CoSMoS needs a summer intern to develop a hardware extension to our robots. The lucky intern will get to work on a real robot and will learn a whole lot about robotics, hardware and engineering along the way. That sort of thing looks great on a CV, plus you get paid! Here’s a photo of one of the robots, we have a total of 18:
It’s a really great opportunity if you didn’t manage to get a summer placement in industry this year. I wish I could do it but unfortunately the CoSMoS project ends with my PhD and it can’t be extended for 10 weeks. In my opinion, the most important requirement from an applicant is that they know about microcontrollers, can code in C and can design circuits. An intern which knows or has done more stuff would be nice, but it’s well worth applying for even if you don’t: It’s better to have a proactive and enthusiastic intern who’ll need to do some extra learning than someone who has the knowledge but won’t do anything.
Full job description and application details are below.
Continue reading Come work for us!
Another CoSMoS paper is being presented at the ALife XII conference which takes in Odense in August.
The paper is related to my PhD work, and in particular what I started out doing, back in the mists of time, relating to Chris Alexander’s Nature of Order. Chris is an architect, of the building variety, and this work relates to his ideas about how the built environment should, and in some cases does, evolve to preserve some properties he thinks important.
In a nutshell,we built a bit of software that places blobs in a two-dimensional space in a manner that attempts to mimic some of Chris’s properties. In particular ones that he calls Positive Space and Levels of Scale. The idea is that, to some extent, the diagrams look rather like city plans, especially the ones for ancient cities that have arisen from geography, geology and centuries [...]
Hello everyone!
Here are two new papers being prepared for press, by your very own CoSMoS researchers. Topics range from evolution and swarm robotics, to validation and structured means of argumentation.
Endulge !
Exploiting Loose Horizontal Coupling in Evolutionary Swarm Robotics – ANTS 2010
Jenny Owen, Susan Stepney, Jon Timmis and Alan Winfield
Abstract: “We describe a theory from Herbert Simon that links the structure of complex systems to increased speed of evolution, and argue the position that this theory can be beneficial to evolutionary swarm robotic research.
We propose a way of applying this theory to evolutionary swarm robotic systems by manually designing the robot to robot communication mechanisms and keeping these constant, whilst evolving the rest of the robots’ behaviours. This allows for robots to evolve independently of each other without breaking any inter-dependencies that may exist between robots in the swarm. Finally [...]
Tick tock, tick tock… and the CoSMoS “workers” are on their way to Kent University, for another fabulo-important meeting. Some of us are called workers because… hmm, this is what we actually are: a variably sized-group of Research Assistants and Research Students from the Universities of York and Kent, doing work for the common good of the modelling and simulating community.
This time of the year we’ve got a good selection of topics, ranging from Adam Sampson‘s thoughts on decoupling different facets of computer simulations (e.g. their visualisation, data analysis, spatial representation), to Antonio Gomez Zamorano‘s work on FPGA-based computer simulations and more. Let’s not forget Tim Hoverd with his secret weapon, “emergent architecture” and Teodor Ghetiu‘s (yes, me) Argument-Driven Validation. The icing on the cake is provided by Jenny Owen, who will shed more light [...]
The final call for papers for the CoSMoS 2010 workshop is out. Deadline for submissions has been extended for a week to the [...]
The second call for papers for the 3rd Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation Workshop, is out! This year, the CoSMoS Workshop is collocated with ALife XII, conference focussed on “critical properties of living systems”.
Here is more from the CFP:
Constructing models and simulations of complex systems is a challenging and interdisciplinary task. Elements might include choice of modelling tools and techniques, simulation infrastructures, concurrency, the process of moving from models to simulations, arguing validity of simulations, and the identification of reusable engineering techniques such as patterns. The CoSMoS workshop series is part of a four-year initiative, based at the Universities of York and Kent, UK, to develop a framework and infrastructure for the construction of of generic complex systems simulations.
We are seeking papers on the engineering aspects of the modelling and simulation of complex systems, with a focus on complex living systems. Areas of interest include, but are [...]
CS students at the University of Kent are currently choosing their modules for next year — and their choice includes CO538 Concurrency Design and Practice, which teaches concurrent software engineering using the same techniques that we’ve used for much of the CoSMoS work. Our demo reel video shows some of the CoSMoS case studies, followed by some of the assessment solutions that students have submitted over the past couple of years:
If you’d like to see more videos of CoSMoS simulations in action, check out my channel on YouTube. Don’t miss Birds on [...]
This year we are delighted to have Prof. Paul Humphreys as our invited speaker. Our York research associate Paul Andrews has been telling us for some time about Prof. Humphreys’ book “Extending Ourselves”, so it will be interesting to hear what the man himself has to say!
The title of his talk will be “Some Relations between Formal Structure and Conceptual Content in Simulations”.
Abstract
One of the striking features of complex systems modelling, and simulation more generally, is the ability in many cases to transfer models across domains of application. Models using fitness landscapes that originated in population biology can be used in agent based models in economics, abstract computations developed for Boolean algebras can be mapped onto dilute spin glass models, and Ising models from condensed matter physics have been used to model the synchronization of firefly flashing in certain species. This feature, which derives from the [...]
A call for participation for the 3rd in the series of CoSMoS workshops has been announced here. We are going to be running the workshop as a satellite event of the AlifeXII conference so we’ll hopefully have some interesting submissions and discussions at a great hosting venue. Get writing those [...]
The Special Session on CoSMoS at ICECCS 2010 is now finalised: see http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/ICECCS2010/
There is a full paper and two posters from the [...]
|
|
