I read Artificial Intelligence for Humans, Volume 1 and then ordered volumes 2 and 3. What I like about this series is the same thing I like about Volume 2, that it's very readable. For someone without a math background, and limited programming prowess, I can understand the concepts. The only things about the book that I don't like are: 1) Some of the context is missing. For instance, I can understand Genetic Algorithms, Partical Swarm Optimization, and Ant Colony Optimization as concepts and I think I could basically code them if I needed to. I would say his forte is explaining the ideas and the math in plain language.

The emergence and development of cancer is a consequence of the accumulation over time of genomic mutations involving a specific set of genes, which provides the cancer clones with a functional selective advantage. In this work, we model the order of accumulation of such mutations during the progression, which eventually leads to the disease, by means of probabilistic graphic models, i.e., Bayesian Networks (BNs). We investigate how to perform the task of learning the structure of such BNs, according to experimental evidence, adopting a global optimization meta-heuristics. In particular, in this work we rely on Genetic Algorithms, and to strongly reduce the execution time of the inference -- which can also involve multiple repetitions to collect statistically significant assessments of the data -- we distribute the calculations using both multi-threading and a multi-node architecture. The results show that our approach is characterized by good accuracy and specificity; we also demonstrate its feasibility, thanks to a 84x reduction of the overall execution time with respect to a traditional sequential implementation.

Machine Learning (ML), a branch of Computer Science that focuses on drawing insights and conclusions by examining data sets, is an increasingly popular discipline today in resolving enterprise business issues. However the field is vast and consists of numerous algorithms and approaches. Data sets are also often complex and require to be pre-processed before an ML algorithm can be'trained' to learn from such data. For a particular problem domain and data set, defining the pre-processing technique and selecting the ML algorithm (or set of algorithms) is still largely'an art rather than a science' depending on the knowledge and skills of the expert/data scientist in question. With time this will change and scientific guiding principles/best practices will emerge to pre-process data and to select appropriate algorithms for a particular problem domain - as the discipline matures.

Climate change has the potential to affect the ecology and evolution of every species on Earth. Although the ecological consequences of climate change are increasingly well documented, the effects of climate on the key evolutionary process driving adaptation--natural selection--are largely unknown. We report that aspects of precipitation and potential evapotranspiration, along with the North Atlantic Oscillation, predicted variation in selection across plant and animal populations throughout many terrestrial biomes, whereas temperature explained little variation. By showing that selection was influenced by climate variation, our results indicate that climate change may cause widespread alterations in selection regimes, potentially shifting evolutionary trajectories at a global scale.

Wondering who will win the 2017 Oscars? Instead of turning to industry experts, film critics, or polls, you can try something else this year: Artificial intelligence. A startup called Unanimous A.I. has been making predictions--like who will win the Superbowl, March Madness, US presidential debates, the Kentucky Derby--for the last two years. It uses a software platform called UNU to assemble people at their computers, who make a real-time prediction together. UNU's algorithm is built to harness the concept of "swarm" intelligence--the power of a group to make an intelligent, collective decision.

Quantum biomimetics consists of reproducing in quantum systems certain properties exclusive to living organisms. Researchers at University of the Basque Country have imitated natural selection, learning and memory in a new study. The mechanisms developed could give quantum computation a boost and facilitate the learning process in machines. Unai Alvarez-Rodriguez is a researcher in the Quantum Technologies for Information Science (QUTIS) research group attached to the UPV/EHU's Department of Physical Chemistry, and an expert in quantum information technologies. Quantum information technology uses quantum phenomena to encode computational tasks.

For the first time, astronomers have used advanced algorithms taken from evolutionary biology and successfully applied them to make a phylogenetic family tree of 22 nearby stars. In a paper appearing in the journal The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the authors report that they have taken a page from the work of Charles Darwin in an effort to do stellar genealogy on a sampling of stars within our own galaxy. "We worked together with people from evolutionary biology and basically applied the principles of biology to astronomy," Paula Jofre, the paper's lead author and an astronomer at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., told me. "We used the chemical elements of the stars as if they were the DNA and used genetic algorithms that have been built in evolutionary biology to create the trees." Astronomers hope to use this new data to develop a genealogical family tree of millions of our galaxy's stars.

Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) has no formal framework which could provide solutions covering different domains within the MRTA taxonomy without changing the optimization scheme. This research aims to develop a novel framework using evolutionary computing. The study proposes a modular approach towards developing this framework in which individual problem types of the MRTA taxonomy are solved one at a time. The performance of the framework will be evaluated against the popular approaches suggested for each problem type.

Besides fashion, personalization is another important factor of wearing. How to balance fashion trend and personal preference to better appreciate wearing is a non-trivial task. In previous work we develop a demo, Magic Mirror, to recommend clothing collocation based on the fashion trend. However, the diversity of people’s aesthetics is huge. In order to meet different demand, Magic Mirror is upgraded in this paper, and it can give out recommendations by considering both the fashion trend and personal preference, and work as a private clothing consultant. For more suitable recommendation, the virtual consultant will learn users’ tastes and preferences from their behaviors by using Genetic algorithm. Users can get collocations or matched top/bottom recommendation after choosing occasion and style. They can also get a report about their fashion state and aesthetic standpoint on recent wearing.

We provide a brief overview on some hot topics in the area of evolutionary computation. Our main focus is on recent developments in the areas of combinatorial optimization and real-world applications. Furthermore, we highlight recent progress on the theoretical understanding of evolutionary computing methods.