Projects
Here are some of my ongoing and past projects.
Ongoing
LabLOVE – Laboratory of Life on a Virtual Environment
This is a simulation tool I wrote during work in my PhD thesis.
LabLOVE is an open source software platform for evolutionary multi-agent simulations. It allows for the definition of scenarios where populations of autonomous agents evolve through processes inspired in Darwinian evolution.
LabLOVE is a scientific research tool with several fields of application, including the generation of artificial intelligence through evolution and biological and social simulations.
Past
Xception
Xception is a software fault injector, used to test the fault tolerance mechanisms of computer systems. While working at Critical Software, I was responsible for the development of one of the modules of this tool. Xcpetion is used by NASA on it’s Remote Exploration and Experimentation Project. I was part of the two person team that deployed the first installation of Xception on the NASA/JPL headquarters.
Portugal 1111
Link to the Wikipedia entry about the game
Portugal 1111 is a real time strategy game developed with educational purposes in mind. I was responsible for conceiving and implementing the Artificial Intelligence systems for this game. The game’s AI is responsible not only for controlling enemy players, but also for the automatic actions of the human player’s own units. The innovative aspect of Portugal 1111’s AI is that it exposes it’s mechanisms to the player through a simple interface, allowing him or her to extend it. The game’s Artificial Intelligence is decentralized, relying on emergent behaviors. It is inspired by Complexity Science concepts.
TetraLife
Link to the SourceForge project page
TetraLife was conceived by Miguel Silva and me, while I was his MSc thesis supervisor at the ECOS research group of the University of Coimbra.
TetraLife is an Artificial Life simulation running on a 2D physical engine. It attempts to promote the emergence of complex organisms from a set of simple building blocks. These building blocks have both physical and computational characteristics. The geneotype of the organisms itself is decentralized, being distributed across the building blocks as they evolve levels of affinity to form connections with each other.
MATER – Territorial Self-Organization Models
I collaborated with the MATER project during my time as a grad student at the ECOS research group of the University of Coimbra.
“MATer is a computational model that aims at reproducing the historical patterns of population settlement in a territory. It is the result a interdisciplinary project at the University of Coimbra that combined Computational Models, Geographic Information Systems and Historical and Archaeological evidence in order to understand how self-organizational processes shape human settlements throughout a territory. Mater is an agent based model, simulating a large number of individuals with simple population dynamics (birth, growing, reproducing and dying).”