DNAgents: Genetically Engineered Intelligent Mobile Agents

Mobile agents are a useful paradigm for network coding providing many advantages and disadvantages. Unfortunately, widespread adoption of mobile agents has been hampered by the disadvantages, which could be said to outweigh the advantages. There is a variety of ongoing work to address these issues, and this is discussed. Ultimately, genetic algorithms are selected as the most interesting potential avenue. Genetic algorithms have many potential benefits for mobile agents. The primary benefit is the potential for agents to become even more adaptive to situational changes in the environment and/or emergent security risks. There are secondary benefits such as the natural obfuscation of functions inherent to genetic algorithms. Pitfalls also exist, namely the difficulty of defining a satisfactory fitness function and the variable execution time of mobile agents arising from the fact that it exists on a network. DNAgents 1.0, an original application of genetic algorithms to mobile agents is implemented and discussed, and serves to highlight these difficulties. Modifications of traditional genetic algorithms are also discussed. Ultimately, a combination of genetic algorithms and artificial life is considered to be the most appropriate approach to mobile agents. This allows the consideration of agents to be organisms, and the network to be their environment. Towards this end, a novel framework called DNAgents 2.0 is designed and implemented. This framework allows the continual evolution of agents in a network without having a seperate training and deployment phase. Parameters for this new framework were defined and explored. Lastly, an experiment similar to DNAgents 1.0 is performed for comparative purposes against DNAgents 1.0 and to prove the viability of this new framework

Advances in Methodology and Applications of Decision Support Systems

These Proceedings are composed of a selection of papers of the Workshop on Advances in Methodology and Applications of Decision Support Systems, organized by the System and Decision Sciences (SDS) Program of IIASA and the Japan Institute of Systems Research (JISR). The workshop was held at IIASA on August 20-22, 1990. The Methodology of Decision Analysis (MDA) Project of the SDS Program focuses on a system-analytical approach to decision support and is devoted to developing methodology, software and applications of decision support systems concentrated primarily around interactive systems for data analysis, interpretation and multiobjective decisionmaking, including uncertainty analysis and group decision making situations in both their cooperative and noncooperative aspects. The objectives of the research on decision support systems (DSS) performed in cooperation with the MDA Project are to: compare various approaches to decision support systems; advance theory and methodology of decision support; convert existing theories and methodologies into usable (simple to use, user-friendly and robust) tools that could easily be used in solving real-life problems. A principal characteristic of decision support systems is that they must be tuned to specific decision situations, to complex real-life characteristics of every application. Even if the theory and methodology of decision support is quite advanced, every application might provide impulses for further theoretical and methodological advances. Therefore the principle underlying this project is that theoretical and methodological research should be strongly connected to the implementation and applications of its results to sufficiently complicated, real-life examples. This approach results in obtaining really applicable working tools for decision support. The papers for this Proceedings have been selected according to the above summarized framework of the research activities. Therefore, the papers deal both with theoretical and methodological problems and with real-life applications

Philosophical foundations of the Death and Anti-Death discussion

Perhaps there has been no greater opportunity than in this “VOLUME FIFTEEN of our Death And Anti-Death set of anthologies” to write about how might think about life and how to avoid death. There are two reasons to discuss “life”, the first being enhancing our understanding of who we are and why we may be here in the Universe. The second is more practical: how humans meet the physical challenges brought about by the way they have interacted with their environment. Many persons discussing “life” beg the question about what “life” is. Surely, when one discusses how to overcome its opposite, death, they are not referring to another “living” thing such as a plant. There seems to be a commonality, though, and it is this commonality is one needing elaboration. It ostensibly seems to be the boundary condition separating what is completely passive (inert) from what attempts to maintain its integrity, as well as fulfilling other conditions we think “life” has. In our present discussion, there will be a reminder that it by no means has been unequivocally established what life really is by placing quotes around the word, namely, “life”. Consider it a tag representing a bundle of philosophical ideas that will be unpacked in this paper

A Smartphone Based Risk Estimation of Human Activities

As handheld devices have been booming up in recent years, the usage of laptops, smartphones, and tablets is increasing exponentially. More important, small handheld devices like smartphones and tablets are becoming more and more popular among people because of their portable and easy-to-use features. They use smartphones and tablets to do business and entertainment which, years ago, could only be accomplished by large personal computers and complicated software programs. Yet, while sensors like the gyroscope, accelerometer, light and magnetic are embedded into smartphones, how to best utilize sensors and improve lives of human beings by those sensors becomes a hot and valuable topic. In this thesis, we try to monitor and document people`s daily activities by the gyroscope and accelerometer that were built inside the smartphone. And with the help of those data, we calculate how much activity is required or overdone for a subject in case of maintaining a healthy condition. More importantly, based on those data, we built a real time system that could not only judge what basic activity the subject is currently doing, but also estimate simple potential risks that might happen to the subject due to the abnormal data of the activity

Reconstructing the Boundary of a Web Document

Documents found on the World Wide Web (WWW) may be composed of a single web page, or several web pages that are linked together by a table of contents or some other commonly known document construct. When a document spans multiple web pages, it is often inconvenient to print or download the entire document using available tools. This thesis introduces a concept called the document boundary to facilitate representation and analysis of multi-page web documents, and suggests a two-phase approach towards automated identification of document boundaries. In the first phase, individual pages are examined to determine which links are most likely to represent an intra-document link. This procedure is applied recursively to identify a group of candidate pages which may be part of the same document. In the second phase, the link topology and other features of the identified pages are examined in aggregate for indications of a multi-page document. A test suite of both single- and multi-page web documents was assembled using a mixture of handpicked documents and documents which were gathered by an arbitrary third party. The document boundary detection system was applied to the main page of each document. The document boundary detection system was able to achieve a success rate of 73% when its results were compared to the ground truth documents

Exploration of Genetic Algorithm Techniques for Non-Deterministic Narratives Development

Treball final de Grau en Disseny i Desenvolupament de Videojocs. Codi: VJ1241. Curs acadèmic: 2018/2019The proposal of the present Final Degree Project in Video Game Design and Development consists in the implementation of a procedural narrative system applying artificial intelligence. This work aims to inquire into genetic algorithms techniques for the creation of an automatic space of possibilities. The idea is to generate a story, based on a minimum input values sequence given by the user. In the process, the foundations of storytelling and the development of narrative archetypes will also be studied with the intention of giving rise to a structurally coherent non-deterministic discourse. The ultimate goal is to demonstrate the feasibility of a complex narrative system design through a demo implemented in a game engine such as Unity3D

Human behaviour modelling through Human Intelligent Movement Software (HIMs)

The concept of sustainable urban environments aims to provide urban facilities including transport interchanges that can accommodate a wide spectrum of the human population irrespective of gender, age or disability. A major objective is to reduce levels of social exclusion which arise from inadequacy in infrastructure that strongly affects certain members of society such as the elderly, disabled and poor. This research focuses on the particular aspect of crowded public spaces where it is envisaged that improvements in crowd flow could be achieved by a proper consideration of all the users of the space but particularly the elderly and disabled. The ultimate objective would be design tools that provide architects with the means to achieve inclusivity in design for the elderly and disabled with relative ease and speed. Therefore, this research has developed a methodology and a computing tool to implement aspects of human walking behaviour in public spaces. Human behaviours have been studied using a large-scale video observation involving over 17,000 subjects. The videos have been analysed to determine a number of different behaviours and their relationship to distinguishing characteristics of the subjects such as age, gender and disability. Algorithms for representing these behaviours have been developed and implemented as a simulation tool (HIMs) within commercially available gaming software. Two case studies, within shopping malls and a bus station, have been carried out to illustrate the feasibility of the work and simple examples of small environmental design changes that significantly affect crowd flow are shown

Machine Learning in Go: Supervised Learning in Move Prediction

The oriental game of Go is increasingly recognized as the "grand challenge" of Artificial Intelligence (AI). So far, traditional AI approaches have resulted in programs that play at the level of a human amateur. Engineering Go knowledge into a Go playing program has proven to be a difficult task, a machine learning approach might therefore be successful. In this study, a supervised learning approach is used to learn to distinguish good moves from bad moves. This is done by training a neural network on a database of moves played by human players. The network's performance is measured on a prediction task. Three main research directions can be identified in this study. The first direction relates to the features used to encode a position in the game of Go. Specifically, an attempt is made to capture global information into a local area. The second research direction addresses the methodology of supervised learning. In order to gain some insight in the ability of a neural network to extract the knowledge used by human experts, both professional and human amateur games are used in the training process. Furthermore, games used in the training sets are decomposed to test whether knowledge obtained in a specific part of the game can be applied to the entire game. The last research direction is an attempt to uncover the relation between move prediction accuracy and playing strength. Results show that (1) capturing global information leads to a significantly higher prediction performance, (2) professional games do not necessarily provide a better base for achieving a high prediction score than amateur games, (3) knowledge obtained from one part of the game does not generalize over the entire game, and (4) no strong claims can be made regarding the relation between prediction accuracy and playing strength, at least for the program used in this study