Engineers and Political Power

Interesting to read this article from TechnologyReview. It is about the political power of engineers in US and the world. According to the article, there are only a few engineers in U.S. Senate and the House. But the reverse is true in other parts of the world, specially in USSR, and middle east. It is true for my country (Iran/Persia) that there are many engineers who is doing political decisions.

On Memetic Algorithms

I read a few papers on Memetic Algorithms recently. The idea of meme as a unit of information that reproduces itself as people exchange idea is very interesting to me. When I review the brief history of my though during these recent years, I found out that I had a similar idea about 4 years ago: an ALife setting in which individual learns and then transfer their knowledge to each other when they become close (I always like spatially-extended ALife creatures that can move in the environment). However in my opinion, the idea of meme is somehow misused or biased in the evolutionary computation community. Most of them interpret a meme as a hybridization of local search and a genetic global search. In other words, most researchers use a kind of local search after (or before) each genetic operator they made. Of course, there are many variations in the exact implementation – but most of them are actually doing so. What is the root of this trend? I am not sure, may be it is due to Moscato’s paper that shaped a new paradigm and getting out of it is difficult. But, I think it comes from this interpretation of meme: when people get idea, they change it during their lifetime, and then transfer it to others. Traditional genetic search does this transfer, but does not include a piece of “lifetime adaptation”. They interpreted this lifetime adaptation as a kind of local search and most of them followed a Lamarckian approach as “memes must be changed during its life in the individual”.
Well … I will write more about memetic algorithms.

(*): This quotation is actually a meme. Many papers refer to it when they want to define a meme. I guess only a few people actually read the Dawkins’ book. One of them is me!

Academic Ethics?

What are your answers to the following questions:
-Three people in an office. Two of them bounce ideas back and forth to prove a new theorem while the third just tries to keep up. Should the third person be a co-author?
-Your advisor of the opposite sex has two tickets to a concert you really want to see and invites you to join him/her. Would you go? (As I am not girl, I haven’t the opportunity to think about this difficult question in my country!!!)
-…
You may like to see a few more similar questions in Computational Complexity weblog and read other people’s answers.

Yuri’s Night


Yuri A. Gagarin (1934-1968)
When I orbited the Earth in a spaceship, I saw for the first time how beautiful our planet is. Mankind, let us preserve and increase this beauty, and not destroy it!

In such a day, 12th of April 1961, Yuri Gagarin was the first human-being who flighted to the outer-space. His historical trip has many consequences; however, one of them is: The Earth is not that big as we thought before. Moreover, I think knowing that the universe is a very big place comparing with our planet might be also good for AI. Guess how!
Read More:
Yuri’s Night in Wikipedia
Yuri Gagarin in Wikipedia
Pictured Biography of Yuri Gagarin
I copy-pasted this post picture from here!

Reading some books on Statistical Learning Theory

I have started reading Vladimir Vapnik’s Statistical Learning Theory book. It is a fascinating book which I enjoy much whenever I read it. Parallel to it, I read Vidyasagar’s Learning and Generalization (2nd edition). It is also about statistical learning theory. However, its trend is somehow different from Vapnik’s. It is early to judge and compare these books, but from what I have read up to now, I can say that Vapnik’s book is much easier and insightful comparing the other. On the other hand, Vidyasagar’s book is more mathematically inclined and I cannot understand many parts of it easily (so I escape most proofs and …). A big problem (for me) in Vidyasagar’s books is that it does not try to explain the underlying phenomena intuitively.
Would you mind write your idea and suggestions about these two books? Moreover, I want to become aware of trends in the theoretical ML. Which book do you suggest? (Kearns?! I haven’t it and I don’t know from where I can find it.)

Happy Norooz!

Happy New Year!!!
Happy Norooz!!!

Today is the first day of Farvardin and the beginning of the new 1384 year. Persian (Iranian) calendar, which is called Khorshidi (=Solar), is the most exact calendar of the world that has only a day of error in every some million years. Its beginning is aligned with the start of the spring. There are many myths about it which I will not tell you! (:

Something … Nothing

Nothing very special … I am waiting for my admissions (and rejections!) to do a final decision. I cannot understand the reason someone might reject me. Nevertheless, those “You are very good, but there is no sufficient accommodations” is not a good explanation for rejecting me. So, I am angry at those guys at the current moment!!!
Well … I changed the title of Thesilog to “Hands off Iran … “. This change can be considered as political act – in the notion of Hannah Arendt (right spelling?). What does it mean? It means that I don’t want U.S.A troops to come to our country and help us getting rid of Mullahs (priest who rule Persia (Iran) ). I do not like Mullahs at all, but I don’t believe that a bloody war is the best way one can do. Beside that, I cannot believe that those troops are very kind people. Moreover, …
What else?! emmm … Apparently, Norooz (or Nowrouz) is coming fast. For those who do not know, Norooz (=New Day) is the first day of the Persians new year. It is the beginning of the spring (1st of Farvardin; usually 21 March) in which we celebrate and doing some fun and etc.

Well … nothing else!

Reinventing SLAM

Trying to reinvent the wheel for a while opens your insight as a tire maker! (Quote by myself!)

Hmmm … I am trying to reinvent robot’s map building method before really reading the detailed stuff. Right now, I am reinventing the Hans Moravec’s Evidence Grid. It is working and I know (don’t ask me from where because I must say that I took a small look to formulas of a few papers (; ) that it is not exactly the same.
I consider the belief of occupancy as P(occupy) (so, 0=Sebastian Thrun’s. I am interested to see the exact formulation of his usage of particle filters.