Evolutionary Systems
Oscars 2022: Who Got More Winners Right, AI or the Movie Experts?
Every year for the last six years, Unanimous AI has been more accurate than movie critics at predicting Oscar winners. It uses swarm intelligence the power of interactive group decisions enhanced by AI โ to transform regular people into expert decision-makers. How did it do this year? Unanimous AI took a group of regular movie fans and created a'hive mind' in which their combined choices are smarter than those of any individual member. "We can take a group of people and turn them into a super organism," founder Louis Rosenberg told IoT World Today's sister publication AI Business.
This Custom Drone Whooshes Closer to the Snowboarding Action
Filming a top-level backcountry snowboarding event presents distinct technical challenges. The action moves all over the mountain; riders navigate through groups of trees, sail over jumps, and carve around obstacles, all the while making split-second adjustments to their speed and direction. The unpredictable and fast-paced nature of the competition can leave even the most talented camera operators struggling to keep up. For Travis Rice and Liam Griffin, the organizers of the Natural Selection Tour, this issue was compounded by the fact that they wanted to broadcast their event live. The annual three-stop jamboree sees a hand-picked field of the world's top snowboarders (eight women and 16 men) compete at specially selected courses in Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Alaska; and British Columbia.
A novel evolutionary-based neuro-fuzzy task scheduling approach to jointly optimize the main design challenges of heterogeneous MPSoCs
Abdi, Athena, Salimi-Badr, Armin
In this paper, an online task scheduling and mapping method based on a fuzzy neural network (FNN) learned by an evolutionary multi-objective algorithm (NSGA-II) to jointly optimize the main design challenges of heterogeneous MPSoCs is proposed. In this approach, first, the FNN parameters are trained using an NSGA-II-based optimization engine by considering the main design challenges of MPSoCs including temperature, power consumption, failure rate, and execution time on a training dataset consisting of different application graphs of various sizes. Next, the trained FNN is employed as an online task scheduler to jointly optimize the main design challenges in heterogeneous MPSoCs. Due to the uncertainty in sensor measurements and the difference between computational models and reality, applying the fuzzy neural network is advantageous in online scheduling procedures. The performance of the method is compared with some previous heuristic, meta-heuristic, and rule-based approaches in several experiments. Based on these experiments our proposed method outperforms the related studies in optimizing all design criteria. Its improvement over related heuristic and meta-heuristic approaches are estimated 10.58% in temperature, 9.22% in power consumption, 39.14% in failure rate, and 12.06% in execution time, averagely. Moreover, considering the interpretable nature of the FNN, the frequently fired extracted fuzzy rules of the proposed approach are demonstrated.
New voices in AI: Tanja Kaiser
Welcome to the third episode of New voices in AI! This episode features Tanja Kaiser sharing her journey to working with swarm robotics. Where are you from/ where do you work? I'm Tanja Katharina Kaiser and I'm currently a research assistant and final year doctoral candidate in the Service Robotics Group led by Prof. Dr.-Ing. My current research focus is on evolutionary swarm robotics, but I am interested in swarm intelligence and bio-inspired robotics in general.
The importance of being constrained: dealing with infeasible solutions in Differential Evolution and beyond
Kononova, Anna V., Vermetten, Diederick, Caraffini, Fabio, Mitran, Madalina-A., Zaharie, Daniela
We argue that results produced by a heuristic optimisation algorithm cannot be considered reproducible unless the algorithm fully specifies what should be done with solutions generated outside the domain, even in the case of simple box constraints. Currently, in the field of heuristic optimisation, such specification is rarely mentioned or investigated due to the assumed triviality or insignificance of this question. Here, we demonstrate that, at least in algorithms based on Differential Evolution, this choice induces notably different behaviours - in terms of performance, disruptiveness and population diversity. This is shown theoretically (where possible) for standard Differential Evolution in the absence of selection pressure and experimentally for the standard and state-of-the-art Differential Evolution variants on special test function $f_0$ and BBOB benchmarking suite, respectively. Moreover, we demonstrate that the importance of this choice quickly grows with problem's dimensionality. Different Evolution is not at all special in this regard - there is no reason to presume that other heuristic optimisers are not equally affected by the aforementioned algorithmic choice. Thus, we urge the field of heuristic optimisation to formalise and adopt the idea of a new algorithmic component in heuristic optimisers, which we call here a strategy of dealing with infeasible solutions. This component needs to be consistently (a) specified in algorithmic descriptions to guarantee reproducibility of results, (b) studied to better understand its impact on algorithm's performance in a wider sense and (c) included in the (automatic) algorithmic design. All of these should be done even for problems with box constraints.
An Improved Genetic Algorithm and Its Application in Neural Network Adversarial Attack
Yang, Dingming, Yu, Zeyu, Yuan, Hongqiang, Cui, Yanrong
The choice of crossover and mutation strategies plays a crucial role in the searchability, convergence efficiency and precision of genetic algorithms. In this paper, a novel improved genetic algorithm is proposed by improving the crossover and mutation operation of the simple genetic algorithm, and it is verified by 15 test functions. The qualitative results show that, compared with three other mainstream swarm intelligence optimization algorithms, the algorithm can not only improve the global search ability, convergence efficiency and precision, but also increase the success rate of convergence to the optimal value under the same experimental conditions. The quantitative results show that the algorithm performs superiorly in 13 of the 15 tested functions. The Wilcoxon rank-sum test was used for statistical evaluation, showing the significant advantage of the algorithm at $95\%$ confidence intervals. Finally, the algorithm is applied to neural network adversarial attacks. The applied results show that the method does not need the structure and parameter information inside the neural network model, and it can obtain the adversarial samples with high confidence in a brief time just by the classification and confidence information output from the neural network.
Implementing Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm to Solve Business Problems
Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm (ABC) is an optimization algorithm based on the intelligent foraging behavior of a honey bee swarm. We'll be looking at the ABC algorithm in detail through its purpose, implementation, and functionality. We will then solve a few problems optimizing benchmark functions such as Sphere, Himmelblau, and the Cross-In-Tray function shown below. We will also look at the application of the ABC Algorithm to real-world business problems. Full, reusable code for the implementation is available on Github. At AAXIS Digital, we routinely encounter intractable business optimization problems that require out-of-the-box thinking. To model these business problems to be solved computationally, we need to model it as a list of decision variables representing a candidate solution and be able to compute a "measure of goodness", called the objective function.
Kernel Density Estimation by Genetic Algorithm
This study proposes a data condensation method for multivariate kernel density estimation by genetic algorithm. First, our proposed algorithm generates multiple subsamples of a given size with replacement from the original sample. The subsamples and their constituting data points are regarded as $\it{chromosome}$ and $\it{gene}$, respectively, in the terminology of genetic algorithm. Second, each pair of subsamples breeds two new subsamples, where each data point faces either $\it{crossover}$, $\it{mutation}$, or $\it{reproduction}$ with a certain probability. The dominant subsamples in terms of fitness values are inherited by the next generation. This process is repeated generation by generation and brings the sparse representation of kernel density estimator in its completion. We confirmed from simulation studies that the resulting estimator can perform better than other well-known density estimators.
Introduction to Genetic Algorithms -- Including Example Code
A genetic algorithm is a search heuristic that is inspired by Charles Darwin's theory of natural evolution. This algorithm reflects the process of natural selection where the fittest individuals are selected for reproduction in order to produce offspring of the next generation. The process of natural selection starts with the selection of fittest individuals from a population. They produce offspring which inherit the characteristics of the parents and will be added to the next generation. If parents have better fitness, their offspring will be better than parents and have a better chance at surviving.
Competitors-Aware Stochastic Lap Strategy Optimisation for Race Hybrid Vehicles
Braghin, Francesco, Paparusso, Luca, Riani, Manuel, Ruggeri, Fabio
World Endurance Championship (WEC) racing events are characterised by a relevant performance gap among competitors. The fastest vehicles category, consisting in hybrid vehicles, has to respect energy usage constraints set by the technical regulation. Considering absence of competitors, i.e. traffic conditions, the optimal energy usage strategy for lap time minimisation is typically computed through a constrained optimisation problem. To the best of our knowledge, the majority of state-of-the-art works neglects competitors. This leads to a mismatch with the real world, where traffic generates considerable time losses. To bridge this gap, we propose a new framework to offline compute optimal strategies for the powertrain energy management considering competitors. Through analysis of the available data from previous events, statistics on the sector times and overtaking probabilities are extracted to encode the competitors' behaviour. Adopting a multi-agent model, the statistics are then used to generate realistic Monte Carlo (MC) simulation of their position along the track. The simulator is then adopted to identify the optimal strategy as follows. We develop a longitudinal vehicle model for the ego-vehicle and implement an optimisation problem for lap time minimisation in absence of traffic, based on Genetic Algorithms. Solving the optimisation problem for a variety of constraints generates a set of candidate optimal strategies. Stochastic Dynamic Programming is finally implemented to choose the best strategy considering competitors, whose motion is generated by the MC simulator. Our approach, validated on data from a real stint of race, allows to significantly reduce the lap time.