How can you harness the powerful force of evolution to help crack down on money laundering? Or to come up with better buildings, communications networks and animations?
Taking tricks from the natural world and using them in computer software is opening up new opportunities to tackle problems and boost design processes, and Dr Michael O’Neill at Complex & Adaptive Systems Laboratory in UCD is forging ahead.
Computers and biological evolution fit well together in ‘natural computing’, he explains. “We are taking inspiration from the processes and systems in the natural world and using those to develop software for solving real world problems,” says Dr O’Neill, who originally studied biochemistry in UCD.
He now heads the Natural Computing Research & Applications Group in UCD, which is known worldwide for its work in natural computing and evolution. “We try and distill the essence of evolution, then if you put the power of that process into software you can get an artificial evolutionary process - and you can breed solutions to problems,” he explains.
The UCD researchers have been working with industry through a Science Foundation Ireland-funded Financial Mathematics and Computing Cluster (FMC2), where Dr O’Neill is a principal investigator. “We have been taking inspiration from nature and using it to come up with ways of managing portfolios and developing high frequency algorithmic trading,” he explains.
“We have worked with companies to develop anti-money-laundering software using these evolution algorithms. You want to detect patterns in transactions that are coming through different financial organisations and you need some automation to flag up transactions that are of interest for the institutions so that they can follow up. Then they don’t have to have a team of people going through every single transaction, and they can be more focused on the alerts.”
Evolving solutions through software can also help boost the creative design process for architects and engineers, according to Dr O’Neill, who is working with colleagues in UCD School of Architecture and UCD School of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering to explore the possibilities.
“You can plug in your particular style to seed different structures, and the evolutionary engine then presents the designer with a population of alternative designs,” he explains. “The designer can pick the ones they like and those designs become parents which produce children, and the design can evolve over generations. It allows people to explore designs that they may not have necessarily come up with.”
Dr O’Neill’s team is also putting natural computing to work to help manage communications networks - a project with Bell Labs is working on solutions to manage power in devices as they dynamically pick up phone signals. The approach can even make computer games more realistic by ‘evolving’ animated characters to create natural movements and diversity.
Meanwhile Dr O’Neill is helping to encourage secondary school students to become interested in studying maths and computers - for several years a Google-funded summer school has attracted secondary school students to come to UCD to study a university module called “Introduction to Computer Science and Programming”.
And their heads are being turned, he notes: “We have had a huge increase in first preferences for computer science in UCD as a result of initiatives like this.”
Dr Michael o' Neill was interviewed by freelance journalist Dr Claire O'Connell
