in Evolutionary Robotics, in collaboration with Manuel López-Ibáñez. The paper discusses known benefits of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms in the context of the evolutionary robotics domain, and is supported by novel experimental results exploiting three benchmarking problems.
The long story: this has been the most painful publications of my career to date, under many aspects. On the one hand, this was a side-project with respect to my other activities, and I could dedicate to this only a very little part of my time. As a matter of fact, I started with the experiments back in June 2011 and finished only on April 2013. Nearly two years in which I could work on this only few hours a week, but I insisted as the I believed (and still do) that the subject is very relevant for the ER community.
On the other hand, this has been a prototypical example of how peer-review should not work: I experienced extremely long delays, subjective judgments, unprofessional behaviour. As a matter of fact, more than two years went past since the first submission. Here’s the detailed chronology:
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