Accesit for OSGiLiath in the local edition of the Free Software Contest #CUSL7

Yesterday, it was the final of the local edition of the Spanish Universitary Free Software Contest and OSGiLiath was awarded with an accesit : )

The winner of the event was Zomblind, an awesome game for blind people. Participating in the contest has helped to improve the framework (as I explained in previous posts), and the experience worth it.

I made a presentation to show the other participants and the public the improvements of the project during the months of the contest.

The national final will be soon, so stay tuned!

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README file added

The README file has just been added to the project repository,  and it also added in this web to be consulted online in the About page. It summarizes some useful information about the project, to centralize the most important information of OSGiLiath, such as download, tutorials, components and License (and also the list of contributors!). Check it out, here.

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OpenCV added in the #6Hackathon of the #CUSL7

This weekend, I’ve been working with @rubenhek, @dcalandria and @abpelegrina in the #6Hackathon of the Free Software Contest (CUSL7) at Spiral Startups.

imagen

We have focused, as before, in the Evolutionary Art capabilities of OSGiLiath. This time we have chosen OpenCV rather than Processing for performance and also because it includes more metrics and image analysis.

OpenCV has been compiled for several platforms (MacOS X, Ubuntu…) and added to the project, with their appropriated Java bindings.

New kind of Artistic Primitives have been added: the Patches. A patch is just a piece of other image. A script in Perl made by @jjmerelo has also been added to the project, with a lot of patches extracted from Caltech101 image benchmark. Individuals can now be a vector of patches, each one in a different positions. The service OpenCVCollageDrawer extracts this information to create a “collage” made of patches, and the MatchingFitness evaluates the individuals to “approach” them to a predefined image, but other feature extraction operations have been added (such as the Histogram).

The Human Guidance module has also been improved: now each image selected increases in 1 vote, and the other decrease 0,33 votes. Help us selecting images here! We will use the knowledge gathered for future experiments.

The first results, only applying the regular matching are not very outstanding, but it’s a start:

Carmen de Mairena
mairenamairenaCollageW

Flevopark
flevoparkflevocollageW

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Two papers accepted at GECCO 2013 conference!

Two papers related with OSGiLiath have been accepted in GECCO 2013 conference. The first one will be published at EvoSoft workshop, and it presents the technological issues of OSGiLiath and a tutorial to add new services (being more centered in the implementation technology than the results of the paper published in the Soft Computing Journal).

Developing Services in a Service Oriented Architecture for Evolutionary Algorithms

This paper shows the design and implementation of services for Evolutionary Computation in the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm. This paradigm allows independence in language and distribution, but the development requires to manage some technological and design issues, such as abstract design or unordered execution. To solve them, OSGiLiath, an implementation of an abstract Service Oriented Architecture for Evolutionary Algorithms, is used to develop new interoperable services taking into account these restrictions.  

The second one, will be presented at the Student Workshop and presents the actual state of my thesis, explaining the OSGiLiath architecture (and SOA-EA), some preliminar results about load balancing in distributed EAs in heterogeneous machines, and the first results we obtained in the previous Hackathon in Evolutionary Art.

A Service Oriented Evolutionary Architecture: Application and Results

This paper shows the stage of development of a Service Oriented Architecture for Evolutionary Algorithms and the first results obtained in two different areas. 

The abstract architecture is presented, with its assocciated implementation using a widely used technology. Results attained in experiments with parameter adaptation in distributed heterogeneous machines are presented and the usage of the architecture in Evolutionary Art is also applied.

I will update the “Publications” section once papers will be published.

We are waiting the acceptance of final works in a journal, and also, the paper about EAs and Processing we wrote in the #5Hackathon for the CEC.

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Changing repository location

Due to software updgrade in Sourceforge the SVN repository of OSGiLiath has changed. The new URL to get the code is now:

http://svn.code.sf.net/p/osgiliath/code/

So, if you want to checkout, please use the next command:

svn checkout –username=your-username svn+ssh://your-username@svn.code.sf.net/p/osgiliath/code/ osgiliath-code

A new code explorer is now available here, and the complete commit history can be checked here.

Finally, this URL has been updated in the getting started tutorial.

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Changing project license from GNU/GPL to GNU/LGPL

After several days of consideration and research, I’ve decided to change the project license from GNU/GPL V3 (General Public License) to GNU/LGPL V3 (Lesser General Public License). This has been motivated as, being OSGiLiath a set of OSGi bundles that can be executed in any OSGi container, setting a GNU/GPL license could be too restrictive. Moreover, OSGi was created for dynamic binding of several service implementations from many different third-parties at the same time. For example, if OSGiLiath is going to be distributed with the Equinox container, it will be bound with bundles with an EPL License. Or in the case of Apache Fenix, the Apache V2 License is used. This is impossible using the GPL License.

Changing to LGPL gaves me some flexibility: for example, if I would like to distribute my project with the Equinox bundles, I can add a combined license (as the Logback project does). However, the EPL and GNU/GPL licenses are extremely incompatible, as can be read here.

Read also the FSF opinion about that incompatibility.

By the way, Processing is also based in LGPL, so I can distribute with my project without problems :)

The GNU/LGPL V3 license can be read here, and it has been updated in the project code (headers and license.txt).

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Conclusions of the #5Hackathon

So, the #5Hackathon is over! (day 1 and day 2). It has been an amazing weekend of learning and programming experiences that have improved a lot OSGiLiath, with the new module OSGiLiART. In summary, we have tackled the next big achievements:

  1. A state of the art on Evolutionary Algorithms. A new paper is being prepared!
  2. A lot of documentation has been added to the Google Group package (Processing primitives, tutorials…).
  3. A Human Guidance GUI to vote the most “aesthetical” pictures and adding metadata for future classifications. See it in action hereHG
  4. The new module OSGiLiART: new basic “artistic” individuals have been added: a set of circles in random positions or in a GRID. Two different fitness: comparing histograms (H, S, V, R, G or B) and pixel matching. And, a HUGE number of manipulation classes! (see for example the SVN statistic obtained with StatSVN).

file_count

Look at the results of the first executions (they must be improved). This example is using the Pixel Matching Fitness.

foto_fergugen200_id0023

Finally, a resume of the experience is also available in this presentation:

Posted in CUSL7, Hackathon, OSGiLiART, Project development | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments