Swarms on Continuous Data

While being it extremely important, many Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) systems have the inhability to perform classification and visualization in a continuous basis or to self-organize new data-items into the older ones (evenmore into new labels if necessary), which can be crucial in KDD - Knowledge Discovery, Retrieval and Data Mining Systems (interactive and online forms of Web Applications are just one example). This disadvantge is also present in more recent approaches using Self-Organizing Maps. On the present work, and exploiting past sucesses in recently proposed Stigmergic Ant Systems a robust online classifier is presented, which produces class decisions on a continuous stream data, allowing for continuous mappings. Results show that increasingly better results are achieved, as demonstraded by other authors in different areas. KEYWORDS: Swarm Intelligence, Ant Systems, Stigmergy, Data-Mining, Exploratory Data Analysis, Image Retrieval, Continuous Classification.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, at http://alfa.ist.utl.pt/~cvrm/staff/vramos/ref_45.htm

Constructing living buildings: a review of relevant technologies for a novel application of biohybrid robotics

Biohybrid robotics takes an engineering approach to the expansion and exploitation of biological behaviours for application to automated tasks. Here, we identify the construction of living buildings and infrastructure as a high-potential application domain for biohybrid robotics, and review technological advances relevant to its future development. Construction, civil infrastructure maintenance and building occupancy in the last decades have comprised a major portion of economic production, energy consumption and carbon emissions. Integrating biological organisms into automated construction tasks and permanent building components therefore has high potential for impact. Live materials can provide several advantages over standard synthetic construction materials, including self-repair of damage, increase rather than degradation of structural performance over time, resilience to corrosive environments, support of biodiversity, and mitigation of urban heat islands. Here, we review relevant technologies, which are currently disparate. They span robotics, self-organizing systems, artificial life, construction automation, structural engineering, architecture, bioengineering, biomaterials, and molecular and cellular biology. In these disciplines, developments relevant to biohybrid construction and living buildings are in the early stages, and typically are not exchanged between disciplines. We, therefore, consider this review useful to the future development of biohybrid engineering for this highly interdisciplinary application.publishe

What Makes Complex Systems Complex?

This paper explores some of the factors that make complex systems complex. We first examine the history of complex systems. It was Aristotle’s insight that how elements are joined together helps determine the properties of the resulting whole. We find (a) that scientific reductionism does not provide a sufficient explanation; (b) that to understand complex systems, one must identify and trace energy flows; and (c) that disproportionate causality, including global tipping points, are all around us. Disproportionate causality results from the wide availability of energy stores. We discuss three categories of emergent phenomena—static, dynamic, and adaptive—and recommend retiring the term emergent, except perhaps as a synonym for creative. Finally, we find that virtually all communication is stigmergic

Metaheuristic Design Patterns: New Perspectives for Larger-Scale Search Architectures

Design patterns capture the essentials of recurring best practice in an abstract form. Their merits are well established in domains as diverse as architecture and software development. They offer significant benefits, not least a common conceptual vocabulary for designers, enabling greater communication of high-level concerns and increased software reuse. Inspired by the success of software design patterns, this chapter seeks to promote the merits of a pattern-based method to the development of metaheuristic search software components. To achieve this, a catalog of patterns is presented, organized into the families of structural, behavioral, methodological and component-based patterns. As an alternative to the increasing specialization associated with individual metaheuristic search components, the authors encourage computer scientists to embrace the ‘cross cutting' benefits of a pattern-based perspective to optimization algorithms. Some ways in which the patterns might form the basis of further larger-scale metaheuristic component design automation are also discussed

Biomimetics in Modern Organizations - Laws or Metaphors?

Biomimetics, the art and science of imitating nature and life for technological solutions is discussed from a modern organization theory perspective. The main hypothesis of this article is that there are common laws in nature that are applicable to living, social and likewise organizational systems. To take advantage of these laws, the study of nature's principles for their application to organizations is proposed - a process which is in product and technology design known as bionic creativity engineering. In a search for most interesting concepts borrowed from nature we found amoeba organizations, the theory of autopoiesis or self-creation, neural networks, heterarchies, as well as fractals and bioteaming which are described and reviewed. Additionally other concepts like swarm intelligence, stigmergy, as well as genesis and reproduction, are introduced. In the end all these ideas are summarized and guidelines for further research are given.biomimetics, organization theory, autopoiesis, network science, bionic creativity engineering

Self-Organizing Architectural design based on Morphogenetic Programming.

In this paper, we present our research into self-organizing building algorithms. This idea of self-organization of animal/plants behaviour interests researchers to explore the mechanisms required for this emergent phenomena and try to apply them in other domains. We were able to implement a typical construction algorithm in a 3D simulation environment and reproduce the results of previous research in the area. LSystems, morphogenetic programming and wasp nest building are explained in order to understand self-organizing models. We proposed Grammatical swarm as a good tool to optimize building structures