Pablo Funes - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Pablo Funes

A recent article by Watts raises the question of whether or not the spread of information and cha... more A recent article by Watts raises the question of whether or not the spread of information and change of opinions in a social network depend on the existence of in uentials. We have developed a software simulation platform to analyze the impact of word-of-mouth and social networks on marketing and advertising. We use our simulation platform to test the relative impact of the structure of a social network and the nature of individuals within that network. Our results show that Watts' conclusions are only partly correct, and depend heavily on assumptions and on characteristics of the social network.

Methods and apparatus or interactive name searching techniques

Methods and apparatus for interactive searching techniques

We show an artificial world where animals (humans) and animats (software agents) interact in a co... more We show an artificial world where animals (humans) and animats (software agents) interact in a coevolutionary arms race. The two species each use adaptation schemes of their own. Learning through interaction with humans has been out of reach for evolutionary learning techniques because too many iterations are necessary. Our work demonstrates that the Internet is a new environment where this may be possible through an appropriate setup that creates mutualism, a relationship where human and animat

Buildable evolution

ACM SIGEVOlution, 2007

... 1 Evolving Toy Brick Structures With Genetic Programming (GP) Koza introduced the notion of e... more ... 1 Evolving Toy Brick Structures With Genetic Programming (GP) Koza introduced the notion of evolving expressions using their parsing trees [19]. ... 6 Page 2. EDITORIAL brick ::= (size, joint, joint, joint, joint) joint ::= nil | (shi ft, brick) size ∈ {4,6,8,10,12,16} shi ft ∈ 1..6 Fig. ...

Hugues Juillé collaborated with the Tron GP architecture (section 3.3.3) and the novelty engine (... more Hugues Juillé collaborated with the Tron GP architecture (section 3.3.3) and the novelty engine (section 3.3.7). Louis Lapat collaborated on EvoCAD (section 2.9). Thanks to Jordan Pollack for the continuing support and for being there when it really matters.

Methods and Apparatus for Interactive Name Searching Techniques

The difficulties associated with designing, building and controlling robots have led their develo... more The difficulties associated with designing, building and controlling robots have led their development to a stasis: applications are limited mostly to repetitive tasks with predefined behavior. Over the last few years we have been trying to address this challenge through an alternative approach: Rather than trying to control an existing machine or create a general-purpose robot, we propose that both the morphology and the controller should evolve at the same time. This process can lead to the automatic design of special purpose mechanisms and controllers for specific short-term objectives. Here we provide a brief review of three generations of our recent research, underlying the robots shown on the cover of this issue: Automatically designed static structures, automatically designed and manufactured dynamic electromechanical systems, and modular robots automatically designed through a generative DNA-like encoding. 1 1

The field of robotics today faces a practical economic problem: flexible machines with minds cost... more The field of robotics today faces a practical economic problem: flexible machines with minds cost so much more than manual machines and their humans operators. Few would spend 2000onavacuumcleanerwhenamanualoneis2000 on a vacuum cleaner when a manual one is 2000onavacuumcleanerwhenamanualoneis200, or half a million dollars on a driverless car when a regular car is 20,000,plus20,000, plus 20,000,plus6 per hour for its driver. The high costs associated with designing, building, and controlling robots have led to a stasis [1], and robots in industry are only applied to simple and highly repetitive manufacturing tasks. Even though sophisticated teleoperated machines with sensors and actuators have found important applications (exploration of inaccessible environments, for example), they leave very little decision, if at all, to the on-board software [2]. The central issue addressed by our work is a low-cost way to get a higher level of complex physicality under control. We seek more controlled and moving mechanical parts, more sensors, more nonlinear interacting degrees of f...

Co-evolution, Determinism and Robustness

A recent article by Watts and Dodds raises the question of whether or not the spread of informati... more A recent article by Watts and Dodds raises the question of whether or not the spread of information and change of opinions in a social network depend on the existence of “influentials.” We have developed a software simulation platform to analyze the impact of word-of-mouth and social networks on marketing and advertising. We use our simulation platform to test the relative impact of the structure of a social network and the nature of individuals within that network. Our results show that Watts’ conclusions are only partly correct, and depend heavily on assumptions and on characteristics of the social network.

In this paper, we propose that learning complex behaviors can be achieved in a coevolutionary env... more In this paper, we propose that learning complex behaviors can be achieved in a coevolutionary environment where one population consists of the human users of an interactive adaptive software tool and the “opposing” population is artificial, generated by a coevolutionary learning engine. We take advantage of the Internet, a connected community where people and software coexist. A new kind of adaptive agent can exploit its interactions with thousands of users—inside a virtual “niche”—to learn in a coevolutionary human-robot arms race. Our model is Tron, a simple dynamic game where introspective self-play quickly leads to collusive stagnation. We describe an application where thousands of small programs are sent to play with people through the Java interpreter running in their web browsers. The feedback provided by these agents is collected in our server and used to augment an ever improving fitness landscape for local robot-robot games. Speciation and fitness sharing provide diversity...

BMC Neuroscience, Apr 15, 2002

Previously, we reported effects of the cry(b) mutation on circadian rhythms in period and timeles... more Previously, we reported effects of the cry(b) mutation on circadian rhythms in period and timeless gene expression within isolated peripheral Drosophila tissues. We relied on luciferase activity driven by the respective regulatory genomic elements to provide real-time reporting of cycling gene expression. Subsequently, we developed a tool kit for the analysis of behavioral and molecular cycles. Here, we use these tools to analyze our earlier results as well as additional data obtained using the same experimental designs. Isolated antennal pairs, heads, bodies, wings and forelegs were evaluated under light-dark cycles. In these conditions, the cry(b) mutation significantly decreases the number of rhythmic specimens in each case except the wing. Moreover, among those specimens with detectable rhythmicity, mutant rhythms are significantly weaker than cry+ controls. In addition, cry(b) alters the phase of period gene expression in these tissues. Furthermore, peak phase of luciferase-rep...

El valor del tiempo de viaje entre Montevideo y Buenos Aires

Seal, 1998

Robustness has long been recognised as a critical issue for coevolutionary learning. It has been ... more Robustness has long been recognised as a critical issue for coevolutionary learning. It has been achieved in a number of cases, though usually in domains which i n v olve some form of non-determinism. W e examine a deterministic domain { a pseudo real-time two-player game called Tron { and evolve a neural network player using a simple hillclimbing algorithm. The results call into question the importance of determinism as a requirement for successful co-evolutionary learning, and provide a good opportunity to examine the relative importance of other factors.

Genetics, Sep 1, 2002

The cacophony (cac) locus of Drosophila melanogaster, which encodes a calcium-channel subunit, ha... more The cacophony (cac) locus of Drosophila melanogaster, which encodes a calcium-channel subunit, has been mutated to cause courtship-song defects or abnormal responses to visual stimuli. However, the most recently isolated cac mutant was identified as an enhancer of a comatose mutation's effects on general locomotion. We analyzed the cac TS2 mutation in terms of its intragenic molecular change and its effects on behaviors more complex than the fly's elementary ability to move. The molecular etiology of this mutation is a nucleotide substitution that causes a proline-to-serine change in a region of the polypeptide near its EF hand. Given that this motif is involved in channel inactivation, it was intriguing that cac TS2 males generate song pulses containing larger-than-normal numbers of cycles-provided that such males are exposed to an elevated temperature. Similar treatments caused only mild visual-response abnormalities and generic locomotor sluggishness. These results are discussed in the context of calcium-channel functions that subserve certain behaviors and of defects exhibited by the original cacophony mutant. Despite its different kind of amino-acid substitution, compared with that of cac TS2 , cac S males sing abnormally in a manner that mimics the new mutant's heat-sensitive song anomaly. 1 Present address: Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular induced song defect is uncovered in flies heterozygous Pharmacology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115. for this mutation and lethal genetic variants that had 2 Corresponding author: Department of Biology MS-008, Brandeis Unibeen independently mapped to the locus. These lethals versity, 415 South St., in turn fail to complement nightblind-A (nbA) mutations, Genetics 162: 135-153 (September 2002)

*School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Abstract Evolutionary design of en-route caching strategies