|
|
|
|
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Prof. Mark Bedau
Reed College, Oregon, USA
Short Biography: Mark Bedau is currently a Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Reed College, Portland, USA and an Adjunct Professor of Systems Science at Portland State University, Portland, USA. He is also a Visiting Professor of the European School of Molecular Medicine. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Society of Artificial Life (ISAL) Journal. His research interests include, dynamical emergent processes, measuring and visualizing evolutionary dynamics, evolutionary design of chemical systems, the creativity of evolution, cultural evolution and the evolution of technology, the nature of life, the science of creating life from scratch and social and ethical implications of recreating life.
Title: The second creation: the scientific and social implications of making new forms of life in the laboratory.
Abstract: A?protocell is a microscopic minimal chemical system that assembles itself, grows and reproduces similar daughter protocell. The process of natural selection operating on a population of protocells could adapt and improve their ability to survive and reproduce. This talk selectively surveys the state of the art in protocell research and development, and sketches the social and ethical implications of making new forms of life in the laboratory.
Prof. Andries P. Engelbrecht
University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa
Short Biography: Andries P. Engelbrecht is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa. He is also a staff member of the Computational Intelligence Research Group (CIRG) hosted by the University of Pretoria, in the Department of Computer Science, and focuses on research in the broad realm of computational intelligence. Under this umbrella, work is done in the fields of swarm intelligence, evolutionary computation, neural networks, artificial immune systems, multi-agent systems, data and text mining, image analysis and game playing systems.
Title: CIlib: A Component-based Framework for Plug-and-Simulate Computational Intelligence Systems
Abstract: Research in Computational Intelligence (CI) has produced a huge collection of algorithms, grouped into the main CI paradigms. These CI algorithms are increasingly being used to create hybrid intelligent systems, where different algorithms from different CI paradigms are combined to form a new model. Implementation of such CI systems requires that the underlying CI algorithms be implemented. While most CI systems have specialized implementations focusing only on specific CI algorithms, the development process usually requires different variations of a CI technique to be implemented and tested in order to find the best combination of CI algorithms for the intelligent system. This process usually demands a re-implementation of existing algorithms, and sometimes even rewrites of the entire system skeleton. In addition to the CI components of complex CI systems, a communications protocal for information (or state) exchange among CI components needs to be defined and implemented. Here it may also become necessary to implement and test different communications protocols. When a final system has been produced, this system has to be thoroughly evaluated and benchmarked against other models.
The development and evaluation of a complex CI system can then become a tedious and time consuming process. Furthermore, re-implementation of existing CI algorithms may lead to code bugs and wastes time. Trying to implement a new generic CI system framework for each new research study can become a nightmare.
This presentation will introduce a new, opensource component-based framework which
-
provides a generic framework to implement any CI algorithm, or variation of that algorithm,
-
facilitates the process of implementing a generic CI system, where any of the CI algorithms (components) can be used within the system,
-
provides a generic framework for implementing any communications protocol,
-
allows easy implementation of the problem to be solved,
-
provides an XML interface to easily glue components together to form the CI system, and
-
provides a simulator to manage the process of running a specified number of simulations on all specified benchmark problem
The talk will discuss this library, called CIlib, in detail and will show that it provides an environment for plug-and-simulate CI systems, and doing so with minimal development effort.