Recent Advances in Bio-Inspired Computing: Theory and Applications
J.UCS Special Issue
Atulya K. Nagar
(Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Liverpool Hope University
United Kingdom
nagara@hope.ac.uk)
T. Robinson
(Department of Mathematics, Madras Christian College, Chennai, India
robin.mcc@gmail.com)
This special issue of the Journal of Universal Computer Science
(J.UCS) is devoted to selected contributions from BIC-TA 2010, the
annual International Conference on Bio-Inspired Computing: Theories
and Applications that in 2010 took place in Liverpool. As the name
indicates, this conference is interdisciplinary in character and
brings together scientists from a wide range of fields for
brainstorming on advances in computing techniques and the humbling
variety, adaptability, as well as sophistication of the nature around
us for inspiration and applications based on such techniques and
algorithms. Another special issue of the Natural Computing (NaCo)
journal was also produced as a result of this conference and the first
guest editor feels privileged and honoured for being able to produced
two very high quality special issue volumes of two very highly
regarded journals.
Bio-Inspired Computing: Theories and Applications (BIC-TA) has
established itself as one of the flagship conferences bringing
together the world's leading academics and scientists from different
branches of Natural Computing. Since 2006 the conference has taken
place at Wuhan (2006), Zhengzhou (2007), Adelaide (2008) and Beijing
(2009) and has attracted wide ranging interest amongst researchers
with different backgrounds. The fifth in the series of the BIC-TA
conferences was held at Liverpool and it was the privilege for the
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Liverpool Hope
University to play host for the BIC-TA 2010 from 8th to 10th
September. With the growing trend in Emergent Complex Systems theme,
BIC-TA 2010 saw, for the first time in the series, the inclusion of
two closely related fields, namely Complex Systems, and Computational
Neuroscience. BIC-TA 2010 was graced with the keynote speeches
delivered by Prof. Steve Furber (The University of Manchester, UK) and
Prof. D.G. Thomas (Madras Christian College, Chennai, India). The
conference series is going from strength to strength with the BIC-TA
2011 hosted at the Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang (Malaysia) and
future 2012 and 2013 editions planned to be held at Gwalior (India)
and Anhui (China), respectively.
From a wide spectrum of interesting research papers on various aspects
of Bio-Inspired Computing, with a diverse range of simulation
applications, theories, and techniques within the domain, the editors
carefully selected, for this special issue of the J.UCS, 15 papers
(out of over 80 papers) which were presented at the conference. An
open Call for Paper was also issued for this special issue and the
editors received 15 submissions as a result of this open call. The
authors of the selected papers were invited to substantially extend
and submit them for a complete new peer-review for consideration in
this special issue. The final decision for the inclusion 8 papers,
brief summary of these is given in the paragraph to follow, in this
special issue has been strictly based on the outcome of the rigorous
peer-review process.
The first three papers in this special issue are devoted to very
interesting applications of Membrane Computing theme. Elias et
al. report an insightful application of distributed P-Systems suitable
for real-time optimisation in a dynamic and distributed
environment. They propose the design of a variant of the Distributed P
system by augmenting it with new features enabling centralised
monitoring and communication with all the other components of the
distributed system. Another Membrane Computing application is in Niu
et al. who implement a variant P system with shuffle operation on
string-language objects and obtain comparison results demonstrating
the power of shuffle operation enlarged in the framework of P
systems. They illustrate how to generate picture languages by using
this kind of devices in the context of Catalytic-Like Rules. In yet
another theoretical development, properties of the Array P System with
Shuffle on Trajectories are studied, using examples, by Venkatesan et
al.. They present a new concept of trajectory array P system which
consists of a membrane structure in which the objects are arrays and
the evolutionary rules are given in terms of trajectories. Although,
the next three articles are on the theme of Particle Swarm
Optimisation (PSO), amongst these the paper by Zhang et al. is on a
membrane algorithm, called HPSOPS, which combines membrane systems and
a hybrid particle swarm optimisation with wavelet mutation (HPSOWM) as
they present this hybrid algorithm for solving certain broadcasting
problems. Deep and Bansal tackle certain class of Economic Dispatch
Problems, which are non-linear continuous optimisation problems, using
original PSO and two of its improved variants (namely, Laplace
Crossover PSO (LXPSO) and Quadratic Approximation PSO (qPSO)), and
obtain improved results than reported in the literature. In-depth
theoretical analysis is presented in Ali et al. as they use
Differential Evolution with some very interesting examples. Their
analysis shows the effect of two local searches (namely, Trigonometric
Local Search (TLS) and Interpolated Local Search (ILS)) on the working
of basic Differential Evolution (DE). A very interesting Genetic
Algorithm application is reported by Singh Baicher in the context of
real-time implementation of a class of optimised multirate quadrature
mirror filter bank. In the final paper, Bhattacharya et al. report a
very interesting work on the theme of Neural Computing comprising of
study assessing Thalamo-cortical Circuitry Model and they describe the
effects of variation of synaptic connectivity using a neural mass
model.
The objective of this special issue has been to make available recent
results and report in-progress research in the field and we much hope
that this publication will become an important reference source to
many students, researchers, and academics in their educational,
research, and professional activities.
As guest editors, we would like to express our deep thanks to the
Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Christian Gütl, for providing us with the
opportunity to host this special issue in J.UCS. We are much indebted
to Mag. Dana Kaiser (assistant editor) for her continued support and
helpful guidance throughout all the stages of preparing the special
issue. We also thank the authors for their contributions, including
those whose papers were not included. Last but not least, we express
our sincere gratitude for the thoughtful work of the reviewers who
provided invaluable evaluations and recommendations that have helped
maintain the quality and clarity of presentation of the papers.
Atulya K. Nagar
T. Robinson
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