Interactive Evolutionary Computation for Analyzing Human Awareness Mechanisms

We discuss the importance of establishing awareness science and show the idea of using interactive evolutionary computation (IEC) as a tool for analyzing awareness mechanism and making awareness models. First, we describe the importance of human factors in computational intelligence and that IEC is one of approaches for the so-called humanized computational intelligence. Second, we show examples that IEC is used as an analysis tool for human science. As analyzing human awareness mechanism is in this kind of analyzing human characteristics and capabilities, IEC may be able to be used for this purpose. Based on this expectation, we express one idea for analyzing the awareness mechanism. This idea is to make an equivalent model of an IEC user using a learning model and find latent variables that connect inputs and outputs of the user model and that help to understand or explain the inputs-outputs relationship. Although there must be several definitions of awareness, this idea is based on one definition that awareness is to find out unknown variables that helps our understanding. If we establish a method for finding the latent variables automatically, we can realize an awareness model in computer. 1. Introduction The number of papers using the keywords context awareness, power awareness, location awareness, and situation awareness in the SciVerse Scopus database of Elsevier is, respectively, 6,383, 1,749, 1,688, and 257 as of February 2012. Engineering interest in these areas has increased. These engineering approaches call obtaining unknown knowledge or facts awareness. However, how do these engineering approaches differ from data mining or knowledge acquisition? Although these kind of applications are useful and important, we need other scientific approaches not only to support the engineering applications of awareness but also to extend awareness science and engineering. One such scientific approach would be analyzing the awareness mechanisms of human beings and/or animals and constructing awareness models based on these mechanisms. Once we establish their core technologies, we may be able to make a computer with using such a model be aware of something. As the result, we can expect not only to develop data mining-like applications as has been done until now but also to progress human-machine communications, the monitoring of social networks, and new areas. Analyzing awareness mechanisms and modeling them are the first important step to research performed in this direction. It is important to integrate ideas from and cooperate with those in ethology,