About Game Bots and Ambient Assisted Living

Last week we were in IWANN Conference, held in Torremolinos (Málaga), presenting two different works. The first one is about evolving IA bots for playing games in the Google AI Challenge. The basic idea is to improve the parameters of a hard-coded bot. Results shown that the default parameters we thought are important may be not work so good, and we can learn a lot of emerging behavior of the trained bot.

Here is the presentation:

Citation is here

The second one, is about a project I was working in last year. It’s about Ambient Assisted Living, Context-awareness and other stuff like that. The presentation is not so awesome. It was presented in the satellite workshop IWAAL.

You can download the paper in Springerlink here.

Thesis on Peer-to-Peer Evolutionary Computation

Last 27th May, I had the dissertation of my thesis entitled: «Peer-to-Peer Evolutionary Computation: A Study of Viability«. It analyzes the viability of the Peer-to-Peer Evolutionary Computation concept and uses to that aim a P2P system as a substrate platform for a parallel implementation of a spatially-structured EA. Dynamics of the P2P platform are extensively described as well as their interactions with the parallel EA which demonstrates good scalability and resilience to the degradation of the system.

Hope that you enjoy the read (if you are crazy enough to go ahead) as I did in the write.

Pervasive evolutionary algorithms on mobile devices

Last week I received the paper aceptance notification for the DCAI conference in Salamanca. This time we are going to present a distributed algorithm framework for mobile devices using Bluetooth. Ok, today I am quite lazy (today, and all the days, actually), so I think the best idea is to copy the abstract.

Abstract. This work presents a Java framework which allows to implement easily connectivity applications via Bluetooth. Nowadays it is difficult to program Bluetooth devices, so it is necessary to use a high-level Application Programming Interface (API) to make easy the creation of applications in Java ME and Java SE platforms, the most extended ones. As a solution we show the development of a distributed computing environment using a layered, client-server, and event-based with asynchronous communication architecture. In addition we solve two well-known evolutionary computation problems (the Traveler Salesman Problem and the Wave Function Problem), as an example of use.

The most interesting thing is that we have used real mobiles in order to execute the experiments, with all associated problems. It is difficult to find a compatible mobile phone with a Bluetooth stack that works properly. Even is not easy communicate two phones of the same fabricant but different model! But finally we managed to start the experiment, as you can see in the next photo.

Two Nokias executing our distributed algorithm. Photo by DraXus.

You can download the draft from here.

[PACT’08][PABA Workshop I] Addressing Churn in P2P EA

This week the first Workshop on Parallel Architerctures and Bioinspired Algorithms is being held in Toronto (Canada) in conjunction with the prestigious conference Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT).

In extension to our line of work in P2P EAs, we have presented the work:

• Addressing Churn in a Peer-to-Peer Evolutionary Algorithm

In this paper we analyse the robustness of a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) subject to the following dynamics: peers leave the system independently from each other causing a collective effect known as churn. The algorithm has been designed to tackle large instances of computationally expensive problems and, in this paper, we will assess its behavior under churn. To that end, we have performed a scalability analysis in five different scenarios using the Massively Multimodal Deceptive Problem as a
benchmark.  In all cases, the P2P EA reaches the success criterion without a penalty on the response time. The key to the algorithm robustness is to ensure enough peers at the beginning of the experiment. Some of them leave but those that remain are enough to guarantee a reliable  convergence.

Magical Science! (MSc)

Last friday I returned from the First Ferguson World Tour Of Science. I was traveling around Europe in order to present some things about my research.

First we arrived at Dortmund, Germany, where the Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN 2008) was celebrated. There I presented my paper «Evolving XSLT Stylesheets for Document Transformation» that you can download from here.

You can see me in this photo that JJ took explaining my poster to a great audience:

I hadn’t any problem explaining it. Nobody came to complain about colours, XML future, or typos in the word «Conclusions». Oh, wait, I could remember… no, nobody came.

Here you can see me doing some magical science. Mmmh, who will be these guys sitting in that table?

After that I went to Castellón (Valencia, Spain) to present my paper «Algoritmos evolutivos distribuidos sobre dispositivos Bluetooth» (in Spanish, as you can see, but you also can download from here).

I’m uploading my own photos to my Flickr account.

Just to say that it has been an awesome travel around the world! I met a lot of interesting people and learnt a lot. Yeah, I really love the researcher’s life.

The title of this post is due to today I received my MSc degree (I presented this paper in Granada, where I am a grad student).