UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
             COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents


                     "Evolution-in-materio: 
           Evolving Computation using Physical Processes"

                     Dr. Julian Miller
            (Department of Electronics, University of York)

                  18 November 2015  (Wednesday)
                           1 pm -2 pm


                  Hatfield, College Lane Campus
                      Lecture Theatre LF233

                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                  Refreshments will be available

Abstract:

Natural evolution has been manipulating the properties of proteins for
billions of years.  This 'design process' is completely different to
conventional human design which assembles well-understood smaller parts
in a highly principled way. In evolution-in-materio (EIM), researchers
use evolutionary algorithms to define configurations and magnitudes of
physical variables (e.g. voltages) which are applied to material systems
so that they carry out useful computation. One of the advantages of this
is that artificial evolution can exploit physical effects that are either
too complex to understand or hitherto unknown. An EU funded project in
Unconventional Computation called NASCENCE: Nanoscale Engineering of
Novel Computation using Evolution, has the aim to model, understand
and exploit the behaviour of evolved configurations of nanosystems
(e.g. networks of nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes, liquid crystals) to
solve computational problems. In this way it is possible to use materials
to help find solutions to a number of well-known computational problems
such as  TSP, Binpacking, and Machine classification.

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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://cs-colloq.stca.herts.ac.uk