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Giordano B. S. Ferreira
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Proceedings Papers
. alife2018, ALIFE 2018: The 2018 Conference on Artificial Life194-201, (July 23–27, 2018) 10.1162/isal_a_00041
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A key question in developmental biology and regenerative medicine concerns the physiological mechanisms by which cells coordinate their behaviors toward the construction and repair of complex anatomical structures. Gap junctional communication among cells enables bioelectrical signaling within a network that enables collections of cells to cooperate during morphogenesis. During regeneration in amputated planarian flatworms, cells capable of dividing must migrate to areas where new tissue is needed. Moreover, these cells must stop proliferating when the needed structures are completed. We previously proposed a cell-cell communication mechanism that enables structure discovery and regeneration by cell networks. In this paper, we further develop the mechanism to address two important simplifications of the previous model: cell division was not limited to adult stem cells (as it is in vivo ), and adult stem cells did not migrate to injured areas to initiate the regeneration process. Thus, here we limit cell division to a specific cell type (neoblasts) and propose a second message type that guides neoblasts to locations where cell division is needed. Our results show that even after incorporating these two constraints, our cell-cell communication model maintained its regeneration capabilities against a large tissue removal.
Proceedings Papers
. ecal2017, ECAL 2017, the Fourteenth European Conference on Artificial Life467-474, (September 4–8, 2017) 10.1162/isal_a_077
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Building robots, even for performing simple tasks, requires the designer to assess performance using various parameters. However, sometimes the best solution is not the one that performs best on average. Hence, other ways of evaluating performance are necessary. We ran a broad parameter sweep for an agent-based simulation of a robotic area coverage task with very simple agent controllers in four different task environments. Analysis of the results emphasizes the importance of considering the entire distribution across randomized starting conditions, and not just the mean overall performance, when assessing the effectiveness of parameter settings. Our findings indicate the potential for robotic system designers to constrain or specify the qualities of system performance distributions.
Proceedings Papers
. ecal2017, ECAL 2017, the Fourteenth European Conference on Artificial Life170-177, (September 4–8, 2017) 10.1162/isal_a_029
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In this paper we modified a previous cell-cell communication mechanism of dynamic structure discovery and regeneration to account for the presence of noise that could alter the route of messages transmitted across cells. We report results from a large number of simulation runs where noise was applied to the distance and direction of messages dispatched by cells. Based on our analysis of the results, we proposed an “activation” mechanism where missing cells need to receive a certain number of messages first before they divide and recreate missing cells. We then show that, due to the inherent message redundancy in the organism this mechanism improved the performance of the model even when noise is present on packets.
Proceedings Papers
. alif2016, ALIFE 2016, the Fifteenth International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems352-359, (July 4–6, 2016) 10.1162/978-0-262-33936-0-ch059
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Many organisms can regenerate their bodies, but it is currently unclear how they accomplish this feat. In this paper, we introduce a cell-to-cell communication mechanism that allows a 3D arrangement of cells to discover its structure and maintain it in the light of random cell death, even at very high death rates. We report results from simulations of an agent-based model that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for Planarian worm-like shapes, but the proposed model is general and applies to any shape.
Proceedings Papers
. ecal2015, ECAL 2015: the 13th European Conference on Artificial Life333-340, (July 20–24, 2015) 10.1162/978-0-262-33027-5-ch062
Proceedings Papers
. ecal2015, ECAL 2015: the 13th European Conference on Artificial Life271-278, (July 20–24, 2015) 10.1162/978-0-262-33027-5-ch052