Research home page for Simon Hardingsimonh.jpg

 

This web page is organized into the following sections:

·         Contact Information

·         Research interests and publications

o   Evolution in materio, Analogue Computing and Unconventional Computation

o   Genetic programming and Developmental Systems

o   Implementation of Genetic Programming

·         Brief CV

 

Email

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Address

Department Of Computer Science,

Memorial University of Newfoundland,

St John’s

NL, Canada

A1B 3X5

 

Telephone

+1 709 737 4891

Skype

simon.l.harding

Web

Evolution In Materio www.evolutioninmaterio.com

General Purpose Genetic Programming on GPUs  www.gpgpgpu.com

Department of Computer Science, Memorial University www.cs.mun.ca

 

 

Evolution in materio, Analogue Computing and Unconventional Computation

 

 

In 1958 Gordon Pask described a method of manipulating a physical system (a series of electrodes in a chemical chamber) so that it would carry out a new function. This work was largely forgotten for many years. In 1996, Adrian Thompson demonstrated that when artificial evolution is sufficiently unconstrained it is possible for it to exploit physical properties for computation. He demonstrated this using an reprogrammable electronic device called an Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA).

 

This inspired the idea that artificial evolution might be able to used to discover hitherto unknown ways of configuring matter to carry out computation. This led to a research project that demonstrated that artificial

evolution can be used to manipulate a liquid crystal device so that it can do computations that solve a number of tasks (frequency discrimination, robot control, Boolean logic).

 

I am particularly interested in the application of evolution to in materio computation.  It is my position that the best way to use material for computation is to allow evolutionary algorithms to treat the system as a black box.  We can therefore shield ourselves from  our inability to understand what is happening inside the material system and still obtain computation.

 

These ideas were the focus of my doctoral thesis:

 

Evolution In Materio

Simon Harding

PhD Thesis, University of York, 2006

Evolution In Materio

Simon Harding and Julian F. Miller

2007, entry accepted for publication in the Encyclopedia of Complexity and System Science

Programming the Extended Analogue Computer using Evolutionary Algorithms

Simon Harding

2007, Under preperation

Evolution in Materio: Exploiting the Physics of Materials for Computation

Simon L. Harding, Julian F. Miller and Edward A. Rietman

2006, Available at arxiv.org submitted to the International Journal of Unconventional Computing

A Framework for the Automatic Identification and Extraction of Computation from Materials

Simon Harding, James Neil, Klaus-Peter Zauner, Julian F. Miller, and Kester Clegg

2006, Unpublished technical report

 

Evolution in Materio: Exploiting the Physics of Materials for Computation

Simon L. Harding, Julian F. Miller and Edward A. Rietman

Position paper at the ‘The Grand Challenge in Non-Classical Computation International Workshop’, York, 2005

 

Evolution In Materio: Investigating the Stability of Robot Controllers Evolved in Liquid Crystal

Simon Harding and Julian F. Miller

Published in ICES 2005 International Conference on Evolvable Systems

 

Evolution In Materio:Evolution In Materio : Evolving Logic Gates in Liquid Crystal

Simon Harding and Julian F. Miller

Presented at the Workshop on Unconventional Computing at ECAL 2005 VIIIth European Conference on Artificial Life, winner of best paper award in Workshop in Unconventional Computing. To be published in International Journal of Unconventional Computing

 

Evolution In Materio:A Real-Time Robot Controller in Liquid Crystal

Simon Harding and Julian F. Miller

Published in the proceedings of 2005 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware

 

Evolution in materio: Initial experiments with liquid crystal

Simon Harding and Julian Miller

Proceedings of 2004 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware (EH'04) , June 2004, Seattle, Washington, USA

 

Evolution in materio: A Tone Discriminator In Liquid Crystal

Simon Harding and Julian Miller

In Proceedings of the Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2004 (CEC'2004)

 

A scalable platform for intrinsic hardware and in materio evolution

S. L. Harding and Julian Francis Miller

NASA/DOD Conference on Evolvable Hardware,  2003

 

Genetic programming and Developmental Systems

 

My research interest in genetic programming and developmental systems is focused on practical applications.  The Self modifying CGP I developed aims to develop a general purpose genetic programming system that allows for growth and development.

 

The representation is a graph that encodes both the computational elements and the instructions needed for growth/modification.  The growth/ modification is environmentally sensitive – data coming into the graph determines which instructions are operated.

 

The system automatically can decide if development is needed – simply by evolving out the modification instructions .

 

Work so far shows that the system can evolve large modular systems (patterns, Boolean logic circuits) as well as behave as a normal GP system  where modification is not needed (for regression, classification etc).

 

Adding the mechanism for modification to this system introduced no overhead in terms of evolability.  Therefore, this representation should be appropriate to use when it is unclear if development(or any form of self modification) is needed.

 

Future work will investigate further uses of the representation for tasks such as growth of artificial neural networks.

 

I am also interested in the exploitation, during development, of the physical properties of the system and how these can be used to benefit artificial developmental systems.

 

 

Self-modifying Cartesian Genetic Programming

Simon L. Harding , Julian F. Miller and Wolfgang Banzhaf               

GECCO 2007

 

The Dead State: A comparison between developmental and direct encodings.

Simon Harding and Julian F Miller

GECCO 2006

 

A comparison between developmental and direct encodings:

An update of the GECCO 2006 Paper “The Dead State”

Simon Harding and Julian F Miller

2006, Unpublished technical report

 

Evolution of Robot Controller Using Cartesian Genetic Programming.

Simon Harding and Julian F. Miller

EuroGP 2005

 

Pole Balancing With Cartesian Genetic Programming

Simon Harding, Rachel M. Harris and Julian F. Miller

2005, Unpublished technical report.

 

 

Implementation of Genetic Programming

 

Fitness evaluation in genetic programming is typically a bottle neck. Parallelization is one mechanism to  overcome this problem.

 

A traditional approach is to use a cluster of computers.  However, modern graphics cards – Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) – can also be used.

 

GPUs are cheap, highly parallel (200+ processors on recent cards) and fast (1.3GHz per processor).  Their SIMD architecture makes them ideally suited for GP use – where we typically have one evolved program and many test cases to evaluate.

 

I have shown that on a standard laptop, a speed increase of 30times can be expected when using the GPU to run fitness evaluations.

 

 

Evolution of Image Filters on Graphics Processor Units Using Cartesian Genetic Programming

Simon Harding

To appear in WCCI 2008. 

Genetic Programming on GPUs for Image Processing

Simon Harding and Wolfgang Banzhaf

Submitted to GECCO 2008

 

Fast Genetic Programming on GPUs

Simon Harding and Wolfgang Banzhaf

EuroGP 2007

 

Fast Genetic Programming and Artificial Developmental Systems on GPUs

Simon Harding and Wolfgang Banzhaf

21st Annual International Symposium on High Performance Computing Systems and Applications (HPCS 2007)

 

A Distributed Evolutionary Algorithm Using C Sharp and Mono

Simon Harding

2006, Unpublished  technical report

 

Brief Curriculum Vitae

 

Employment

Post doctoral research fellow,  Jan 2008

Department Of Computer Science, Memorial University, Canada

 

 

Collaborateur scientifique, May 2007 – Jan 2008

Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

Primarily researching the use of an bio-inspired analog network encoding and its applicability to evolving robust electronic circuits.

 

Post doctoral research fellow,  Feb 2006 – May 2007

Department Of Computer Science, Memorial University, Canada

Primarily researching  the properties of genetic programming developmental systems. Other research involves physics based computation, using cluster-based simulations of complex systems and evolving control strategies. Other research investigated high performance implementation of these systems.

 

Consultant Control Software Engineer,  Sept 2001-Present

Software In Control Ltd.

Consultancy in real time control and remote telemetry. Current projects include high precision, non-contact laser measurement systems and robotic control (for Scantron Industrial Products), remote wireless web-cams (for BBC) and telemetry over GSM networks (PIC Ltd).  Role includes development on multiple platforms (Windows XP/Embedded, CE and Linux) and PLC units.

 

Teaching Assistant,  Sept 2001- Dec 2004

School Of Computer Science, University Of Birmingham

Teaching undergraduates and masters students, in both laboratory demonstrations and small group tutorials. Courses taught include: Java, neural networks, robotics and AI programming. 

 

Software Engineer, Jun 2001- Sept 2001

Delcam, Birmingham

Full time position, developing CAD file format conversion applications and upgrading existing application for OLE automation.

 

Control Engineer, Jun 1997 –Sept 2000

Honeywell Control Systems, Bracknell

Apprentice control engineer until Sept 1998. Undergraduate degree was sponsored by Honeywell.  Worked full time as control engineer during holiday periods 1998-2000. Roles included: site visits for equipment configuration, repair and calibration and distributed control system development for large-scale projects for the petrochemical industry.

 

Education

 

The University of York, 2004-2005

PhD Electronics

Thesis title: “Evolution In Materio”

Partially funded by the “European Office of Aerospace Research and Development”

Examined by Prof A. Tyrrell and Prof. W. Banzhaf

 

The University of Birmingham, 2001-2004

PhD