Computer vision (CV) is a big and important field in artificial intelligence covering a wide range of applications. Image analysis is a major task in CV aiming to extract, analyse and understand the visual content of images. However, image-related tasks are very challenging due to many factors, e.g., high variations across images, high dimensionality, domain expertise requirement, and image distortions. Evolutionary computation (EC) approaches have been widely used for image analysis with significant achievement. However, there is no comprehensive survey of existing EC approaches to image analysis. To fill this gap, this paper provides a comprehensive survey covering all essential EC approaches to important image analysis tasks including edge detection, image segmentation, image feature analysis, image classification, object detection, and others. This survey aims to provide a better understanding of evolutionary computer vision (ECV) by discussing the contributions of different approaches and exploring how and why EC is used for CV and image analysis. The applications, challenges, issues, and trends associated to this research field are also discussed and summarised to provide further guidelines and opportunities for future research.

Portfolio management is a multi-period multi-objective optimisation problem subject to a wide range of constraints. However, in practice, portfolio management is treated as a single-period problem partly due to the computationally burdensome hyper-parameter search procedure needed to construct a multi-period Pareto frontier. This study presents the \gls{ParDen-Sur} modelling framework to efficiently perform the required hyper-parameter search. \gls{ParDen-Sur} extends previous surrogate frameworks by including a reservoir sampling-based look-ahead mechanism for offspring generation in \glspl{EA} alongside the traditional acceptance sampling scheme. We evaluate this framework against, and in conjunction with, several seminal \gls{MO} \glspl{EA} on two datasets for both the single- and multi-period use cases. Our results show that \gls{ParDen-Sur} can speed up the exploration for optimal hyper-parameters by almost $2\times$ with a statistically significant improvement of the Pareto frontiers, across multiple \glspl{EA}, for both datasets and use cases.

Evolution is the theory that plants and animals today have come from kinds that have existed in the past. Scientists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace dedicate their life to observe how species interact with their environment, grow, and change. We are able to predict future changes as well as simulate the process using genetic algorithms. Genetic Algorithms give us the opportunity to present multiple variables and parameters to an environment and change values to simulate different situations. By optimizing genetic algorithms to hold entities in an environment, we are able to assign varying characteristics such as speed, size, and cloning probability, to the entities to simulate real natural selection and evolution in a shorter period of time. Learning about how species grow and evolve allows us to find ways to improve technology, help animals going extinct to survive, and figure* out how diseases spread and possible ways of making an environment uninhabitable for them. Using data from an environment including genetic algorithms and parameters of speed, size, and cloning percentage, the ability to test several changes in the environment and observe how the species interacts within it appears. After testing different environments with a varied amount of food while keeping the number of starting population at 10 entities, it was found that an environment with a scarce amount of food was not sustainable for small and slow entities. All environments displayed an increase in speed, but the environments that were richer in food allowed for the entities to live for the entire duration of 50 generations, as well as allowed the population to grow significantly.

The advancements in machine learning techniques have encouraged researchers to apply these techniques to a myriad of software engineering tasks that use source code analysis, such as testing and vulnerability detection. Such a large number of studies hinders the community from understanding the current research landscape. This paper aims to summarize the current knowledge in applied machine learning for source code analysis. We review studies belonging to twelve categories of software engineering tasks and corresponding machine learning techniques, tools, and datasets that have been applied to solve them. To do so, we conducted an extensive literature search and identified 479 primary studies published between 2011 and 2021. We summarize our observations and findings with the help of the identified studies. Our findings suggest that the use of machine learning techniques for source code analysis tasks is consistently increasing. We synthesize commonly used steps and the overall workflow for each task and summarize machine learning techniques employed. We identify a comprehensive list of available datasets and tools useable in this context. Finally, the paper discusses perceived challenges in this area, including the availability of standard datasets, reproducibility and replicability, and hardware resources.

Tiny protein factories, or ribosomes, have been made to self-replicate outside a living cell for the first time. The achievement is a crucial step towards building self-replicating artificial cells from scratch and understanding how the first living things started reproducing themselves. Ribosomes are where the genetic code gets translated into proteins – complex molecules that make up the machinery of living cells. In order for the earliest life to get going, many researchers think ribosomes must have been able to assemble and replicate before there were cells.

Lattice paths are functional entities that model efficient navigation in discrete/grid maps. This paper presents a new scheme to generate collision-free lattice paths with utmost efficiency using the bijective property to rooted ordered trees, rendering a one-dimensional search problem. Our computational studies using ten state-of-the-art and relevant nature-inspired swarm heuristics in navigation scenarios with obstacles with convex and non-convex geometry show the practical feasibility and efficiency in rendering collision-free lattice paths. We believe our scheme may find use in devising fast algorithms for planning and combinatorial optimization in discrete maps.

Abstract--The Job Shop Schedule Problem (JSSP) refers to the ability of an agent to allocate tasks that should be executed in a specified time in a machine from a cluster. The task allocation can be achieved from several methods, however, this report it is explored the ability of the Ant Colony Optimization to generate feasible solutions for several JSSP instances. This proposal models the JSSP as a complete graph since disjunct models can prevent the ACO from exploring all the search space. Several instances of the JSSP were used to evaluate the proposal. Results suggest that the algorithm can reach optimum solutions for easy and harder instances with a selection of parameters.

Exploring search spaces is one of the most unpredictable challenges that has attracted the interest of researchers for decades. One way to handle unpredictability is to characterise the search spaces and take actions accordingly. A well-characterised search space can assist in mapping the problem states to a set of operators for generating new problem states. In this paper, a landscape analysis-based set of features has been analysed using the most renown machine learning approaches to determine the optimal feature set. However, in order to deal with problem complexity and induce commonality for transferring experience across domains, the selection of the most representative features remains crucial. The proposed approach analyses the predictivity of a set of features in order to determine the best categorization.

Customer satisfaction is crucially affected by energy consumption in mobile devices. One of the most energy-consuming parts of an application is images. While different images with different quality consume different amounts of energy, there are no straightforward methods to calculate the energy consumption of an operation in a typical image. This paper, first, investigates that there is a correlation between energy consumption and image quality as well as image file size. Therefore, these two can be considered as a proxy for energy consumption. Then, we propose a multi-objective strategy to enhance image quality and reduce image file size based on the quantisation tables in JPEG image compression. To this end, we have used two general multi-objective metaheuristic approaches: scalarisation and Pareto-based. Scalarisation methods find a single optimal solution based on combining different objectives, while Pareto-based techniques aim to achieve a set of solutions. In this paper, we embed our strategy into five scalarisation algorithms, including energy-aware multi-objective genetic algorithm (EnMOGA), energy-aware multi-objective particle swarm optimisation (EnMOPSO), energy-aware multi-objective differential evolution (EnMODE), energy-aware multi-objective evolutionary strategy (EnMOES), and energy-aware multi-objective pattern search (EnMOPS). Also, two Pareto-based methods, including a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) and a reference-point-based NSGA-II (NSGA-III) are used for the embedding scheme, and two Pareto-based algorithms, EnNSGAII and EnNSGAIII, are presented. Experimental studies show that the performance of the baseline algorithm is improved by embedding the proposed strategy into metaheuristic algorithms.

Evolutionary Computation (EC) has been shown to be able to quickly train Deep Artificial Neural Networks (DNNs) to solve Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems. While a Genetic Algorithm (GA) is well-suited for exploiting reward functions that are neither deceptive nor sparse, it struggles when the reward function is either of those. To that end, Novelty Search (NS) has been shown to be able to outperform gradient-following optimizers in some cases, while under-performing in others. We propose a new algorithm: Explore-Exploit $\gamma$-Adaptive Learner ($E^2\gamma AL$, or EyAL). By preserving a dynamically-sized niche of novelty-seeking agents, the algorithm manages to maintain population diversity, exploiting the reward signal when possible and exploring otherwise. The algorithm combines both the exploitation power of a GA and the exploration power of NS, while maintaining their simplicity and elegance. Our experiments show that EyAL outperforms NS in most scenarios, while being on par with a GA -- and in some scenarios it can outperform both. EyAL also allows the substitution of the exploiting component (GA) and the exploring component (NS) with other algorithms, e.g., Evolution Strategy and Surprise Search, thus opening the door for future research.