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Mauro Rosa, Augustin Olivier and Aníbal Matos

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"The clock is ticking and others in the world are not only ahead of us but moving faster. This is an opportunity that INESC Porto and the University of Porto should not miss if they want to be on the map", Ricardo Morla

Free Nonsense

"After several sleepless nights, I decided to demystify a theme that the media haven’t really been paying enough attention: Influenza A Virus", Nelson Rodrigues

Gallery of the Uncommon

“Similarly to what happened with the Portuguese Budget a few years, the answer to the mystery that took INESC Porto by surprise this Christmas was… cheese! Who would have thought?”

Jobs 4 the Boys & Girls

In this section, the reader may find reference to public announcements made by INESC Porto offering grants, contracts and other opportunities of the same kind.

Biptoon

More scenes of how life goes merrily on...

 
 

Mister Engineer Darwin – an intelligent provocation

Mister Engineer Darwin – an intelligent provocation

2009 was the year of Darwin. Thus it was announced and several were the initiatives organised to celebrate it.

Many were the events and yet seldom it was reminded that the general evolutionary principles defended by Charles Darwin constitute a successful tool for Engineering as far as intricate technological problem solving is concerned. Several components of the so-called Computational Intelligence assume suggestive designations, such as Evolutionary Computation, Genetic Algorithms, Evolutionary Programming, Evolution Strategies, etc.

Several industrial activities are today efficiently organised in Portugal and in the world thanks to this contribution, from power system planning to the operation of power plants, from industrial operation scheduling to the design of optical fibre based light filters. Even the national industry has been benefiting from these contributions: for instance, EFACEC is selling, all over the world, systems that incorporate the evolutionary principles; EDP uses these principles to design its distribution grids; manufacturing companies in the areas of packaging, metalworking and plastics are incorporating these principles in the software applications that they use regularly; optical fibre Bragg sensors were designed thanks to these principles and Fibersensing, a spin-off from INESC Porto, is standing today in the international scenario as one of the few companies in the world with the technological capacity to develop this type of sensors.

When generally the common citizen believes that Darwin’s ideas are related to biology, it is interesting to highlight that the same principles of evolution through diversity and selection can be vastly applied in the area of engineering, thus widely demonstrating that they actually work and are capable of improving the systems to which they are applied – furthermore, since engineering is not subject to the restrictions of biology, it has been capable of successfully demonstrating other models that biology does not consent to or does not present: Lamarkism, multiple parents, and others.

INESC Porto is silently one of the exponents of the application of Darwinism, through the technological path, for the comfort and happiness of people. We modernly call this discipline of thought Computational Intelligence. Among its researchers, several of them, in the most varied fields, have already been internationally acknowledged.

Thus, celebrating the Engineer Darwin is a just tribute; it is giving Darwin the true dimension that he assumes. Some of the orthodox may see this as a provocation, but let’s face it: it is an intelligent provocation.

It is time to explain that Darwinism in not owned by biology. This is an immensely powerful tool and biology is simply a limited practical application of general principles that rule the natural universe.