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.

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are intended to receive information from the environment through sensors and perform appropriate actions using actuators of the controller. In the last years world of intelligent technologies has grown in an exponential fashion: from cruise control to smart ecosystems. Next we are facing the future of CPS involved in almost every aspect of our lives bringing higher comfortability and efficiency. Our goal is to help smart inventions adjust to this highly uncertain environment and guarantee safety for its inhabitants. The physical environment renders the problem of CPS verification extremely cumbersome. Due to a wealth of uncertainties introduced by physical processes, the system is best described by stochastic models. Approximate prediction techniques, such as Statistical Model Checking (SMC), have therefore recently become increasingly popular. As a result, verification of a CPS boils down to quantitative analysis of how close the system is to reaching bad states (safety property) or desired goal (liveness property). Controlling the systems, that is, computing appropriate response actions depending on the environment, involves probabilistic state estimation, as well as optimal action prediction, i.e., choosing the best next step by simulating the future. In my thesis, I develop a novel intelligent algorithm addressing existing deficiencies of SMC such as poor prediction of rare events (RE) and sampling divergence.

Robot learning in simulation is a promising alternative to the prohibitive sample cost of learning in the physical world. Unfortunately, policies learned in simulation often perform worse than hand-coded policies when applied on the physical robot. Grounded simulation learning (GSL) promises to address this issue by altering the simulator to better match the real world. This paper proposes a new algorithm for GSL -- Grounded Action Transformation -- and applies it to learning of humanoid bipedal locomotion. Our approach results in a 43.27% improvement in forward walk velocity compared to a state-of-the art hand-coded walk. We further evaluate our methodology in controlled experiments using a second, higher-fidelity simulator in place of the real world. Our results contribute to a deeper understanding of grounded simulation learning and demonstrate its effectiveness for learning robot control policies.

For quite some time, the analysis of leukocyte images has drawn significant attention from the fields of medicine and computer vision alike where various techniques have been used to automate the manual analysis and classification of such images. Analysing such samples manually for detecting leukocytes is time-consuming and prone to error as the cells have different morphological features. Therefore, in order to automate and optimize the process, the nature-inspired Plant Growth Simulation Algorithm (PGSA) has been applied in this paper. An automated detection technique of white blood cells embedded in obscured, stained and smeared images of blood samples has been presented in this paper which is based on a random bionic algorithm and makes use of a fitness function that measures the similarity of the generated candidate solution to an actual leukocyte. As the proposed algorithm proceeds the set of candidate solutions evolves, guaranteeing their fit with the actual leukocytes outlined in the edge map of the image. The experimental results of the stained images and the empirical results reported validate the higher precision and sensitivity of the proposed method than the existing methods. Further, the proposed method reduces the feasible sets of candidate points in each iteration, thereby decreasing the required run time of load flow, objective function evaluation, thus reaching the goal state in minimum time and within the desired constraints.