Bio-inspired Algorithms

This course provides the students with working knowledge of bio-inspired algorithms and their applications. It introduces the basic concepts of bio-inspired methods, briefly discusses their history and concentrates on the current state and recent developments in this field. The course first outlines the fundamental concepts of bio-inspired computation as such and then discusses the basic categories of bio-inspired methods including evolutionary computation, swarm intelligence, artificial neural networks, and hybrid methods. The students are also familiarized with different types of problems, typically solved by bio-inspired methods. In particular, continuous and discrete problems are discussed and bio-inspired methods, suitable for different types of problems, are discussed. Last but not least, the methods and techniques for the statistical evaluation and visualization of the results of bio-inspired algorithms are discussed.
The languages and frameworks for the practical design and implementation of bio-inspired methods in the scope of the course will include Python (scikit-learn), C/C++, and R (caret package).