A Review on the Application of Natural Computing in Environmental Informatics

Natural computing offers new opportunities to understand, model and analyze the complexity of the physical and human-created environment. This paper examines the application of natural computing in environmental informatics, by investigating related work in this research field. Various nature-inspired techniques are presented, which have been employed to solve different relevant problems. Advantages and disadvantages of these techniques are discussed, together with analysis of how natural computing is generally used in environmental research.Comment: Proc. of EnviroInfo 201

An intelligent system for risk classification of stock investment projects

The proposed paper demonstrates that a hybrid fuzzy neural network can serve as a risk classifier of stock investment projects. The training algorithm for the regular part of the network is based on bidirectional incremental evolution proving more efficient than direct evolution. The approach is compared with other crisp and soft investment appraisal and trading techniques, while building a multimodel domain representation for an intelligent decision support system. Thus the advantages of each model are utilised while looking at the investment problem from different perspectives. The empirical results are based on UK companies traded on the London Stock Exchange

Artificial Immune Systems - Models, algorithms and applications

Copyright © 2010 Academic Research Publishing Agency.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) are computational paradigms that belong to the computational intelligence family and are inspired by the biological immune system. During the past decade, they have attracted a lot of interest from researchers aiming to develop immune-based models and techniques to solve complex computational or engineering problems. This work presents a survey of existing AIS models and algorithms with a focus on the last five years.This article is available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fun

Learning Opposites Using Neural Networks

Many research works have successfully extended algorithms such as evolutionary algorithms, reinforcement agents and neural networks using "opposition-based learning" (OBL). Two types of the "opposites" have been defined in the literature, namely \textit{type-I} and \textit{type-II}. The former are linear in nature and applicable to the variable space, hence easy to calculate. On the other hand, type-II opposites capture the "oppositeness" in the output space. In fact, type-I opposites are considered a special case of type-II opposites where inputs and outputs have a linear relationship. However, in many real-world problems, inputs and outputs do in fact exhibit a nonlinear relationship. Therefore, type-II opposites are expected to be better in capturing the sense of "opposition" in terms of the input-output relation. In the absence of any knowledge about the problem at hand, there seems to be no intuitive way to calculate the type-II opposites. In this paper, we introduce an approach to learn type-II opposites from the given inputs and their outputs using the artificial neural networks (ANNs). We first perform \emph{opposition mining} on the sample data, and then use the mined data to learn the relationship between input $x$ and its opposite $\breve{x}$. We have validated our algorithm using various benchmark functions to compare it against an evolving fuzzy inference approach that has been recently introduced. The results show the better performance of a neural approach to learn the opposites. This will create new possibilities for integrating oppositional schemes within existing algorithms promising a potential increase in convergence speed and/or accuracy.Comment: To appear in proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2016), Cancun, Mexico, December 201

Ergonomic Chair Design by Fusing Qualitative and Quantitative Criteria using Interactive Genetic Algorithms

This paper emphasizes the necessity of formally bringing qualitative and quantitative criteria of ergonomic design together, and provides a novel complementary design framework with this aim. Within this framework, different design criteria are viewed as optimization objectives; and design solutions are iteratively improved through the cooperative efforts of computer and user. The framework is rooted in multi-objective optimization, genetic algorithms and interactive user evaluation. Three different algorithms based on the framework are developed, and tested with an ergonomic chair design problem. The parallel and multi-objective approaches show promising results in fitness convergence, design diversity and user satisfaction metrics