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https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/112208355718713539649
Judea Pearl gave the ACM Turing Lecture at AAAI-2012
Judea Pearl, the 2011 ACM A.M. Turing Award winner, presented the ACM Turing Lecture at the AAAI 2012 conference on artificial intelligence in Toronto on July 24. The lecture was entitled The Mechanization of Causal Inference: A ‘Mini Turing Test’ and Beyond. The lecture should be soon available as an on-demand video on the Turing Lecture site. For more information, please visit the ACM announcement and
Genetic algorithms fool eye scanners
Photo courtesy of Wilody, http://fc-foto.com/18276395.
Wired.com reported on an application of a genetic algorithm that generates iris images capable of fooling eye scanners. From the article:
Their research involved taking iris codes that had been created from real eye scans as well as synthetic iris images created wholly by computers and modifying the latter until the synthetic images matched real iris images. The researchers used a genetic algorithm to achieve their results.
For more information, see the original article at wired.com.
Horns of elk and rhinoceros beetles likely to have an evolutionary reason
Earlier today, Danielle Whittaker made an interesting post on the blog of BEACON, an NSF Center for the Study of Evolution in Action about the study of Ian Dworkin, Michigan State University zoologist and his team. In the study, Dworkin’s team showed for the first time that horns seen in elk and rhinoceros beetles are sensitive to change in nutrition. The results of the study suggest that the traits are more likely to have evolved as indicators of quality rather than handicaps. “While more work needs to be done, our results provide and important way of linking genetic mechanism with the ultimate evolutionary reason for the trait exaggeration,” Dworkin said.
For more about this work, please visit the original post on BEACON, see the MSU Press Release, or go directly to the Science article discussing the study.
Demonstration of evolutionary algorithm application in robotics at BEACON
BEACON, an NSF Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, has featured a demonstration of MSU undergraduate student Faisal Tameesh, in which he explains how he applied an evolutionary algorithm to a simple robotics problem. The video follows:
SIGEVOlution Volume 6 Issue 1 is now online
The new issue of SIGEVOlution is now available for you to download
from:
The issue features:
- Lessons from an App Ecosystem by Soo Ling Lim & Peter J. Bentley
- Distilling GeneChips by William B. Langdon
- Calls & calendar
The newsletter is intended to be viewed electronically.
STARS has now concluded
Earlier today I attended the presentation of Yoni Biel and David Hua, the two high school students I mentored in the Students and Teachers As Research Scientists (STARS) program at the Missouri Estimation of Distribution Algorithms Laboratory (MEDAL). Working with high school students was a lot of fun, and I must say that I learned a lot myself. More on the project can be found at http://stars.martinpelikan.net.
Presentation slides from GECCO-2012
GECCO-2012: Last day and last talk
It’s now the 5th and last day of GECCO-2012. After attending the SIGEVO Business Meeting in the morning, I am now getting ready for my last presentation at the conference. The presentation is going to be on image segmentation using a genetic algorithm and hierarchical local search. A preprint of the paper can be downloaded as MEDAL Report 2012.
GECCO-2012: Poster session
Getting ready to attend the poster session in a bit on day 4 of the conference, we have a poster there on linkage learning. Tomorrow’s the last day of GECCO-2012, going to attend the SIGEVO Business Meeting in the morning and then prepare the talk for the early afternoon.