HONG KONG BAPTIST UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF SCIENCE

Department of Computer Science Colloquium
2013 Series

Morphogenetic Self-Organization of Collective Systems

Prof. Yaochu Jin
Professor of Computational Intelligence and Head
Nature-Inspired Computing and Engineering (NICE) Group Department of Computing
University of Surrey Guildford
U.K.

Date: May 10, 2013 (Friday)
Time: 10:45 - 11:45 am
Venue: RRS905, Sir Run Run Shaw Building, Ho Sin Hang Campus

Abstract
Self-organization is one of the most important features observed in social, economic, ecological and biological systems. Distributed self-organizing systems are able to generate emergent global behaviors through local interactions among individuals without a centralized control. Such systems are also supposed to be robust, self-repairable and highly adaptive. However, design of self-organizing systems is very challenging, particularly when the emerged global behaviors are required to be predictable.

Morphogenesis is the biological process in which a fertilized cell proliferates, producing a large number of cells that interact with each other to generate the body plan of an organism. Biological morphogenesis, governed by gene regulatory networks through cellular and molecular interactions, can be seen as a self-organizing process. This talk presents a methodology that uses genetic and cellular mechanisms inspired from biological morphogenesis to self-organize collective engineered systems, such as multi-robot systems and modular robots. We show that the morphogenetic approach is able to self-organize collective systems without a centralized control, which is nevertheless able to generate controlled global behaviors. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that the global behavior is adaptable to changing environments.

Biography
Yaochu Jin received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees from Zhejiang University, China, in 1988, 1991, and 1996, respectively, and the Dr.-Ing. Degree from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, in 2001. He is currently a Professor of Computational Intelligence and Head of the Nature Inspired Computing and Engineering (NICE) Group, Department of Computing, University of Surrey, UK. His research interests include understanding evolution, learning and development in biology and bioinspired approach to solving engineering problems. He is an Associate Editor of BioSystems, the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, the IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine. He is an Invited Plenary / Keynote Speaker on several international conferences on various topics, including multi-objective machine learning, computational modeling of neural development, morphogenetic robotics and evolutionary aerodynamic design optimization. He is the General Chair of the 2012 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and Program Chair of 2013 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.

Dr Jin is a Distinguished Lecturer and AdCom member of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He is a Fellow of BCS and Senior Member of IEEE.

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http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/v1/?page=seminars&id=245
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