Today’s activities (28-Apr) …

Admin

• Completed setting up backup system: one email address now forwards information to Google Mail, Yahoo Mail and Reading mail systems.

Study Comments

• Over the last couple of days, whilst I appreciate I'm taking the first few steps of the journey, it's felt a little unstructured/unguided: the activities I've undertaken feel a little woolly — it's all been interesting, but there was the nagging question that maybe I wasn't spending the best use of my time.
• As such, I've put the following steps in place:
  • The About page on this blog will act as the working draft of the research title: I'm aiming to spend a good 15min today sitting down and thinking what I think this would be at this point in time. I appreciate this could just be a few sentences, but should provide a base/talking point to work with and align activities.
  • The Goal/To-do's page will act more of a plan of what I'm looking to achieve: this will start off quite nebulous ("read about animats", for example) no doubt, but I'll be aiming to tighten this up as we go forwards. This will provide something productive to achieve.
  • On a weekly basis, spend 15 – 30min going through what I've done, what's been written here, etc., and summarise the week's activities (captured via the Summaries category): this will indicate how I'm progressing, plus feed well into Goals/To-do's above.
  • As I'll be meeting with Will on Thursdays, the summary-/goal-writing will take place on Wednesday of each week.

Notes

• realised that vector programming will be in the Mastering Algorithms in Perl book I've got — but can't find the book … arggghh!! ;-)
• Wrote a first draft of what the study will be aiming to produce, detailed in the About section.
• Following on from the above point, started to read about Leadership — some notes:
  • the simplest definition I could find (from dictionary.com for "Lead") is "to show the way by going in advance"
  • 2 ways to pick a successor:
    • traditional closed groups: e.g. using bloodlines or seniority to pick leaders (e.g. Royalty, etc)
    • competence: skill and character lead to being selected
      • … cf. selection of leader from heterogeneous groups
  • quick note to say that adults can => leaders as part of a lifephase (youth –> adult –> leader) (particularly in societies which have reverence for age/wisdom).
    • interesting point about what happens if individuals too old to hunt/fight: act more as "village elders", rely on respect and implied wisdom/teaching roles
  • ?? measuring leadership effectiveness
    • James McGregor Burns introduced concepts around transformational and transactional leadership
      • Transformational leadership is a leader offering a purpose which transcends short-term goals: the bigger picture
        • a swine to measure though!!
      • Transactional leaders build power by doing whatever will get them more followers
    • Fiedler contingency model
      • Fiedler suggested that leadership effectiveness depends on both the leader's personality and the situation. Certain leaders are effective in one situation but not in others, and it is therefore a situational theory in the sense that there is no one best way of leading.
    • Path-goal model
      • a leader's function is to clear the path towards the goal of the group, by meeting the needs of the subordinates
        • "Effective leaders clarify the path to help their followers achieve theory goals and make the journey easier by reducing roadblocks and pitfalls."
        • "Follower characteristics are the locus of control, experience, and perceived ability."
      • assumes a leader is flexible and can change their style as situations require

• NB these topics will need researching:
  • lead(er(ship)) (go to the Wikipedia page, and start at Suggested Qualities of Leadership)
  • follow(er)
  • disciple
    • ?? religious undertones (e.g. muslim means "follower", etc in Arabic)
  • obedience
  • mentor
  • what happens to animal groups in times of crisis?
    • cf. groups with leaders vs. those without

Links

• Simulation of Adaptive Behaviour 06 (From Animals to Animats 9): 25 – 29 Sep, Rome:
  • Workshop 1. Swarm Robotics — September 30th 2006
  • Workshop 4. Bio-inspired Cooperative and Adaptive behaviours in Robots — September 30th 2006

Day 4’s adventures (27-Apr) …

Admin

 Worked out backup strategy:

• sort out weekly reminder system
• weekly (Friday): save blog, reading list/to-do file and jargon file locally as HTML file
• save to yahoo (jdephd2006), google, local disk, Reading network

Notes

• started to look at the boids pseudocode to understand what’s going on
• also came across this page Swarm Applets which seems to be quite useful
• started to read about vector mathematics, to help understand the pseudocode
• NB need to look into how vector mathematics is done in programming languages
• bet that this sort of information would be included in a how to program computer games book
• There’s an absolute stack of different boids-like applets here : http://www.aridolan.com/ad/Alife.html
• Boids
• there are three rules that boids follow:
• they try to move to the central mass of the flock
• they try to keep a small distance from other objects and flock particles
• they try to match the velocity of near boids
• Found a python version of boids at http://www.vpython.org/contributed/boids.py
• not Perl based which would have been ideal, but appears to be sufficient to meet my needs (i.e. a working example to play with)

What I did today (26-Apr) …

Notes

AlifeX 

• looked at AlifeX website:
• noted speakers and topics:

• Dirk Helbing,Technische Universität Dresden
  Self-Organization in Crowds and Network Flows

  Abstract:Crowds
  and traffic flows have been successfully modelled as driven
  many-particle systems. Due to the non-linear interactions and delayed
  adaptations in these systems, one finds a rich spectrum of
  self-organization phenomena.

• ?? what is a good definition and example of non-linear interactions
• ?? what are delayed adaptations

This includes, for example, various forms
of traffic jams, noise-induced breakdowns, freezing-by-heating and
slower-is-faster effects, self-organized oscillations, and spontaneous
synchronization phenomena. We also discuss instabilities in the motion
of dense crowds and the occurrence of turbulence-like phenonema that
have been discovered by high-performance video analysis techniques.
Non-linear interactions do not automatically lead to a system optimum.
The system may be rather trapped in a local optimum or behave in an
unstable way.Therefore, one interesting question is how to modify
many-particle interactions in order to avoid this. Future traffic
assistance systems will, for example, be able to increase the stability
and capacity of traffic flows. Moreover, self-organized traffic light
and production scheduling based on decentralized control approaches
will allow for a better adaptation to variations in capacities and
demands. This will lead to a higher quality and performance of traffic
and production systems in the future.

• Bio: Dirk Helbing is
  the managing director of the Institute for Transport & Economics at
  the Technische Universität of Dresden. He has authored circa 150
  articles in such areas asf Multi-Agent Simulation of Socio-Economic
  Systems, Vehicle and Pedestrian Traffic including Panic, Disaster
  Management, Behavioural Models, Self-Organization Phenomena in Space and
  Time, Stochastic Systems and Monte-Carlo Simulations, Molecular
  Dynamics, etc.

• go see this site for simulations of traffic: http://www.helbing.org/
• see Traffic section below
• Topics being presented of interest:
• Evolution of Complexity (Carlos Gershenson, Tom Lenaerts)
• Neurodynamic Methods for Analysis & Control of Cognitive Behaviors (Robert
  Kozma, Anil Seth & Jun Tani)
• Artificial Autonomy (Xabier Barandiaran, Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo)
• On the Influence of Lifetime Learning on Selection Pressure (Ingo Paenke,
  Kawecki Tadeusz, Sendhoff Bernhard)
• How machines can learn the meanings of words: Intelligent cross-situational learning
  (Bart deVylder, Joachim De Beule, Tony Belpaeme)
• Self-Organization of Communication in Evolving Robots (Davide Marocco and Stefano
  Nolfi)
• Learning on a Continuum in Evolved Dynamical Node Networks (Eduardo
  Izquierdo-Torres, Inman Harvey)
• Towards Evolvable Hovering Flight on a Physical Ornithopter (Will Regan, Floris
  van Breugel, Hod Lipson)
• Evolving an Integrated Phototaxis and Hole-avoidance Behaviour for a Swarm-
  bot (Anders Lyhne Christensen, Marco Dorigo)
• An Improved System for Artificial Creatures Evolution (Thomas Miconi, Alastair
  Channon)
• The Role of Redundancy in the Robustness of Random Boolean Networks
  (Carlos Gershenson, Stuart Kauffman, Ilya Shmulevich)
• Real-time Evolving Swarms for Rapid Patern Detection and Tracking
  (Christopher Middendorff, Matthias Scheutz)
• The fallacy of general purpose bio-inspired computing (Seth Bullock)
• Emergence of Cooperation in Heterogeneous Structured Populations (Francisco Santos,
  Jorge Pacheco, Tom Lenaerts)
• A Particle Swarm Selects for Evolution of Gliders in Non-Uniform 2D Cellular Automata
  (Jeffrey Ventrella)
• On Self-Regulated Swarms, Societal Memory, Speed and Dynamics (Vitorino Ramos,
  Carlos Fernandes, Agostinho Rosa)
• Influence of the level of polyandry and genetic architecture on division of labour (Danesh
  Tarapore, Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller)
• On prey grouping and predator confusion in artificial fish schools (Hanspeter Kunz,
  Charlotte Hemelrijk, Thomas Züblin )

Traffic

• came across this page: www. trafficforum.org, which indicates these conferences:

• ep 13-16, 2005	Vienna (Austria)	8th’ International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems
  Sep 19-20, 2005	Dresden (Germany)	20th Dresden Conference on Traffic and Transportation Sciences
  Jan 19-20, 2006	Brescia, Italy	Traffic Flow Modeling & Management

• (no idea how this is going to present itself on the web … expect some strange mangling of table information about here when posted … ;-) !)

• these people are on the advisory board for this forum:
• Dirk Helbing (Germany, Editor)    
• Hans J. Herrmann (France)    
• Craig Reynolds (USA)    
• Tamás Vicsek (Hungary)    
• Dietrich E. Wolf (Germany)
• … and it has an online journal: Cooper@tive Tr@nsport@tion Dyn@mics (ISSN 1618-0305)
• go back here as there could be links to useful journals for background information regarding traffic

RoboCup 

• link: http://www.robocup.org/
• the site from RoboCup 2005 has some reasonable explanations on what the different leagues in RoboCup are, and describes RoboCupRescue. There’s a new event for 2006, RoboCup@Home which is to develop robots for use around the house
• the symposium links appear to be dead, but these people chair:

• Itsuki Noda (Information Technology Research Institute, National Institute on Advanced Industry, Science and Technology (AIST), Japan)

• Adam Jacoff (Intelligent Systems Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), USA.)

• Ansgar Bredenfeld (Fraunhofer Institute for Autonomous Intelligent Systems (AIS), Germany.)

• Yasutake Takahashi (Deptartment of Adaptive Machine Systems, Osaka University, Japan.)

• Had a look at some of the RoboCup videos available at Google Video …. not eactly as I expected — slightly slower tempo than I thought. Very impressive to be honest, but I doubt we’ll see Bobby Robson managing a side for a while!!
• Interestingly, there is a purely simulation event.
• These people are chairing the 2006 symposium:
• Gerhard Lakemeyer http://www-i5.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~gerhard/ , RWTH Aachen, Germany; gerhard@informatik.rwth-aachen.d
• Elizabeth Sklar http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~sklar/ , City University of New York, USA; sklar@sci.brooklyn.cuny.ed
• Domenico G. Sorrenti http://www.disco.unimib.it/sorrenti Universitá di Milano, Bicocca, Italy sorrenti@disco.unimib.it
• Takahashi Tomoichi http://sakura.meijo-u.ac.jp/ttakaHP/ , Meijo University, Japan ttaka@ccmfs.meijo-u.ac.j

EvoCop 

•  find out what metaheuristics are:

Things to do

• work out how to backup this blog
• work out the best way to host a "jargon  file" and definitions somewhere

• ?? NB would business cards be a good idea for attending conferences?
• Look at the DARPA site, remembering that Stanford won the competition (Sebastian Thrun, of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) is the team leader)

Things done today …

Admin

• Sent Will an email of contact details, plus came with a list of potential dates for meeting
• Set up blog account with WordPress: http://jdephd.wordpress.com
  • (appreciate name is not fantastic, but am awaiting a flash of inspiration to change the name to something catchier — watch this space)
• Downloaded flock (http://flock.com) as a blogging tool
  • bear in mind I'm still learning on how to blog, good practices, etc — expect certain things to probably not work as I anticipate … ;-)

Notes

• Started by reading the Wikipedia entry for herds : thoughts/notes:
  • cf. btw human groups (teams, military), which show co-ordination and role differentiation
    • ?? are there animal groups which perform in the same way??
      • ants, maybe
      • called eusociality (phenomenon of reproductive specialisation found in some animals) (ants, etc)
  • pros/cons of herd
    • pro: risk dilution of threat to individual when surrounded by large number of particles/agents
    • con: easily detectable group, due to size
  • from the flocking behaviour page:
    • Separation – avoid crowding neighbours
    • Alignment – steer towards average heading of neighbours
    • Cohesion – steer towards average position of neighbours
  • people to look out for:
    • Lee Spector, Jon Klein, Chris Perry and Mark Feinstein
    • wrote this paper called Emergence of Collective Behavior in Evolving Populations of Flying Agents
      • NB mention something called SwarmEvolve … ??
    • Craig Reynolds — person behind boids (http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/)
      • Boids apparently work in a similar manner to cellular automata — something to scan over (Jon to go away, read and report)
      • Boids pseudocode
      • Boids plug-in for MS Excel
        • NB look at the links page as well
  • swarming vs. herding vs. flocking
    • seems that swarming may differ from flocking due to the alignment of the particles in the swarm … but seems non-nonsensical as geese technically swarm then when they're in their V-shape

To do …

• go read about geese, starlings, etc as a quick overview of what/how particles swarm (probably background)
• read this wiki: Swarm Development Group Wiki
• blimey there's a lot of stuff out there … and this is just day 1 !!
• Websites to look at include:
  • Multi agent systems
  • Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams (Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds), Mitchel Resnick

Meeting with Will, 24-Apr @ Reading …

Admin.
- Jon to set up weekly phone meetings with Will, every Thursday

• 1st one to be set up 4-May @10.30am
• {Jon noted Will's phone numbers}

- Jon to set up monthly meetings with Will

• every 3rd Thursday of the month
• Thu 11-May though will be a good one to attend, as there is a relevant talk
• Jon to send Will a list of suitable days, and Will to respond with clashses, etc.

Study
- {Jon outlined the intent of the project, to look at dynamic changes on the fly within flocks}
- using hard code rules to perform changes in flocking behaviour are relatively straightforwards; naturalistic rules are more challenging goals

- however, would be a good idea to use hard code rules as a baseline metric, then look to improve with a naturalistic/novel way of approaching problem

- heterogeneous robots were discussed, with herd particles having different skillsets in the herd

• different skillsets within the group
• different goals and different approaches

- two quick anecdotes were mentioned, regarding differing and combining problems

• the donkey, who is equidistant between water and food: it makes a decision to move towards the food, then realises it's thirsty, so changes direction to go to the water; on it's way to the water, it realises it's hungry, and changes direction — it never reaches either
• the rhino in the middle of the road: automated car knows it can go round either the left of the right of the rhino, but ends up hitting the rhino, as there's no reason to choose one of the separate directions
• {cf. the choice between two seemingly identical choices}

How to test the ultimate deliverable

- looking at existing problem space:

• robocup
• search and rescue

- flocking algorithms

- webbots

• khepra
• k-team robots
• EPFL

- simulation packages

• either webbots above, or …
• in-house bespoke system (need to know C#)
• roll your own {NB issue with use of bespoke packages is the fact that difficult for community to compare what you've done if non-standard simulation environment}

- Conferences to look at:

• ALife10 / ALifeX
• EvoCop
• From animals to animats (artificial animals)

Things to dig into:

• Learning and evolving
• deterministic approach (cf. chaotic) to flocking
• {Note that a lot of work has already been done in the deterministic flocking space, so you may struggle to find a new avenue}
• How distributed animats works on a real life problem (e.g. search and rescue, etc)
• ??What is the difference between flocking and swarming??
• * Evolution and Computation journal