New papers coming up

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 [...]

May 14th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: CoSMoS | Leave a comment

When Argumentation shakes hands with Science

Science is, in theory, “nice and principled”. We have the scientific method to guide experimentation, we have null hypothesis testing, so one could say nothing can really go wrong. What we get is what is “out there”. That is in theory, of course…

Coming back to good-old reality, things are not exactly perfect. First of all, we have the omnipresent sampling effect – our certainty over particular experimental results is always limited by measurement errors. Secondly, the way data is aggregated and conclusions drawn, may be biased: assumptions taken for granted, methods that are not really applicable to the given context, etc. Transparency is an issue. Finally, one of the biggest fish in the pond is the issue of scaling: drawing conclusions for large-scale systems, from small-scale observations.

From all this cloud of dust, argumentation techniques come to the rescue. They have been around for some time, especially in the domain [...]

March 10th, 2010 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Research | Leave a comment