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Nature has long provided the inspiration for a variety of scientific discoveries in engineering, biomedicine, and computing, though only recently have these elements of nature been used directly in computational systems. Natural Computing for Simulation and Knowledge Discovery investigates the latest...

In this paper the authors present PSO-CGO, a novel particle swarm algorithm for cluster geometry optimization. The proposed approach combines a steady-state strategy to update solutions with a structural distance measure that helps to maintain population diversity. Also, it adopts a novel rule to...

This paper presents a new technique for optimizing binary problems with building blocks. The authors have developed a different approach to existing Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs). Our technique, called Phylogenetic Differential Evolution (PhyDE), combines the Phylogenetic Algorithm and...

In this work, the authors propose a combined approach based on a controller architecture that is able to generate locomotion for a quadruped robot and a global optimization algorithm to generate head movement stabilization. The movement controllers are biologically inspired in the concept of Central...

The incorporation of preferences into Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) presents some relevant advantages, namely to deal with complex real-world problems. It enables focus on the search thus avoiding the computation of irrelevant solutions from the point of view of the practical exploitation of results...

In this paper, the authors propose a new approach to fully asynchronous P systems, and a matching complexity measure, both inspired from the field of distributed algorithms. The authors validate the proposed approach by implementing several well-known distributed depth-first search (DFS) and...

In this paper, the authors discuss the simulation of a P system variant known as Spiking Neural P systems (SNP systems), using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). GPUs are well suited for highly parallel computations because of their intentional and massively parallel architecture. General purpose GPU...

In this paper, the authors continue the investigation of P colonies introduced in Kelemen, Kelemenová, and Paun (2004). This paper examines a class of abstract computing devices composed of independent agents, acting and evolving in a shared environment. The first part is devoted to the P colonies of...

Local search is currently one of the most used methods for finding solutions in real-life problems. It is usually considered when the research is interested in the final solution of the problem instead of the how the solution is reached. In this paper, the authors present an implementation of local...

One of the concepts that lie at the basis of membrane computing is the multiset rewriting rule. On the other hand, the paradigm of rules is profusely used in computer science for representing and dealing with knowledge. Therefore, establishing a “bridge” between these domains is important, for...

This paper presents an approach to P systems verification using the Spin model checker. The authors have developed a tool which implements the proposed approach and can automatically transform P system specifications from P-Lingua into Promela, the language accepted by the well known model checker...

The Intravenous Glucose Tolerance Test is an experimental procedure used to study the glucose-insulin endocrine regulatory system. An open problem is to construct a model representing simultaneously the entire regulative mechanism. In the past three decades, several models have appeared, but they have...

Smoothing is often used in Digital Imagery for improving the quality of an image by reducing its level of noise. This paper presents a parallel implementation of an algorithm for smoothing 2D images in the framework of Membrane Computing. The chosen formal framework has been tissue-like P systems. The...

P systems with active membranes have the ability of solving computationally hard problems. In this paper, the authors prove that uniform families of P systems with active membranes operating in polynomial time can solve the whole class of PP decision problems, without using nonelementary membrane...

Prime factorization is useful and crucial for public-key cryptography, and its application in public-key cryptography is possible only because prime factorization has been presumed to be difficult. A polynomial-time algorithm for prime factorization on a quantum computer was given by P. W. Shor in...

This work presents a discussion about the relationship between the contributions of Alan Turing – the centenary of whose birth is celebrated in 2012 – to the field of artificial neural networks and modern unorganized machines: reservoir computing (RC) approaches and extreme learning machines (ELMs)....

An important premise of Natural Computing is that some form of computation goes on in Nature, and that computing capability has to be understood, modeled, abstracted, and used for different objectives and in different contexts. Therefore, it is necessary to propose a new language capable of describing...

Slime mould Physarum polycephalum builds up sophisticated networks to transport nutrients between distant parts of its extended body. The slime mould’s protoplasmic network is optimised for maximum coverage of nutrients yet minimum energy spent on transportation of the intra-cellular material. In...

The main issue to be presented in this paper is based on the premise that Nature computes, that is, processes information. This is the fundamental of Natural Computing. Biogeographic Computation will be presented as a Natural Computing approach aimed at investigating ecosystems computing. The first...

As healthcare costs rise, hospitals are seeking ways to improve operations. This paper examines the usefulness of free-form notes to solve a classification problem commonly associated with customer churn. The authors show that classifiers which incorporate free-form notes, using natural language...

For the past three decades rationale drug design (RDD) has been developing as an innovative, rapid and successful way to discover new drug candidates. Many strategies have been followed and several targets with diverse structures and different biological roles have been investigated. Despite the...

The use of virtual worlds and social media has grown to the point that more than one-quarter of the world's population utilize it in some manner. Security and privacy concerns regarding the use and capabilities of current and emerging technologies such as gaming, blogging, podcasting, virtual...

This paper discusses the concept of big data mining in the domain of biology and medicine. Biological and medical data are increasing at very rapid rates, which in many cases outpace even Moore's law. This is the result of recent technological development, as well as the exploratory attitude of...

Several governmental entities: the Secretary of Transportation; the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Commerce; the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA); National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); and industry, aligned their resources to develop the Next Generation Air...

This relatively short article will set the stage for productive discussions concerning the effective management of risk in large scale dynamic systems, for which future articles will be featured. One of the most important first steps in this regard is the pressing need to understand the operational...