EvoJAX is a scalable, general purpose, hardware-accelerated neuroevolution toolkit. Built on top of the JAX library, this toolkit enables neuroevolution algorithms to work with neural networks running in parallel across multiple TPU/GPUs. EvoJAX achieves very high performance by implementing the evolution algorithm, neural network and task all in NumPy, which is compiled just-in-time to run on accelerators. This repo also includes several extensible examples of EvoJAX for a wide range of tasks, including supervised learning, reinforcement learning and generative art, demonstrating how EvoJAX can run your evolution experiments within minutes on a single accelerator, compared to hours or days when using CPUs. EvoJAX is implemented in JAX which needs to be installed first.

An examination of machine learning art and its practice in new media art and music.Over the past decade, an artistic movement has emerged that draws on machine learning as both inspiration and medium. In this book, transdisciplinary artist-researcher Sofian Audry examines artistic practices at the intersection of machine learning and new media art, providing conceptual tools and historical perspectives for new media artists, musicians, composers, writers, curators, and theorists. Audry looks at works from a broad range of practices, including new media installation, robotic art, visual art, electronic music and sound, and electronic literature, connecting machine learning art to such earlier artistic practices as cybernetics art, artificial life art, and evolutionary art. Machine learning underlies computational systems that are biologically inspired, statistically driven, agent-based networked entities that program themselves. Audry explains the fundamental design of machine learning algorithmic structures in terms accessible to the nonspecialist while framing these technologies within larger historical and conceptual spaces. Audry debunks myths about machine learning art, including the ideas that machine learning can create art without artists and that machine learning will soon bring about superhuman intelligence and creativity. Audry considers learning procedures, describing how artists hijack the training process by playing with evaluative functions; discusses trainable machines and models, explaining how different types of machine learning systems enable different kinds of artistic practices; and reviews the role of data in machine learning art, showing how artists use data as a raw material to steer learning systems and arguing that machine learning allows for novel forms of algorithmic remixes.

Machine learning (ML) has become ubiquitous in scientific disciplines. In some applications, accurate data-driven predictions are all that is required; however, in many others, interpretability and explainability of the model is equally important. Interpretability and explainability can provide justification for decisions, promote scientific discovery and ultimately lead to better control/improvement of models [1, 2]. In a complementary fashion, ML models can provide further insight by conveying their level of uncertainty in predictions [3]. Especially in cases of low risk tolerance this type of insight is crucial for building trust in ML models [4]. Rather than focus on black-box ML methods (e.g., neural networks or Gaussian process regression) combined with post hoc explainability tools, the current work focuses on inherently interpretable methods. Interpretable ML methods can be competitive with black-box ML in terms of accuracy and do not require a separate explainability toolkit [4, 5]. Symbolic regression is one such inherently interpretable form of ML wherein an analytic equation is produced that best models input data.

Practitioners often encounter challenging real-world problems that involve a simultaneous optimization of multiple objectives in a complex search space. To address these problems, we propose a practical multiobjective Bayesian optimization algorithm. It is an extension of the widely used Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE) algorithm, called Multiobjective Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (MOTPE). We demonstrate that MOTPE approximates the Pareto fronts of a variety of benchmark problems and a convolutional neural network design problem better than existing methods through the numerical results. We also investigate how the configuration of MOTPE affects the behavior and the performance of the method and the effectiveness of asynchronous parallelization of the method based on the empirical results.

Despite recent improvements in computer vision, artificial visual systems' design is still daunting since an explanation of visual computing algorithms remains elusive. Salient object detection is one problem that is still open due to the difficulty of understanding the brain's inner workings. Progress on this research area follows the traditional path of hand-made designs using neuroscience knowledge. In recent years two different approaches based on genetic programming appear to enhance their technique. One follows the idea of combining previous hand-made methods through genetic programming and fuzzy logic. The other approach consists of improving the inner computational structures of basic hand-made models through artificial evolution. This research work proposes expanding the artificial dorsal stream using a recent proposal to solve salient object detection problems. This approach uses the benefits of the two main aspects of this research area: fixation prediction and detection of salient objects. We decided to apply the fusion of visual saliency and image segmentation algorithms as a template. The proposed methodology discovers several critical structures in the template through artificial evolution. We present results on a benchmark designed by experts with outstanding results in comparison with the state-of-the-art.

Howie Choset is a Professor of Robotics where he serves as the co-director, along with Matt Travers, of the Biorobotics Lab. Choset's research program has made contributions to strategically significant problems in surgery, manufacturing, on-orbit maintenance, recycling and search and rescue. His work is most famous for its snake robots and other biologically inspired systems and recently his group has been contributing to robotic modularity, multi-agent planning, information-based search, and skill learning. Currently, Choset's projects include: medical support in the field, expeditionary robotics, on-orbit maintenance and construction of structures in space, rapidly carrying heavy objects up several flights of stairs, recycling of E-waste, food preparation, "edge"-sensing, and aerospace painting. Choset has led multi-PI projects centered on manufacturing: (1) automating the programming of robots for auto-body painting; (2) the development of mobile manipulators for agile and flexible fixture-free manufacturing of large structures in aerospace, and (3) the creation of a data-robot ecosystem for rapid manufacturing in the commercial electronics industry.

Genetic algorithms (GA) are optimisation, search and learning algorithms famous for their ability to solve problems with large number parameters and complex mathematical representations and they are sometimes used to tune models parameters in machine learning . NASA used them to create optimised antennas for their spacecrafts . The initial population is a set of valid candidates (individuals) with a specified population size chosen randomly .

With the global production of 150 million tons in 2016, ethylene is one of the most significant building blocks in today's chemical industry. Most ethylene is now produced in cracking furnaces by thermal cracking of fossil feedstocks with steam. This process consumes around 8% of the main energy used in the petrochemical industry, making it the single most energy-intensive process in the chemical industry. This paper studies a tubular thermal cracking reactor fed by propane and the molecular mechanism of the reaction within the reactor. After developing the reaction model, the existing issues, such as the reaction, flow, momentum, and energy, were resolved by applying heat to the outer tube wall.

Wind energy is one of the cleanest renewable electricity sources and can help in addressing the challenge of climate change. One of the drawbacks of wind-generated energy is the large space necessary to install a wind farm; this arises from the fact that placing wind turbines in a limited area would hinder their productivity and therefore not be economically convenient. This naturally leads to an optimisation problem, which has three specific challenges: (1) multiple conflicting objectives (2) computationally expensive simulation models and (3) optimisation over design sets instead of design vectors. The first and second challenges can be addressed by using surrogate-assisted e.g.\ Bayesian multi-objective optimisation. However, the traditional Bayesian optimisation cannot be applied as the optimisation function in the problem relies on design sets instead of design vectors. This paper extends the applicability of Bayesian multi-objective optimisation to set based optimisation for solving the wind farm layout problem. We use a set-based kernel in Gaussian process to quantify the correlation between wind farms (with a different number of turbines). The results on the given data set of wind energy and direction clearly show the potential of using set-based Bayesian multi-objective optimisation.

Optimisation problems often have multiple conflicting objectives that can be computationally and/or financially expensive. Mono-surrogate Bayesian optimisation (BO) is a popular model-based approach for optimising such black-box functions. It combines objective values via scalarisation and builds a Gaussian process (GP) surrogate of the scalarised values. The location which maximises a cheap-to-query acquisition function is chosen as the next location to expensively evaluate. While BO is an effective strategy, the use of GPs is limiting. Their performance decreases as the problem input dimensionality increases, and their computational complexity scales cubically with the amount of data. To address these limitations, we extend previous work on BO by density-ratio estimation (BORE) to the multi-objective setting. BORE links the computation of the probability of improvement acquisition function to that of probabilistic classification. This enables the use of state-of-the-art classifiers in a BO-like framework. In this work we present MBORE: multi-objective Bayesian optimisation by density-ratio estimation, and compare it to BO across a range of synthetic and real-world benchmarks. We find that MBORE performs as well as or better than BO on a wide variety of problems, and that it outperforms BO on high-dimensional and real-world problems.