Archive for 'Software' Category
Wordpress MU plugin to render math using latex commands
10 April 2007I just run into an interesting Wordpress MU plugin to render mathematical equations via LaTeX commands. Kumara just put up a demo here. There is another on below
More on Wordpress themes
9 April 2007Via wpmudev, I run into a huge pack of themes for Wordpress. Kumara Sastry also have a nice collection of his favorites.
Interesting compilation of Firefox add-ons
3 April 2007Kumara Sastry has an interesting blog post about add-ons for Mozilla Firefox.
Java and Open GL
3 April 2007I knew there were some efforts to have access to OpenGL from Java, but I did not check it for a while. The JOGL API project has made a long journey since its inception. You can check the demos easily, since they are Java web started applications.
Metadata, RDF, and the browsers
28 November 2006Recently I have been playing on implementing some extension for Firefox. When I started working on it, I was not aware on how far they have taken the use of metadata—I blogged before on metadata stores here. Actually, now you can query RDF data sources, which contain information ranging from your browsing history or bookmarks—to mention a few. But what makes it more exiting is that when you are writing extensions you can use java script to get that information stored by the browser using the RDF interface to do something useful. For instance, DISCUS is using it to provide on-the-fly analytics for the current page currently viewing. DISCUS will soon release a demo version of such a toolbar. If you want to read more about it, I would recommend the XULplanet.com.
E2K: Evolution to knowledge
21 October 2006Evolution to Knowledge (E2K) is a set of Data to Knowledge (D2K) modules and itineraries that perform genetic algorithms (GA) and genetics-based machine learning (GBML) related tasks. The goal of E2K is to fold: simplify the process of building GA/GBML related tasks, and provide a simple exploratory workbench for the evolutionary computation community to help users to interact with evolutionary processes. It can help to create complex tasks or help the newcomer to get familiarized and trained with the evolutionary methods and techniques provided. Moreover, due to its integration into D2K, the creation of combined data mining and evolutionary task can be effortlessly done via the visual programming paradigm provided by the workflow environment and also wrap other evolutionary computation software.
E2K targets the creation of a common shared framework for the evolutionary computation community. E2K allows users to reuse evolutionary components and, using a visual programming paradigm, connect them to create applications that fulfill the targeted needs. E2K is a project built around the D2K framework developed by the Automated Learning Group at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. D2K’s dataflow architecture provides users with a simple workbench where they can rapidly create applications visually by just dragging and connecting components (modules) together. E2K modules provide simple computation activities—such as evaluation, selection, and recombination mechanism—that when combined together create complex evolutionary computation algorithms. Due to the module standardization in D2K, it can act as integrator of evolutionary techniques and library—for instance wrapping ECJ or Open BEAGLE components—and also take advantage of the data mining techniques provided with the D2K.
R and Java
19 October 2006I just ran into two nice packages rJava and JRI that allow running R code from Java and Java code from R. The packages are developed by Department of Computer Oriented Statistics and Data Analysis at Universität Augsburg. It just makes my life much easier. If you need scientific computing from Java it is a really nice option to try :D.
Metadata stores, RDF, Mulgara, MySQL, and Oracle
19 September 2006I have been using Kowari for a while. I am quite happy with it, but I am planning to ditch it in favor of the new release of Mulgara (Open Source for of Kowari) lead by Paul Gearon. If you haven’t check it out yet, take a look at it because is more than worth it. I have also been exploring other options. There is modified implementation of SPARQL for MySQL maintained by Eric Prud’hommeaux, his approach is very interesting one if you rely on MySQL server, it is a must. You can find some of his related papers and presentations and here. The last one I ran into recently is the RDF store implementation by Oracle Spatial. I have not played with it much, but it has Oracle behind, and that is a big name…
GALE is back!
10 May 2006Yes, with the new update of the website GALE was unreachable for a while. Here it is the original code again. Please, take a few minutes to read this post. Hope you find it useful. Enjoy 
GALE?
GALE (Genetic and Artificial Life Environment) is fine-grained parallel genetic algorithm for data mining. Its main contributions are simplicity and its knowledge-independent model. The simplicity of GALE relies in its fine-grained parallelism based on spreading the population (feasible solutions to the classification task) over a 2D grid. Thus, artificial evolution can be easily modeled in terms of neighborhood relations. These neighborhood relations define GALE as a massive parallel evolutionary model. On the other hand, GALE does not constrain the knowledge representation. It can evolve indistinctly rules, instances, partially defined instances, and decision trees (orthogonal, oblique, and multivariate based on nearest neighbor).
Where can I found more information about GALE?
GALE, as well as some results achieved using it, had been published on workshops, international conferences, and books, among others. I strongly suggest that if you are trying to use GALE for any purpose first read some of the papers that explain it. I would suggest that you check the proceeding of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) from 2001-2005, the books from the International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems (IWLCS) from 2001-2005, and a two book chapter in Multi-Objective Machine Learning and Applications of Learning Classifier Systems.
Can I use GALE?
GALE is distributed under GNU GPL license for educational purposes. If this is not your case, please contact xllora@illigal.ge.uiuc.edu.
Download & documentation
The current release of GALE is version 0.9alpha. This release is written in Java, being some parts rewritten or removed, for educational purposes. Not all the current GALE knowledge representations and functionalities are included. As you see, it is an alpha, thus, it is possible that it still has some bugs that I have not fixed, yet. If you find some, please send them to xllora@illigal.ge.uiuc.edu. I will be happy to patch them.
The main source of documentation about GALE source code is in the reference manual. In the distribution file you will find the following stuff:
./README |
-> |
A file with a little information. |
./COPYING |
-> |
The GNU GPL license. |
./INSTALL |
-> |
Some installation issues. |
|
-> |
The source code of GALE (.java files.) |
|
-> |
The binaries of GALE (.class files.) You can run it using java -jar |
|
-> |
The reference manual. |
./data/ |
-> |
This directory contains some training data. |
./cnf/ |
-> |
Some examples of configuration files are provided here. |
Distribution files
Finally, here you can find GALE distribution files. Remember that you accept the terms of the GNU GPL license described above (you can find a copy inside the distribution file).
gale_0.9alpha.tar.bz2 (389Kb)
gale_0.9alpha.tar.gz (394Kb)
gale_0.9alpha.tar (675Kb)
Metadata stores and D2K
21 April 2006Today I gave a presentation for the ALG group in NCSA about metadata stores and how they can be used in D2K. The presentation has two parts. The first one covers and introduction to metadata in general with some examples. The second one, is about how to wrap a metadata store (Kowari, see the previous post here) and make it accessible in D2K. You can find the slides here.