Natural Computing and Beyond

This book contains the joint proceedings of the Winter School of Hakodate (WSH) 2011 held in Hakodate, Japan, March 15–16, 2011, and the 6th International Workshop on Natural Computing (6th IWNC) held in Tokyo, Japan, March 28–30, 2012, organized by the Special Interest Group of Natural Computing (SIG-NAC), the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI). This volume compiles refereed contributions to various aspects of natural computing, ranging from computing with slime mold, artificial chemistry, eco-physics, and synthetic biology, to computational aesthetics

Natural Computing and Beyond

This book contains the joint proceedings of the Winter School of Hakodate (WSH) 2011 held in Hakodate, Japan, March 15–16, 2011, and the 6th International Workshop on Natural Computing (6th IWNC) held in Tokyo, Japan, March 28–30, 2012, organized by the Special Interest Group of Natural Computing (SIG-NAC), the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI). This volume compiles refereed contributions to various aspects of natural computing, ranging from computing with slime mold, artificial chemistry, eco-physics, and synthetic biology, to computational aesthetics

Improving Big Data Visual Analytics with Interactive Virtual Reality

For decades, the growth and volume of digital data collection has made it challenging to digest large volumes of information and extract underlying structure. Coined 'Big Data', massive amounts of information has quite often been gathered inconsistently (e.g from many sources, of various forms, at different rates, etc.). These factors impede the practices of not only processing data, but also analyzing and displaying it in an efficient manner to the user. Many efforts have been completed in the data mining and visual analytics community to create effective ways to further improve analysis and achieve the knowledge desired for better understanding. Our approach for improved big data visual analytics is two-fold, focusing on both visualization and interaction. Given geo-tagged information, we are exploring the benefits of visualizing datasets in the original geospatial domain by utilizing a virtual reality platform. After running proven analytics on the data, we intend to represent the information in a more realistic 3D setting, where analysts can achieve an enhanced situational awareness and rely on familiar perceptions to draw in-depth conclusions on the dataset. In addition, developing a human-computer interface that responds to natural user actions and inputs creates a more intuitive environment. Tasks can be performed to manipulate the dataset and allow users to dive deeper upon request, adhering to desired demands and intentions. Due to the volume and popularity of social media, we developed a 3D tool visualizing Twitter on MIT's campus for analysis. Utilizing emerging technologies of today to create a fully immersive tool that promotes visualization and interaction can help ease the process of understanding and representing big data.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, 2015 IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference (HPEC '15); corrected typo

Monotone Projection Lower Bounds from Extended Formulation Lower Bounds

In this short note, we reduce lower bounds on monotone projections of polynomials to lower bounds on extended formulations of polytopes. Applying our reduction to the seminal extended formulation lower bounds of Fiorini, Massar, Pokutta, Tiwari, & de Wolf (STOC 2012; J. ACM, 2015) and Rothvoss (STOC 2014; J. ACM, 2017), we obtain the following interesting consequences. 1. The Hamiltonian Cycle polynomial is not a monotone subexponential-size projection of the permanent; this both rules out a natural attempt at a monotone lower bound on the Boolean permanent, and shows that the permanent is not complete for non-negative polynomials in VNP$_{{\mathbb R}}$ under monotone p-projections. 2. The cut polynomials and the perfect matching polynomial (or "unsigned Pfaffian") are not monotone p-projections of the permanent. The latter, over the Boolean and-or semi-ring, rules out monotone reductions in one of the natural approaches to reducing perfect matchings in general graphs to perfect matchings in bipartite graphs. As the permanent is universal for monotone formulas, these results also imply exponential lower bounds on the monotone formula size and monotone circuit size of these polynomials.Comment: Published in Theory of Computing, Volume 13 (2017), Article 18; Received: November 10, 2015, Revised: July 27, 2016, Published: December 22, 201

A guided tour of asynchronous cellular automata

Research on asynchronous cellular automata has received a great amount of attention these last years and has turned to a thriving field. We survey the recent research that has been carried out on this topic and present a wide state of the art where computing and modelling issues are both represented.Comment: To appear in the Journal of Cellular Automat