I am computer scientist with a passion for biology and pursue research concerning algorithmics for decentrally organized systems. In particular, these are robot swarms. The chains of thoughts can be applied universally though: I believe that systems incorporating global dependencies are less robust and scalable in general. Everytime I get a deeper look into how biological systems work, I am assured in this belief. Sometimes, I procrastinate my research by extending my manuscript or shooting photos of the ant colony I keep at home (a decentrally organized system as well). Please let me know if you find any errors (I want to improve my English skills). Thank you!
My imagination of the faulty Knight Capital code causing the Aug 2 disruptions at New York Stock Exchange:
On the German edition of my web site, I sometimes blog about the ant colony I keep. Recently, I published some new ant photos. Even though I keep the english blog a bit shorter, I hereby share them with you
. If you want to have a look on the rest of the ant photos, you might go to my ant-keeping page (unfortunately, it is in German) and klick on the links in the “Neuigkeiten” (=news) section. Anyway, here are the two most recent galleries:
After a recently held talk, I was told that what I did in my diploma thesis would me more easily understandable if I declared, what the thesis actually is. Nothing easier than that: The diploma thesis is a nice, colorful tech demo. The same persons wished for a short, bullet-like introduction to the technical features of the frameworks I wrote in my diploma thesis. I made this wish come true, too, there are now lots of technical, yet easily understandable bullet points on the respective page!
Thanks for mailing!
In addition to the original versions of the manuscript ”A Brief Introdicution to Neural Networks”, there are now versions in German and English, that are optimized for reading with electronic devices.
The original version is the two-column layouted one you've been used to. The eBookReader optimized version on the other hand has one-column layout. In addition, headers, footers and marginal notes were removed.
For print, the eBookReader version obviously is less attractive. It lacks nice layout and reading features and occupies a lot more pages. However, using electronic readers, the simpler lay-out significantly reduces the scrolling effort.
During every release process from now on, the eBookReader version going to be automatically generated from the original content. However, contrary to the original version, it is not provided an additional manual layout and typography tuning cycle by the release workflow. So concerning the aestetics of the eBookReader optimized version, do not expect any support
In this manner, I raised the edition from “Zeta” to “Zeta2”. However, this has just technical reasons – there is no difference in both editions' content. So if you have printed the original “Zeta” edition, there is no need for printing the “Zeta2”.
As you might have recognized, there have been a few technical issues at this place – for instance, it had become pretty slow (up to 9 secs per request at peak times), and some bug in the old blog engine sometimes seriously messed up the home page layout. Now, there's help:
Software overhaul. I changed the blog engine to BlogTNG, which solved the home page messing up issue. Unfortunately, this changed the feed urls (however, the new ones are already embedded in the pages, so you'll be fine). There may be some issues with the new RSS streams during the first days, sorry for that.
New design and lay-out. Everything (in particular, the home page) is more slick and clean now. I almost completely rewrote the site design and also changed some parts of navigation and lay-out. See for yourselves
New Hardware. The site now got a dedicated dual-core server, so you are free to place load now
. I hope we withstand even load peaks without major delays – this hasn't been the case so far.
The english version has been completely overhauled, the entire manuscript got a dedicated reference implementation (SNIPE), a brand-new resilient propagation section and much more. It's winter term (at least in Germany) and there is a new major release of my manuscript “A Brief Introduction to Neural Networks”. As usual, it is available for download here.
In particular to the last bullet point I have to state how encouraging your e-mails are. In the mean time, I have been getting e-mails from readers several times a week, providing me feed-back, correcting typos, asking interesting questions or just commendations.
I want to encourage everybody to continue writing me e-mails, because it keeps up my motivation in writing. Every little error you guys are mailing me will be added to my big manuscript todo list and will be implemented in the next release, if appropriate. And of course, you get an answer.
Thanks, and let's continue the good work!
In this version, the internal data structure of snipe got some flexible extendability features. What's more, the training procedure resilient propagation was overhauled (
this includes an interface change). You can download snipe as usual by going to the snipe page.
com.dkriesel.snipe.core.NeuralNetwork.trainResilientBackpropagation. A big thank you for the overhaul goes to Martin Westhoven. He not only managed to fix a bug that might have prevented resilient propagation from learning (no other components were influenced), but also implemented a further Rprop-enhancement that you can activate if you like (have a look at the documentation). Furthermore, Rprop has been adapted to the synapse shadow structure.Have a lot of fun!
Nice microscope photos of very small living beings, the 38 best of 2000 images! Pretty nice to see. The whole BigPicture-Site is also nice. (Thx, Verena)
Last week, I have attended a conference in Paris. In the evenings, there was time for some photos, some of which I now post here.
Axel Boldt, a German college teacher living in the US, compares his experiences of living in the US and Germany in a nicely readable way. He sheds light on positive and negative aspects to encounter in both of the countries. This is the text I would wish I had written after my US experience in 2007.