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For many years, Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) have been applied to improve Neural Networks (NNs) architectures. They have been used for solving different problems, such as training the networks (adjusting the weights), designing network topology, optimizing global parameters, and selecting features. Here, we provide a systematic brief survey about applications of the EAs on the specific domain of the recurrent NNs named Reservoir Computing (RC). At the beginning of the 2000s, the RC paradigm appeared as a good option for employing recurrent NNs without dealing with the inconveniences of the training algorithms. RC models use a nonlinear dynamic system, with fixed recurrent neural network named the \textit{reservoir}, and learning process is restricted to adjusting a linear parametric function. %so the performance of learning is fast and precise. However, an RC model has several hyper-parameters, therefore EAs are helpful tools to figure out optimal RC architectures. We provide an overview of the results on the area, discuss novel advances, and we present our vision regarding the new trends and still open questions., Comment: Accepted manuscript to the 14th World Congress on Nature and Biologically Inspired Computing (NaBIC), Seattle, WA, United States, December 14-16, 2022. A revised manuscript will be published in the conference proceedings by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems

We present the design and performance of the GROWTH-India telescope, a 0.7 m robotic telescope dedicated to time-domain astronomy. The telescope is equipped with a 4k back-illuminated camera giving a 0.82-degree field of view and sensitivity of m_g ~20.5 in 5-min exposures. Custom software handles observatory operations: attaining high on-sky observing efficiencies (>~ 80%) and allowing rapid response to targets of opportunity. The data processing pipelines are capable of performing PSF photometry as well as image subtraction for transient searches. We also present an overview of the GROWTH-India telescope's contributions to the studies of Gamma-ray Bursts, the electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave sources, supernovae, novae and solar system objects., Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal

Optical pump-probe spectroscopy is a powerful tool to directly probe the carrier dynamics in materials down to sub-femtosecond resolution. To perform such measurement, while keeping the pump induced perturbation to the sample as small as possible, it is essential to have a detection scheme with high signal to noise ratio. Achieving such high signal to noise ratio is easy with phase sensitive detection based on lock-in-amplifier when a high repetition rate laser is used as the optical pulse source. However such a lock-in-amplifier based method does not work well when a low repetition rate laser is used for the measurement. In this article, a sensitive detection scheme which combines the advantages of boxcar which rejects noise in time domain and lock-in-amplifier which isolates signal in frequency domain for performing pump-probe measurements using low-repetition rate laser system is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. A theoretical model to explain the process of signal detection and a method to reduce the pulse to pulse energy fluctuation in probe pulses is presented. By performing pump-probe measurements at various detection conditions the optimum condition required for obtaining transient absorption signal with low noise is presented. The reported technique is not limited to pump-probe measurements and can be easily modified to suite for other sensitive measurements at low-repetition rates., Comment: submitted to "Review of Scientific Instruments"

Artificial bee colony (ABC), an optimization algorithm is a recent addition to the family of population based search algorithm. ABC has taken its inspiration from the collective intelligent foraging behavior of honey bees. In this study we have incorporated golden section search mechanism in the structure of basic ABC to improve the global convergence and prevent to stick on a local solution. The proposed variant is termed as ILS-ABC. Comparative numerical results with the state-of-art algorithms show the performance of the proposal when applied to the set of unconstrained engineering design problems. The simulated results show that the proposed variant can be successfully applied to solve real life problems., Comment: 6 Pages, Journal of Engineering (JOE), World Science Publisher 2012

A wide range of engineering design problems have been solved by the algorithms that simulates collective intelligence in swarms of birds or insects. The Artificial Bee Colony or ABC is one of the recent additions to the class of swarm intelligence based algorithms that mimics the foraging behavior of honey bees. ABC consists of three groups of bees namely employed, onlooker and scout bees. In ABC, the food locations represent the potential candidate solution. In the present study an attempt is made to generate the population of food sources (Colony Size) adaptively and the variant is named as A-ABC. A-ABC is further enhanced to improve convergence speed and exploitation capability, by employing the concept of elitism, which guides the bees towards the best food source. This enhanced variant is called E-ABC. The proposed algorithms are validated on a set of standard benchmark problems with varying dimensions taken from literature and on five engineering design problems. The numerical results are compared with the basic ABC and three recent variant of ABC. Numerically and statistically simulated results illustrate that the proposed method is very efficient and competitive., Comment: Advances in Mechanical Engineering and its Applications (AMEA), 2012