Jornada sobre Smart Cities y Movilidad

El jueves 26 de noviembre de 2015 celebramos en la Sala de Usos Múltiples del CITIC-UGR (C/ Periodista Rafael Gómez, nº 2) la Jornada sobre Smart Cities y Movilidad, enmarcada en el Programa De Ayudas Genil Para Realización De Actividades Por Grupos De Investigación Interdiciplinares (RAGII-2015).

El objeto de esta Jornada fue la investigación en el área de la gestión de la movilidad, internet de las cosas y smart cities.

A lo largo de la mañana asistimos a varias conferencias, impartidas por responsables del Area de Movilidad del Ayuntamiento de Granada, de varias empresas, así como por parte de investigadores de la Universidad de Granada en este ámbito.

Los objetivos finales fueron crear sinergia entre los diversos grupos de investigación y empresas de este área, así como facilitar el contacto de cara a promover colaboraciones, tales como solicitar proyectos, o realizar transferencia de conocimiento a partir de los resultados de investigación.

El desarrollo de la Jornada se basó en presentaciones de unos 40 minutos, en las que el ponente, por parte del Área de Movilidad del Ayuntamiento de Granada, Nazaríes, UXMobile, Geokeda, e investigadores de los grupos de investigación, comentaron los proyectos en los que trabajan actualmente en el área de las smart cities, así como las problemáticas, y los retos a los que se enfrentan.

Workshop on Spatially Structured Metaheuristics

We cordially invite you to attend the following two-presentations on Spatially Structured Metaheuristics. This mini-workshop will be held at 11.30 a.m. in the CITIC-UGR building (June 26th, 2014).

Spatially Structured Metaheuristics: Principles and Practical Applications
by Juan Luis Jiménez Laredo (University of Luxembourg)

A relevant number of metaheuristics are based on population. Although conventions may establish different names, individuals in evolutionary algorithms, ants in ant colony optimization or particles in particle swarm optimization belong to the same side of a coin: they are all  atomic elements of the population (a.k.a. building-blocks). In this context, spatially structured metaheuristics investigate how to improve the performance of metaheuristics by confining these elements in neighborhoods. This talk aims at presenting the working principles of spatially structured metaheuristics and practical applications to enhance diversity, scalability and robustness.

 

Spatially Structured Metaheuristics: Dynamic and Self-organized Topologies
by Carlos M. Fernandes (University of Lisbon)

Population based metaheuristics are computational search or optimization methods that use a population of possible solutions to a problem. These solutions are able communicate, interact and/or evolve. Two types of strategies for structuring population are possible. In panmictic populations, every individual is allowed to interact with every other individual. In non-panmictic metaheuristics, also called spatially structured population-based metaheuristics, the interaction is restricted to a pre-defined or evolving structure (network). Traditional spatially structured metaheuristics are built on pre-defined static networks of acquaintances over which individuals can interact. However, alternative strategies that overcome some of the difficulties and limitations of static networks (extra design and tuning effort, ad hoc decision policies, rigid connectivity, and lack of feedback from the problem structure and search process) are possible. This talk discusses dynamic topologies for spatially structured metaheuristics and describes a new model for structuring populations into partially connected and self-organized networks. Recent applications of the model on Evolutionary Algorithms and Particle Swarm Optimization are given and discussed.

The 5th Hackathon

Six projects have taken part this year in the 5th hackathon at Granada for the University Free Software Contest, three of which come from the GeNeura team. We spent all the weekend working at Cocorocó’s facilities. We worked but also enjoyed it and had fun.  And the projects from GeNeura team are….:

OSGiLiath (from Pablo García, source code)

OSGiLiath (OSGi Laboratory for Implementation and Testing of metaHeuristics) is an open source framework for Service Oriented Evolutionary Algorithms.

ZomBlind (from Antonio Fernández, source code)

Zomblind is a post-apocalyptic mobile game of zombies. You have surely «lived» that, but now you can’t see your enemies, just hear them… Designed for players with visual impairments.

Code-Reimagined (from Javier Asensio, source code)

The idea is simple: turn your java code into a Super Maryo game stage. Then you can follow Maryo while debugging your code and quickly access any place on it. Many features are expected to be developed in the future.

The other competing projects are:

• Truco
• Daf-Collage
• ParticleQuest

If you like any, join!

Science and Videogames Tutorial

Last 16th November, inside the GAME-ON 2012 Conference, I presented (with Antonio Fernández Leiva) a tutorial entitled «Computational Intelligence applied to videogames; past, present and future».

It was a two parts tutorial, being the first one (mine) devoted to introduce the relationship between science and videogames, describing the integration of Computational Intelligence in this scope.

My part presentation can be seen here:

Enjoy it! :D

New operator for the Traveling Salesman Problem

As announced, Darrell Whitley gave a talk on the new operator his team has designed for the classic TSP.

After doing a review of all the classical techniques and operators used to solve this problem, he introduces his new crossover operator that tries not to introduce new edges in the offspring, acting thus as a pure recombination operator, instead of a crossover+mutation. This new operator is called perfect crossover, and is first respectful, and then it transmits alleles. It’s not always possible to apply it, but in samples studied it works 95% of the time. When used in combination with other mutation operators in an evolutionary algorithm, it yields very good results; not completely competitive with the best results known, but almost there.
It’s been great to have such a great talker in our weekly seminars. You can also check out his paper Tunneling between optima: partition crossover for the traveling salesman problem online

GeNeura at GECCO

Almost half the GeNeura-people will be at the GECCO conference, presenting a number of papers and posters. Here are a few:

This one is about detecting buzz in document streams using evolutionary algorithms. It’s been tested on Blogalia comments and stories.
The second one is related to our world domination plan: use stealthy computation based on Ruby on Rails (whose draft is at ArXiV).

As I said in my personal blog, we could maybe meet up there. I think there are around 6-7 evo-bloggers around.