Contributors
Last name: al-Rifaie
First Name: Mohammad Majid 
Affiliation: University of Greenwich
University of Greenwich, Old Royal Naval College
E-mail: m.alrifaie@gre.ac.uk
Submission Details:
Titles: Life of a Fly

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Short Biography

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        Dr. Mohammad Majid al-Rifaie is a Senior Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Greenwich, School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences. He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Swarm Intelligence (CSI) from Goldsmiths, University of London, and since the start of his PhD, he has published extensively in the field, covering various applications of CSI, Evolutionary Computation (EC), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). He has taught in the higher education for more than a decade, several of which relevant to CSI, AI, their real-world applications as well as philosophical issues on artificial intelligence and arts. His work in the area has featured multiple times in the media including the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Over the past 10 years, he has developed a unique interdisciplinary research profile with more than 70 peer-reviewed publications including, book chapters, journal and conference papers on CSI, EC, ML and DNNs as well as their applications in medical imaging, data science, philosophy and arts. In addition to speaking few human languages, he speaks around a dozen machine languages. He has supervised (and is supervising) several PhD students and is welcoming proposals from prospective PhD students who are willing to research the aforementioned areas.

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Artist’s Statement​

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        This image presents the life of a fly (guided by Dispersive Flies Optimisation or DFO [1]), and is illustrating its life from the moment of inception (bottom) to the moment where it reaches its maturity and goal (top). In this case, the goal is reconstructing the internal structure of an opaque object from projected images cast by penetrating radiation [2].
The ‘genes’ of the fly represent the values in each dimension (in a one thousand dimensional problem), and the ‘age’ represents the iterations (the fly is allowed to live for one thousand iterations or steps). As the fly ages, it matures and approaches the desired state, which is highlighted in black with sparkles of white pixels which indicate the fly’s continual interest in exploration and learning.

References:
[1] Al-Rifaie, M. M. (2014, September). Dispersive Flies Optimisation. In 2014 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems (pp. 529-538). IEEE.

[2] al-Rifaie, M. M., Blackwell, T. (2022, April). Swarm Optimised Few-View Binary Tomography. In European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation. Springer, Cham. (Accepted and in Press).