From computer engineering and computer science to artificial intelligence

Early June saw the celebration of the Interdisciplinary Summer School on Artificial Intelligence, with talks on diverse subjects that went from creativity in Twitter bots by Tony Veale to my own talk on computer science and engineering and how they can help AI.

The talk had two parts; the first focused on how AI is improving in performance and decreasing its energy footprint via design of specific chips, many of them based on the RISC-V open hardware architecture. The second part was mainly devoted to concurrent programming and how algorithms and whole applications must be changed to meet the challenges of creating cloud-native programs.

Our research group fully supports free software and open science, and the field of AI is ratcheting up its achievements by working on free stacks, from free hardware to the whole set of programs and services that support them. Understanding these stacks will help us design better algorithms and frameworks in the future.

Mathematics applied to the maintenance of radio communication devices

Yesterday, Alexander Lyubchenko, post-doctoral researcher from Omsk State Transport University, made a report on the topic “Mathematical support for preventive maintenance periodicity optimization of radio communication facilities”.

The presentation was:

He presented the results of his research field and shared with us ideas for future work.

A small discussion took place concerning the application of another research approaches for solving the presented task, which could provide better efficiency and accuracy of calculations… Somebody said Evolutionary Algorithms? Yes, of course! :D

Thus, it is possible to conclude that the organised event was productive.

Alexander is doing a short visit to our group until next June.

GeNeura at European Project MUSES Final Review

GeNeura’s members have been working in the three-year long, FP7 European project MUSES, which faced its last review last week at the European Commision Beaulieu Quarter Buildings in Brussels.

UGR was one of the partners participating in this project. More concretely, GeNeura’s members have contributed by leading WP2 – MUSES framework definition and integration during the completion of tasks to define the MUSES System Architecture. In addition, GeNeura’s research has been applied to the project in WP5 – Self-adaptive event correlation, lead by a Spanish security company S2 Grupo. The main purpose of this WP was to develop a system which, on the one side, uses event correlation to detect Security Policy violations and, on the other side, performs an analysis of all the data in the system and creates new Security Policies or enhances the existing ones. Different types of classification, rule association, and clustering algorithms, as well as Data Mining techniques, have been applied with satisfactory results. These results were specially welcomed by the comission, ponting that such a system will be very helpful to enhance security. Also, MUSES is an Open Software project, and you can contribute at https://github.com/MusesProject

The results were presented by S2 Grupo and GeNeura together. The slides are now published on Slideshare:

It has been a pleasure for GeNeura to work in MUSES

Out of CPU cycles and in need to do science? No problem!

After the bad experience of spending money in clusters and grids and then spending more time doing maintenance, hack-proofing and installing stuff than science, maybe it is the time to rethink how massive distributed evolutionary computation should be done. Nowadays there are lots of free or use-based resources that can be tapped for doing volunteer-based evolutionary algorithms. That is way my last keynote and tutorial have dealt with that: the IDC Keynote, Low or No Cost Evolutionary computation, which you can access here in Heroku, puts the money where its mouth is: talking and doing volunteer-based evolutionary computing at the same time. The PPSN tutorial, Low or no cost distributed evolutionary computation, touched on the same topic, only longer and with more enphasis on tools.
So finally it is just a matter of a little Javascript and using free cloud resources and you can have your very own massive distributed experiment. Whose results will be published soon enough.

Apariciones en prensa del Proyecto Sipesca

Recientemente hemos inaugurado en la web de Sipesca [1] una sección con las apariciones en prensa del proyecto, para recoger la difusión que está teniendo el proyecto en los medios.

[1] http://sipesca.ugr.es/prensa/

 

CEDI 2013. Programar no es un juego de niños… ¿o sí?

Dentro del Primer Simposio Español de Entretenimiento Digital (SEED) del CEDI 2013, presentamos una herramienta para visualizar código Java en forma de videojuego tipo Super Mario.  El artículo se llama «Code Reimagined: Gamificación a través de la visualización de código».

La idea consiste en una representación tipo mapa (parecido a un treemap) del árbol sintáctico. Los bloques de código se representan mediante plataformas, las expresiones como cajas, los bucles con tuberías y el retorno como una puerta… la verdad es que esta representación da mucho juego.

Al ejecutar paso a paso el programa se visualiza a Secret Maryo (la versión libre de Super Mario) recorriendo el escenario del programa.

Aquí está el código y esta es la presentación:

OSGiLiath at #GECCO2013

Add your thoughts here… (optional)

OSGiLiath Evolutionary Framework

This week several members of Geneura group and ANYSELF project are attending to GECCO 2013 conference in Amsterdam. I’ve presented two papers related with OSGiLiath:

The first one, entitled Developing Services in a Service Oriented Architecture for Evolutionary Algorithms has been presented inside the EvoSoft workshop. It is a more technical continuation of the work «Service Oriented Evolutionary Algorithms«. Here is the abstract:

This paper shows the design and implementation of services for Evolutionary Computation in the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm. This paradigm allows independence in language and distribution, but the development requires to manage some technological and design issues, such as abstract design or unordered execution. To solve them, OSGiLiath, an implementation of an abstract Service Oriented Architecture for Evolutionary Algorithms, is used to develop new interoperable services taking into account these restrictions.

And here the presentation:

I also have presented the work «A Service Oriented…

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Is entropy good for solving the game of MasterMind?

Well, it does. In another paper published in the Evostar conference, we compare several methods for measuring how good a combination is when compared to the others that could possibly be the solution; so far we had mostly used most parts (counting the number of non-zero partitions), but, in this paper, that compares our previous Evo method with another created by the coauthors, Maestro-Montojo and Salcedo-Sanz, we find that Entropy, at least for these sizes, is the way to go. Here’s the poster

You can access the paper Comparing Evolutionary Algorithms to Solve the Game of MasterMind, by Javier Maestro-Montojo, Juan Julián Merelo and Sancho Salcedo-Sanz (first and last authors from the University of Alcalá de Henares) online or request a copy from the authors.

Optimización evolutiva de bots para el juego Planet Wars

Aquí está la presentación del trabajo que da título al post. Es una versión actualizada del trabajo que se presentó en el IWANN 2011, así que os refiero primero a esa versión por si no estáis al tanto.

For information about an early version of this work (in English) please check here.