In early stages of design, the language used is often very abstract. In architectural design, for example, architects and their clients use experiential terms such as “private” or “open” to describe spaces. The Architect’s Collaborator (TAC) is a prototype design assistant that supports iterative design refinement using abstract, experiential terms. TAC explores the space of possible designs in...

In screening experiments, run size considerations often necessitate the use of designs with complex aliasing patterns. Such designs provide an opportunity to examine interactions and other higher order terms as possible predictors, as Hamada and Wu (1992) propose. The large number of model terms and the small number of observations mean that many good models may describe the data well. The need...

This work describes how evolutionary computation can be used to synthesize low-level image operators that detect interesting points on digital images. Interest point detection is an essential part of many modern computer vision systems that solve tasks such as object recognition, stereo correspondence, and image indexing, to name but a few. The design of the specialized operators is posed as an...

The modern engineering design process often relies on computer simulations to evaluate candidate designs. This simulation-driven approach results in what is commonly termed a computationally expensive black-box optimization problem. In practise, there will often exist candidate designs which cause the simulation to fail. Such simulation failures can consume a large portion of the allotted compu...

Searching for information on the web is hard; the user may not know what they are looking for, they may refine their search from information gathered by preliminary naive searches, and they may be looking for luminous sites that have many external links so that they can browse further. Information visualization can aid the user in many of these search related tasks. Certainly, the user is famil...

The increased use of CAD systems by product development organizations has resulted in the creation of large databases of assemblies. This explosion of assembly data is likely to continue in the future. In many situations, text-based search alone may not be sufficient to search for assemblies and it may be desirable to search for assemblies based on the content of the assembly models. The abilit...

The present work reveals a problem formulation to minimize material consumption and improve efficiency of diagrids to resist equivalent wind loading. The integrated formulation includes not only sizing of structural members but also variation in geometry and topology of such a system. Particular encoding technique is offered to handle practical variation of diagrid modules. A variant of Pseudo-...

According to conventional wisdom, functional diversity is exclusively a consequence of species having evolved adaptations to fill different niches within a heterogeneous environment. This view anticipates only one optimal combination of trait values in a given environment, but it is also conceivable that alternative designs of equal fitness in the same environment might evolve. To investigate t...

We discuss the optimization of photonic crystal waveguides for four-wave mixing (FWM) applications, taking into account linear loss and free-carrier effects. Suitable figures of merit are introduced in order to guide us through the choice of practical, high-efficiency designs requiring relatively low pump power and small waveguide length. In order to realistically perform the waveguide optimiza...