Cooperative neuro - evolution of Elman recurrent networks for tropical cyclone wind - intensity prediction in the South Pacific region

Climate change issues are continuously on the rise and the need to build models and software systems for management of natural disasters such as cyclones is increasing. Cyclone wind-intensity prediction looks into efficient models to forecast the wind-intensification in tropical cyclones which can be used as a means of taking precautionary measures. If the wind-intensity is determined with high precision a few hours prior, evacuation and further precautionary measures can take place. Neural networks have become popular as efficient tools for forecasting. Recent work in neuro-evolution of Elman recurrent neural network showed promising performance for benchmark problems. This paper employs Cooperative Coevolution method for training Elman recurrent neural networks for Cyclone wind- intensity prediction in the South Pacific region. The results show very promising performance in terms of prediction using different parameters in time series data reconstruction

An architecture for encoding two - dimensional cyclone track prediction problem in coevolutionary recurrent neural networks

Cyclone track prediction is a two dimensional time series prediction problem that involves latitudes and longitudes which define the position of a cyclone. Recurrent neural networks have been suitable for time series prediction due to their architectural properties in modeling temporal sequences. Coevolutionary recurrent neural networks have been used for time series prediction and also applied to cyclone track prediction. In this paper, we present an architecture for encoding two dimensional time series problem into Elman recurrent neural networks composed of a single input neuron. We use cooperative coevolution and back-propagation through-time algorithms for training. Our experiments show an improvement in the accuracy when compared to previous results using a different recurrent network architecture

Dynamically reconfigurable bio-inspired hardware

During the last several years, reconfigurable computing devices have experienced an impressive development in their resource availability, speed, and configurability. Currently, commercial FPGAs offer the possibility of self-reconfiguring by partially modifying their configuration bitstream, providing high architectural flexibility, while guaranteeing high performance. These configurability features have received special interest from computer architects: one can find several reconfigurable coprocessor architectures for cryptographic algorithms, image processing, automotive applications, and different general purpose functions. On the other hand we have bio-inspired hardware, a large research field taking inspiration from living beings in order to design hardware systems, which includes diverse topics: evolvable hardware, neural hardware, cellular automata, and fuzzy hardware, among others. Living beings are well known for their high adaptability to environmental changes, featuring very flexible adaptations at several levels. Bio-inspired hardware systems require such flexibility to be provided by the hardware platform on which the system is implemented. In general, bio-inspired hardware has been implemented on both custom and commercial hardware platforms. These custom platforms are specifically designed for supporting bio-inspired hardware systems, typically featuring special cellular architectures and enhanced reconfigurability capabilities; an example is their partial and dynamic reconfigurability. These aspects are very well appreciated for providing the performance and the high architectural flexibility required by bio-inspired systems. However, the availability and the very high costs of such custom devices make them only accessible to a very few research groups. Even though some commercial FPGAs provide enhanced reconfigurability features such as partial and dynamic reconfiguration, their utilization is still in its early stages and they are not well supported by FPGA vendors, thus making their use difficult to include in existing bio-inspired systems. In this thesis, I present a set of architectures, techniques, and methodologies for benefiting from the configurability advantages of current commercial FPGAs in the design of bio-inspired hardware systems. Among the presented architectures there are neural networks, spiking neuron models, fuzzy systems, cellular automata and random boolean networks. For these architectures, I propose several adaptation techniques for parametric and topological adaptation, such as hebbian learning, evolutionary and co-evolutionary algorithms, and particle swarm optimization. Finally, as case study I consider the implementation of bio-inspired hardware systems in two platforms: YaMoR (Yet another Modular Robot) and ROPES (Reconfigurable Object for Pervasive Systems); the development of both platforms having been co-supervised in the framework of this thesis

Advances in Public Transport Platform for the Development of Sustainability Cities

Modern societies demand high and varied mobility, which in turn requires a complex transport system adapted to social needs that guarantees the movement of people and goods in an economically efficient and safe way, but all are subject to a new environmental rationality and the new logic of the paradigm of sustainability. From this perspective, an efficient and flexible transport system that provides intelligent and sustainable mobility patterns is essential to our economy and our quality of life. The current transport system poses growing and significant challenges for the environment, human health, and sustainability, while current mobility schemes have focused much more on the private vehicle that has conditioned both the lifestyles of citizens and cities, as well as urban and territorial sustainability. Transport has a very considerable weight in the framework of sustainable development due to environmental pressures, associated social and economic effects, and interrelations with other sectors. The continuous growth that this sector has experienced over the last few years and its foreseeable increase, even considering the change in trends due to the current situation of generalized crisis, make the challenge of sustainable transport a strategic priority at local, national, European, and global levels. This Special Issue will pay attention to all those research approaches focused on the relationship between evolution in the area of transport with a high incidence in the environment from the perspective of efficiency