2003 News___________________________________________

New Research Group

January 2003

JRI is proud to announce the creation of a new research group at the Jisan Research Institute. This research group, unlike all other research groups at the Jisan Research Institute, is formed around a collaborative effort between the laboratories of Dr. Jerry Mendel at the University of Southern California and the laboratory of Dr. Sanza Kazadi at the Jisan Research Institute. This collaboration is facilitated by a grant by the National Science Foundation which provides funding for one graduate student and ten JRI Junior Researchers. The research group will investigate topics in the design of fuzzy systems, and is currently exploring the application of evolutionary algorithms in the design of a system already pioneered by Dr. Mendel and student Hongwei Wu.
The initial group of students working with Ms. Yang under the auspices of Drs. Kazadi and Mendel is Andrew Bae, Diana Jue, and John Lee. Funding for this collaboration is expected to last for a period of three years.

JRI students speak at the California Institute of Technology

January 2003

JRI students spoke this month at the California Institute of Technology about their research currently under way at the Jisan Research Institute. The talk, which was arranged after an invitation by the Neuromorphic Engineering Student Society, a student organization at the Center for Neuromorphic Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, centered around current work in evolutionary computation and swarm engineering going on at JRI. Speakers included JRI students (see image) Daniel Choi, Brian Lee, Albert Chang, Ted Kang , Ryan Cho, Anthony Lim, and Michael Chung. Students presented their work and fielded questions about their research.

Students Daniel Choi, Albert Chang and Ted Kang spoke about their work on compartmentalization in artificial evolution. Choi, Chang and Kang reported work completed on the design of an "evolutionary preprocessor" which allows a complex evolutionary computation to be broken into smaller connected evolutionary pieces. Students Brian Lee, Ryan Cho, Anthony Lim, and Michael Chung gave details about their work on swarm engineering which is intended to allow swarms of small robots to build complex structures without any global knowledge, processing, or explicit communication. Simulation results presented showed rudimentary structure construction.

March 2003

The Jisan Research Institute will be featured in an upcoming installment of the weekly television show California Connected . The weekly television news magazine hosted by David Brancaccio provides "intelligent, irreverent and provocative reporting of the events, policies and legislation affecting California, and connects viewers to their state by involving them in both the stories and the solutions". Mr. Brancaccio also hosts a radio program called Marketplace which can be heard nationally. The story provides one of the first forms of documentation of the JRI program which will be made available to the general public.
The date of the broadcast has not yet to be determined.