Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

I hadn’t heard anything about wavlets in several years and then this news story caught my eye.

. . .Meningiomas are tumours of the brain and nervous system and they account for 20% of all brain tumours. Doctors have a major problem of discriminating between the four different subtypes of meningiomas but doctors face three key problems in making such a diagnois:

– The work can be painstakingly slow requiring up to two hours of analysis and expert consideration of a full “slide” of information.

– The finest tumour specialists (histopathologists) can at times come up with completely contradictory findings based on slight variations in their method of analysis.

– Currently the slides that specialists examine contain a few million pixels of data and the task of tumour diagnosis is painstakingly slow already. This problem is quite literally growing as medical equipment is coming on stream that can produce slides with hundreds of millions pixel resolution.

. . .

Now researchers in the University of Warwick’s Department of Computer Science have devised a method of using “wavelets” to provide an automated analysis of the varying texture of the tumours and guidance to doctor’s within seconds of being presented the data.

[ read more Wavelets crunch through doctor’s day to long struggle to diagnose brain tumors

Maybe wavelets are about to make a bigger splash in the world of artificial intelligence?

Learn more:
An introduction to wavelets
A really friendly guide to wavelets
Tutorial on continuous wavelet analysis
Wavelet ( Wolfram site )
Wavelets
Wavelets for computer graphics

Code:
WAILI – Wavelets C++ library ( open source )
PyWavelets – Python library ( open source )
Wavelets in Java ( source code provided)

There are several tutorials and examples on the source forge site.

JGAP (pronounced “jay-gap”) is a Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming component provided as a Java framework. It provides basic genetic mechanisms that can be easily used to apply evolutionary principles to problem solutions. See the examples for a demonstration or watch out the graphical tree that can be created with JGAP for found solutions of genetically evolved programs.

JGAP was designed to be very easy to use “out of the box”, while also designed to be highly modular so that more adventurous users can easily plug-in custom genetic operators and other sub-components.

Download and more information at JGAP at SourceForge

More information:
Traveling Salesman problem solved with JGAP ( pdf )
A Genetic Algorithm Based Mobile Sensor Network Deployment Algorithm ( pdf )

Ah and we take another step closer to cylons and the world of Cory Doctrow.

Look at your computer setup and imagine that you hooked up a 3D printer. Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you’re in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right – a self-replicating machine. [ read more from the RepRap home page]

More information:
RepRap blog has available kits to build your own RepRap.
Documentation

And see also:
Five ways to print your own 3d objects ( SciAm slide show )

The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation thinks religion is just a part of evolution. How totally fitting is it that those least likely to believe the theory of evolution because of religious beliefs do so because of evolution?

The reason this is here on the AI blog is because this was tested using sims. The code is open source. You can download a copy of “Evogod” and read the papers ‘Is Religion an Evolutionary Adaptation? for yourself.

If you are interesting in building sim worlds this this is a great place to start.