Xavier Llorà » DISCUS

From Galapagos to Twitter: Darwin, Natural Selection, and Web 2.0

Xavier — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:14:05 +0000

Yesterday I was visiting Monmouth College to participate on the Darwinpalooza which commemorates the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. After scratching my head about about what to present, I came out with quite a mix. You will find the abstract of the talk below, as well as the slides I used.

Abstract: One hundred and fifty years have passed since the publication of Darwin’s world-changing manuscript “The Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection”. Darwin’s ideas have proven their power to reach beyond the biology realm, and their ability to define a conceptual framework which allows us to model and understand complex systems. In the mid 1950s and 60s the efforts of a scattered group of engineers proved the benefits of adopting an evolutionary paradigm to solve complex real-world problems. In the 70s, the emerging presence of computers brought us a new collection of artificial evolution paradigms, among which genetic algorithms rapidly gained widespread adoption. Currently, the Internet has propitiated an exponential growth of information and computational resources that are clearly disrupting our perception and forcing us to reevaluate the boundaries between technology and social interaction. Darwin’s ideas can, once again, help us understand such disruptive change. In this talk, I will review the origin of artificial evolution ideas and techniques. I will also show how these techniques are, nowadays, helping to solve a wide range of applications, from life science problems to twitter puzzles, and how high performance computing can make Darwin ideas a routinary tool to help us model and understand complex systems.

Seattle and Tokyo

Xavier — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 05:38:37 +0000

I am traveling again. This time Seattle was the first stop. NCSA was having a private sector partner meeting at Boeing. I was invited to present the work about DISCUS we are doing as part of the LINK alliance endeavor. And from Seattle to Tokyo where Yukio Ohsawa is organizing “Cubes for innovation: Information Systems for Design and Marketing”. The workshop sponsored by Tsukuba University and IEEE is being held today at University of Tokyo. I was invited to go over our work on DISCUS to create IT infrastructure to support innovative and creative processes. You can find the slides of my presentation above (you can also download the PDF).

One talk and a visit to UK

Xavier — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 01:06:03 +0000

September 21 I was invited to give a talk at the Computer Science Department at UIUC. During the talk “Combating User Fatigue and Contradictions in Subjective-based Optimization Schemes” I reviewed some of the research I have been involved about active interactive genetic algorithms. The PDF of the presentation can be downloaded here. I also gave the same presentation to some of the members of the ASAP research group at the University of Nottingham. Natalio Krasnogor invited me for a visit. The main topic was latest advances on Pittsburgh LCS (Jaume Bacardit is working there on protein folding problems using Pitt-style LCS). I really enjoyed interact with people there—lots of challenges and interesting discussions. Oh, I almost forgot, the three days I was in Nottingham I saw the sun most of the day .

Evolving emotional prosody

Xavier — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 15:57:30 +0000

by Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm and Xavier Llorà (2006).
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (INTERSPEECH 2006), paper 1741. Also as IlliGAL TR No 2006018. Link to the PDF.

Abstract
Emotion is expressed by prosodic cues, and this study uses the active interactive Genetic Algorithm to search a wide space for sad and angry parameters of intensity, F0, and duration in perceptual resynthesis experiments with users. This method avoids large recorded databases and is flexible for exploring prosodic emotion parameters. Solutions from multiple runs are analyzed graphically and statistically. Average results indicate parameter evolution by emotion, and appear best forsad speech. Solutions are quite successfully classified by CART, with duration as main predictor.

Finally I am back up

Xavier — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 10:23:09 +0000

Vacations were over quite a while ago, but things kept piling on my desk. Finally I succeeded clearing some big chunks of matters out of it. Enough that I could go to the Design Theory and Methodology (DTM 2006) conference in Philadelphia last Tuesday. The conference is held as part of the ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences (IDETC 2006) . Yan Jin invited me to join the panel he organized on Intelligent Systems and Innovation. I had a great time joining the DTM people, very interesting work—if you are interested on innovation and creativity.

Metadata stores

Xavier — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 16:20:27 +0000

The DISCUS project has always supported that intuition that annotation capabilities are a must for knowledge and information exchange. For instance, imaging that you are analyzing the KeyGraph generated from a particular discussion (here you can find an example). You may want to enrich such graph with your analysis, comments, or related information. Basically, you want to add metadata to the KeyGraph. If such a capability is available, a whole new bunch of information will need to be efficiently stored to allow, not only fast and easy retrieval, but allow analysis of the added metadata.

The Kowari project is an Open Source, massively scalable, transaction-safe, purpose-built database for the storage, retrieval and analysis of metadata. It provides a simple query language to interact with the metastore (iTQL). If you are familiar with SQL the resemblance will help you get up to speed very fast. The design is oriented to efficiently manage large volume metadata. Informal tests from Joe Frutelle, a NCSA colleague, have convinced me that this metastore can be the way to go for storing the large volumes of metadata that annotation may produce in DISCUS.

DISCUS as open source code?

Xavier — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 21:06:35 +0000

Recently Jack Park from Iris Semantic Network left a comment asking, among other things, if DISCUS was going open source. This is an interesting question. DISCUS is currently under two patent pending processes. However, the current policies at NCSA, one of the DISCUS partners, is to push toward open source. We are currently finishing a first release of DISCUS International with support for English and Japanese. When it passes the release quality standards, some parts of DISCUS will be disseminated, may be as open source code. This is, however, an issue that needs to be ultimately discussed with the Office of Technology Management (the university office handling the DISCUS patent process).

Combating user fatigue in iGA: partial ordering, support vector machines, and synthetic fitness

Xavier — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 17:00:26 +0000

[sli

This is the presentation for the initial paper on active interactive genetic algorithms published in GECCO 2005 (Washington D.C., July, 2005). The paper may be find here (PDF, 0.7Mb) and the presentation slides here (PDF, 0.8Mb).

The evolutionary path to innovation and creativity

Xavier — Thu, 26 May 2005 15:30:42 +0000

Keynote speaker talk in Congreso Mexicano de Computación Evolutiva (CONCEV-2005) about how evolutionary models and chance discovery can support human innovation and creativity. The presentation may be download here (PDF 8.5Mb).

Mining social networks in message boards (Presentation)

Xavier — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 17:00:11 +0000

This is the presentation for the paper “Mining Social Network in Message Boards” (the paper PDF may be found here (1Mb)) published in the Sympposium on Conversational Informatics for Supporting Social Intelligence and Interaction (AISB’05, 12-15 April, Hatfield, UK, 2005). You can download the PDF here (2Mb).