Titulo Estágio
Distributed Evolutionary Computation in Informal Environments
Área Tecnológica
Sistemas Evol. e Comp.
Local do Estágio
CISUC
Enquadramento
Informal computing represents ways of devising systems that work on informal environments (non-cluster, non-grid, for instance) which are independent from any organization.
Means for informal computing include:
Parasitic of stealth computing: using resources without explicit authorization from the user.
Volunteer computing: using a pool of resources that are willingly submitted by a user.
Freeriding computing: similar to parasitic computing except that the users know they are providing resources but simply don't care. Using resources that are free and available online.
Ubiquitous computing: using resources available in devices such as mobile phones or other gadgets.
Using these and similar kinds of computing paradigms present various challenges to the evolutionary computation community, specially to those interested in distributed models: neither the topology nor the availability of the nodes are known, different nodes will have different performances and resources and the connections between them will show different characteristics.
In order to take full advantage of such paradigms for evolutionary computation, present day paradigms need to be adapted to meet the afore mentioned inherent characteristics.
Island Models are one of the many available paradigms for distributed evolutionary computation. Considered a state of the art approach, this paradigm has been thoroughly studied on controlled, cluster like environments, showing very promising results on different benchmark and real world problems.
Despite being devised for controlled environments, island models show a number of features that are of interest to informal environments such as support for dynamic topologies, asynchrony and the need of very little communication between nodes. These characteristics, as well as the increasing popularity of island models, suggest that they are a good starting point to develop a full fledged evolutionary computation system for informal environments.
Objetivo
Explore the use of island models in the context of informal computing.
Study its performance on both benchmark and real world problems.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
Step 1 - Revision of the Bibliography .
Step 2 - Determining the techniques to use and develop
Step 3 - Proof of concept and prototype development
Step 4 - Thesis and work plan proposal
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
Step 5 - Development of an EC platform adequate for the research plan of the proposal.
Fase 6 - Experimentation and Analysis.
Fase 7 - Writing of the Thesis.
Fase 8 - Scientific paper.
Condições
Strong skills in programming.
Will to communicate in English with other researchers is also important.
Other interesting skills include Complex Systems and Artificial Intelligence
Observações
Estágio Remunerado
Orientador
Penousal Machado
machado@dei.uc.pt 📩