My research is mainly concerned with the enhancement of Learning Classifier Systems (LCS), a family of evolutionary rule-based online machine learning algorithms, and their application to intelligent, i.e., self-learning adaptive systems. In this context, I pursue the mission of revealing the strong potentials underlying this unique learning paradigm, i.e., their inherent ability to self-adapt to continuing change while at the same time evolving an explainable and interpretable knowledge base. In order to adequately counteract occurring knowledge gaps detected during the productive runtime, I am augmenting intelligent systems to equip them with more robust means to (1) reactively bridge such gaps via knowledge transduction approaches, and, (2) proactively constructing new knowledge, e.g., via Active Learning techniques.  

Beside my research focus, I'm also very interested in:

• Further Evolutionary Machine Learning techniques (GP, Neuroevolution, etc.)
• (Deep) Reinforcement Learning
• Knowledge transfer & extraction from black box models
• Artificial Intelligence in general, esp. Machine Learning and its unsolved challenges
• Design of Organic, Autonomic and general Self-* Systems

Journal articles and book chapters

2018

Reaction Learning

Anthony Stein
In: Organic Computing -- Technical Systems for Survival in the Real World, Chapter Basic Methods, pp. 287-328

2017

Interpolation in the eXtended Classifier System: An Architectural Perspective
Anthony Stein; Dominik Rauh; Sven Tomforde; Jörg Hähner
In: International Journal of Systems Architecture - Embedded Systems Design 75: pp. 79 - 94 (2017)

Conference contributions

2019

Reducing Search Space of Genetic Algorithms for Fast Black Box Attacks on Image Classifiers
Julius Brandl; Nicolas Breinl; Maximilian Demmler; Lukas Hartmann; Jörg Hähner; Anthony Stein
In: Proceedings of the KI 2019, the 42nd edition of the German Conference on Artificial Intelligence organized in cooperation with the AI Chapter of the German Society for Informatics (GI-FBKI), 23.09. - 26.09.2019, Kassel, Germany, to appear
 

A Survey of Formal Theoretical Advances Regarding XCS
David Pätzel; Anthony Stein; Jörg Hähner
In: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion (GECCO ’19 Companion), July 13–17, 2019, Prague, Czech Republic. ACM, New York, NY, USA.
 

CHARIOT – A Continuous High-level Adaptive Runtime Integration Testbed
Chloe M. Barnes, Kirstie Bellman, Jean Botev, Ada Diaconescu, Lukas Esterle, Christian Gruhl, Chris Landauer, Peter R. Lewis, Phyllis R. Nelson, Anhtony Stein, Christopher Stewart, C. Sven Tomforde
In: 2019 IEEE 4th International Workshops on Foundations and Applications of Self* Systems (FAS*W), Umea, Schweden, 16. - 20.06.2019, to appear
 

Transfer Learning is a Crucial Capability of Intelligent Systems Self-Integrating at Runtime
Anthony Stein, Sven Tomforde
In: 2019 IEEE 4th International Workshops on Foundations and Applications of Self* Systems (FAS*W), Umea, Schweden, 16. - 20.06.2019, to appear
 

Towards Physical Disturbance Robustness in Organic Computing Systems Using MOMDPs
Markus Görlich, Anthony Stein, Jörg Hähner
In: 2019 Intelligent Systems Workshop to appear in Workshop Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems, ARCS 2019, 20 - 23 May 2019, Copenhagen, Denmark, pp. 135 - 142.
 

Parallel Chemical Reaction Optimization for Utilization in Intelligent RNA Prediction Systems
Helena Stegherr, Anthony Stein, Jörg Hähner
In: 2019 Intelligent Systems Workshop to appear in Workshop Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems, ARCS 2019, 20 - 23 May 2019, Copenhagen, Denmark, pp. 135 - 142.
 

2018

A Concept for Proactive Knowledge Construction in Self-Learning Autonomous Systems
Anthony Stein, Sven Tomforde, Ada Diaconescu, Jörg Hähner, Christian Müller-Schloer
In: 2018 IEEE 3rd International Workshops on Foundations and Applications of Self* Systems (FAS*W), Trento, Italy, 3-7 September 2018, accepted for publication and oral presentation, pp. 204 - 213
 

Self-improving System Integration – Status and Challenges After Five Years of SISSY
Kirstie Bellman, Jean Botev, Ada Diaconescu, Lukas Esterle, Christian Gruhl, Chris Landauer, Peter R. Lewis, Anthony Stein, Sven Tomforde, Rolf P. Würtz
In: 2018 IEEE 3rd International Workshops on Foundations and Applications of Self* Systems (FAS*W), Trento, Italy, 3-7 September 2018, accepted for publication and oral presentation, to appear
 

What About Interpolation? A Radial Basis Function Approach to Classifier Prediction Modeling in XCSF (Best Paper Nominee)
Anthony Stein, Simon Menssen, Jörg Hähner
In: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2018), 15 - 19 July, Kyoto, Japan, pp. 537-544
 

Toward an Organic Computing Approach to Automated Design of Processing Pipelines
Anthony Stein, Andreas Margraf, Jürgen Moroskow, Steffen Geinitz, Jörg Hähner
In: Workshop Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems (ARCS 2018), 9 - 12 April 2018, Braunschweig, Germany, accepted for presentation, to appear
 

2017

An Evolutionary Learning Approach to Self-Configuring Image Pipelines in the Context of Carbon Fiber Fault Detection
Andreas Margraf; Anthony Stein; Leonhard Engstler; Steffen Geinitz; Jörg Hähner
In: 16th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA), Cancún, Mexico, 18 - 21 December 2017, pp. 147 - 154.
 

Self-Learning Smart Cameras -- Harnessing the Generalization Capability of XCS
Anthony Stein; Stefan Rudolph; Sven Tomforde, Jörg Hähner
In: Proceedings of International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence IJCCI 2017, Funchal, Madeira-Portugal, 1 - 3 November 2017, pp. 129 - 140.
 

Toward Curious Learning Classifier Systems: Combining XCS with Active Learning Concepts
Anthony Stein; Roland Maier; Jörg Hähner
In: Proceedings of the 2017 International Workshop on Evolutionary Rule-based Machine Learning, Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion, ACM, 15 - 19 July 2017, Berlin, Germany, pp. 1349 - 1356.
 

Bottom-Up Norm Creation in Open Distributed Computing Grids by Means of eXtended Classifier Systems
Sarah Edenhofer; Youssef Madkour; Anthony Stein; Christopher Stifter; Jörg Hähner
In: Workshop Proceedings of the ARCS 2017, 30th International Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems, Vienna, Austria, 3 - 6 April 2017, VDE Verlag GmbH, Berlin Offenbach, 2017, pp. 55-62
 

2016

Local Ensemble Weighting in the Context of Time Series Forecasting Using XCSF
Matthias Sommer; Anthony Stein; Jörg Hähner
In: Proc. of the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Esemble Learning (CIEL 2016), 6 - 9 December 2016, Athens, Greece, pp. 1 - 8.
 

Ensemble Time Series Forecasting with XCSF
Matthias Sommer; Anthony Stein; Jörg Hähner
In: Proc. of 10th IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO 2016), Augsburg, 12 - 16 September 2016, pp. 150 - 151.
 

Evolutionary Online Machine Learning from Imbalanced Data
Anthony Stein
In: FAS* Doctoral Symposium ,Proc. of the 1st IEEE International Workshops on Foundations and Applications of Self* Systems (FAS*W 2016), Augsburg, 12-16 September 2016, pp. 281 - 286.
 

Interpolation-based Classifier Generation in XCSF
Anthony Stein; Christian Eymüller; Dominik Rauh; Sven Tomforde; Jörg Hähner
In: Evolutionary Computation (CEC), 2016 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Vancouver, July 2016, pp. 3990 - 3998.
 

Distributed Resource Allocation as Co-Evolution Problem
Sven Tomforde; David Meier; Anthony Stein; Sebastian von Mammen
In:Proceedings of the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), 2016, Vancouver, 24 - 29 July 2016, 1815 - 1822.
 

Dealing with Unforeseen Situations in the Context of Self-Adaptive Urban Traffic Control: How to Bridge the Gap
Anthony Stein; Dominik Rauh; Sven Tomforde; Jörg Hähner
In: The 13th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing,(ICAC 2016), Würzburg, Germany, July, 19 - 22, 2016, pp. 167 - 172.
 

Augmenting the Algorithmic Structure of XCS by Means of Interpolation
Anthony Stein; Dominik Rauh; Sven Tomforde; Jörg Hähner
In: Proceedings of the 29th GI/ITG International Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems (ARCS’16), accepted for publication and oral presentation, Nuremberg, Germany, April 4-7, 2016, VDE, pp. 348 - 360.
 

2015

Task Execution in Distributed Smart Systems
Uwe Jänen; Carsten Grenz; Sarah Edenhofer; Anthony Stein; Jürgen Brehm; Jörg Hähner
In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Internet and Distributed Computing Systems (IDCS 2015), Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 02. - 04. September 2015, Cumberland Lodge - The Great Park - Windsor-Berkshire, United Kingdom, pp. 103 - 117.
 

2014

HCI-Patterns for Developing Mobile Apps and Digital Video-Assist-Technology for the Film Set
Christian Märtin, Anthony Stein, Bernhard Prell, Andreas Kesper
In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on HCI, Part I: Theories, Methods, and Tools 2014-06-22 v.1 p.320-330, ISBN: 978-3-319-07232-6, Greece, June 22-27, 2014

Other peer-reviewed contributions

2017

Machine Learning in Organic Computing: A Brief Clarification of Terms and Concepts
Maarten Bieshaar; Adrian Calma; Christian Gruhl; Stefan Rudolph; Anthony Stein
In: Organic Computing: Doctoral Dissertation Colloquium 2016, Duisburg, 2 - 3 June 2016 / 2017, pp. 113 - 130
 

2016

Evolutionary Online Learning in Organic Computing Systems
Anthony Stein
In: Organic Computing: Doctoral Dissertation Colloquium 2016, Duisburg, 2 - 3 June 2016, Kassel University Press, 2016, to appear
 

2014

Neighborhood-based Interpolation for XCS Improvements
Anthony Stein
In: Organic Computing - Doctoral Dissertation Colloquium 2014, Part III: Self-Learning Systems, ISBN: 978-3-86219-832-0, Kassel, Germany, May 22-23, 2014
 

2013

Mobile App-Support for Advanced Digital Video-Assist Systems in Computer-Supported Film Sets
Christian Martin, Anthony Stein, Bernhard Prell, Andreas Kesper
In: Proceedings of the 6th Forum Medientechnik, Fachhochschule St. Pölten, Austria, November 2013