Posted by ljmacphee on June 30, 2008 under artificial intelligence in the news | 
Path Intelligence has developed software to track pedestrians by analyzing their mobile phone signals. Monitoring units can be placed about a mall or store and the units fetch a unique signal from shoppers phones and track the shopper’s path.
Stores are provided with easy to use interfaces for the data, weather information, and SMS notification of trouble ( people in unauthorized areas or left packages ) to security personal.
Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their mobile phones.
The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around.
The device cannot access personal details about a person’s identity or contacts, but privacy campaigners expressed concern about potential intrusion should the data fall into the wrong hands.
The surveillance mechanism works by monitoring the signals produced by mobile handsets and then locating the phone by triangulation – measuring the phone’s distance from three receivers.
Related Links
It has already been installed in two shopping centres, including Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, and three more centres will begin using it next month, Times Online has learnt. [ read more
Right now the stores do not have personal information on the shoppers. Shoppers are tracked by IMEI number ( International Mobile Equipment Identity ). But I’m confident it will not be long before your mobile phone company finds a way to sell this information to interested parties. In phones with a sim card this information is on the sim, in phones without sims it is stored on the phone hardware.
See also:
Data retention effectively changes the behavior of citizens in Germany
Posted by ljmacphee on June 23, 2008 under source code |
The SantaFe Trail is a textbook beginner’s problem in genetic programming. The ants are allowed to turn right or left or to move forward. Ants can see food if it is directly in front of them. The Trail is the one in the image above and it is also in the source code.
Ants follow two finite state machines, one if it sees food, another if it does not see food. Optimally the see food machine would only have move forward. But we let nature decide that.
Ants are created, given a random set of instructions and move one instruction each cycle. Then entire swarm moves a given number of cycles, then a new generation is born. The top half of the food finders in the generation mate. One mate contributes the ’see food’ states, one the ‘doesn’t see food states’ and one move is randomly changed in each string of moves. The population is kept at a constant number.
Source Code:
Santa Fe Ants ( Java )
Papers:
Cartesian Genetic Programming (pdf )
Selection in massively Parallel Genetic Algorithms
Ant Algorithms for Discrete Optimization
See also:
Evolutionary AI
Posted by ljmacphee on June 16, 2008 under artificial intelligence in the news |
While most of the artificial intelligent design of websites has come in the form of ‘Mechanical Turks’ better known as Web 2.0. Here is someone using an evolution algorithm to design a website.
Matthew Hockenberry and Ernesto Arroyo of Creative Synthesis, a non-profit organisation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have created evolutionary software that alters colours, fonts and hyperlinks of pages in response to what seems to grab the attention of the people who click on the site. See Creative Synthesis for more. [ read more Web pages come alive and start breeding]
They defined the design of a webpage as a search problem. Then they broke html and css elements up into the smallest possible items. Those items are the dna, the webpage is the environment.
The best design attracts the most and longest attention. Here is the end result and some of the designs along the way AAAI.jpg
Human Tended Gardens of Evolutionary Design
Posted by ljmacphee on June 9, 2008 under cool open source ai projects |
Biota has podcasts, several open source artificial life projects, and papers all available for you to use. Biota exists to promote and assist the creation of biologically inspired artificial life forms in digital ecosystems. ( See the links page for a list of several projects )
The mission of Biota.org is to promote and assist in the engineering of complete, biologically-inspired, synthetic ecosystems and organisms. This involves the creation and deployment of digital tools and environments for simulation, research, and learning about living systems both natural and artificial. These tools could range from simple genetic algorithms all the way up to full multi-user virtual environments. Biota.org will seek to nourish a community of interest and to bring the experience of interacting with digital biota to a large audience through the medium of the Internet. Cyberbiology is Artificial Life made visible through Cyberspace.
More information:
Biota
Posted by ljmacphee on June 2, 2008 under cool open source ai projects |
Developed by Tom Ray, Tierra is a program that allows simple computer code to evolve and reproduce. Ray originally began as a biologist studying evolution and hoped to create an electric powered evolution machine to better study evolution. A friend in computer science and the current ( 1980s ) rash of computer viruses gave him the idea he needed.
To keep his creations from escaping or crashing his computer with bad code he wrote a computer emulator and let his creations loose in there. The first creation was an 80 byte program designed to fill in a free memory space on his computer with a copy of itself. Each program would continue its reproduction. The programs scrambled a few bits during the copy. If a program was broken enough to damage the computer or got too old it would be killed off.
After billions of generations working mutants appeared. Smaller programs doing the best since they needed the least resources. Parasites appeared which used other programs code to reproduce themselves. Programs would then evolve that had immunity to the parasites. Social programs evolved that would cooperate or steal from each other.
The algorithm has been on the internet and you can download it and experiment with Tom Rays programs.
More information and code:
Tierra home page
