Giovanni Squillero

• Professor
• Professor (Full) at Polytechnic University of Turin

Feature selection is an essential task in machine learning and data mining that involves identifying a subset of relevant features from a larger set. This paper proposes a novel technique for unsupervised feature selection based on a Neural Network in conjunction with an evolutionary algorithm. The proposed method aims to extract subsets of the mos...

In safety-critical applications, microcontrollers must be compliant with the required quality constraints and performance standards, particularly in terms of the maximum operating frequency (Fmax). Machine learning models have proven effective in estimating Fmax by utilizing data extracted from on-chip ring oscillators (ROs), making them a valuable...

In safety-critical applications, microcontrollers must meet stringent quality and performance standards, including the maximum operating frequency F <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">max</sub> . Machine learning models have proven effective in estimating F <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w...

In safety-critical applications, microcontrollers have to be tested to satisfy strict quality and performances constraints. It has been demonstrated that on-chip ring oscillators can be used as speed monitors to reliably predict the performances. However, any machine-learning model is likely to be inaccurate if trained on an inadequate dataset, and...

According to the World Health Organization, the SARS-CoV-2 virus generated a global emergency between 2020 and 2023 resulting in about 7 million deaths out of more than 750 million individuals diagnosed with COVID-19. During these years, polymerase-chain-reaction and antigen testing played a prominent role in disease control. In this study, we prop...

Gear backlash is a quite serious problem in industrial robots, it causes vibrations and impairs the robot positioning accuracy. Backlash estimation allows targeted maintenance interventions, preserving robot performances and avoiding unforeseen equipment breakdowns. However, a direct measure of the backlash is hard to obtain, and dedicated auxiliar...

We propose an unsupervised, model-agnostic, wrapper method for feature selection. We assume that if a feature can be predicted using the others, it adds little information to the problem, and therefore could be removed without impairing the performance of whatever model will be eventually built. The proposed method iteratively identifies and remove...

During the last decade, the Integrated Circuit industry has paid special attention to the security of products. Hardware-based vulnerabilities, in particular Hardware Trojans, are becoming a serious threat, pushing the research community to provide highly sophisticated techniques to detect them. Despite the considerable effort that has been investe...

In the field of machine learning, coresets are defined as subsets of the training set that can be used to obtain a good approximation of the behavior that a given algorithm would have on the whole training set. Advantages of using coresets instead of the training set include improving training speed and allowing for a better human understanding of...

As machine learning becomes more and more available to the general public, theoretical questions are turning into pressing practical issues. Possibly, one of the most relevant concerns is the assessment of our confidence in trusting machine learning predictions. In many real-world cases, it is of utmost importance to estimate the capabilities of a...

The maximum common subgraph of two graphs is the largest possible common subgraph, i.e., the common subgraph with as many vertices as possible. Even if this problem is very challenging, as it has been long proven NP-hard, its countless practical applications still motivates searching for exact solutions. This work discusses the possibility to exten...

As soon as banks began developing mobile applications to enable users to perform financial activities online, cybercriminals started formulating ways to penetrate this new channel and perform illicit transactions. For criminals, it is easier to exploit the scarce end-user security awareness and attack individual clients' devices rather than directl...

Feature selection is the process of choosing, or removing, features to obtain the most informative feature subset of minimal size. Such subsets are used to improve performance of machine learning algorithms and enable human understanding of the results. Approaches to feature selection in literature exploit several optimization algorithms. Multi-obj...

A coreset is a subset of the training set, using which a machine learning algorithm obtains performances similar to what it would deliver if trained over the whole original data. Coreset discovery is an active and open line of research as it allows improving training speed for the algorithms and may help human understanding the results. Building on...

In the field of artificial intelligence, agents learn how to take decisions by fitting their parameters on a set of samples called training set. Similarly, a core set is a subset of the training samples such that, if an agent exploits this set to fit its parameters instead of the whole training set, then the quality of the inferences does not chang...

Industrial manipulators are robots used to replace humans in dangerous or repetitive tasks. Also, these devices are often used for applications where high precision and accuracy is required. The increase of backlash caused by wear, that is, the increase of the amount by which teeth space exceeds the thickness of gear teeth, might be a significant p...

The recent trends for nanoelectronic computing systems include machine-to-machine communication in the era of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and autonomous systems, complex safety-critical applications, extreme miniaturization of implementation technologies and intensive interaction with the physical world. These set tough requirements on mutually depend...

With the complexity of nanoelectronic devices rapidly increasing, an efficient way to handle large number of embedded instruments became a necessity. The IEEE 1687 standard was introduced to provide flexibility in accessing and controlling such instrumentation through a reconfigurable scan chain. Nowadays, together with testing the system for defec...

The Maximum Common Subgraph is a computationally challenging problem with countless practical applications. Even if it has been long proven NP-hard, its importance still motivates searching for exact solutions. This work starts by discussing the possibility to extend an existing, very effective branch-and-bound procedure on parallel multi-core and...

When a machine learning algorithm is able to obtain the same performance given a complete training set, and a small subset of samples from the same training set, the subset is termed coreset. As using a coreset improves training speed and allows human experts to gain a better understanding of the data, by reducing the number of samples to be examin...

In machine learning a coreset is defined as a subset of the training set using which an algorithm obtains performances similar to what it would deliver if trained over the whole original data. Advantages of coresets include improving training speed and easing human understanding. Coreset discovery is an open line of research as limiting the trainin...

Grammar-guided Genetic Programming (G3P) is a family of Evolutionary Algorithms that can evolve programs in any language described by a context-free grammar. The most widespread members of this family are based on an indirect representation: a sequence of bits or integers (the genotype) is transformed into a string of the language (the phenotype) b...

This work presents an automatic methodology able to improve machine-generated signatures for Android malware detection. The technique relies on a population-less evolutionary algorithm and uses an unorthodox fitness function that incorporates unsystematic human experts knowledge in the form of a set of rules of thumb. The proposed optimization alg...

Nowadays, many Integrated Systems embed auxiliary on-chip instruments whose function is to perform test, debug, calibration, configuration, etc. The growing complexity and the increasing number of these instruments have led to new solutions for their access and control, such as the IEEE 1687 standard. The standard introduces an infrastructure compo...

Reducing the effort required by humans in countering malware is of utmost practical value. We describe a scalable, semi-supervised framework to dig into massive datasets of Android applications and identify new malware families. Up to the 2010s, the industrial standard for the detection of malicious applications has been mainly based on signatures;...

In novel forms of the Social Internet of Things, any mobile user within communication range may help routing messages for another user in the network. The resulting message delivery rate depends both on the users' mobility patterns and the message load in the network. This new type of configuration, however, poses new challenges to security, amongs...

In this paper we propose a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm for supporting the definition of a personal income tax reform. As a case study, we apply this methodology to the Italian income tax, and consider a recently implemented tax cut. Our optimization algorithm can determine a set of tax structures that maximize the redistributive effect o...

VALIS is an effective and robust classification algorithm with a focus on understandability. Its name stems from Vote-ALlocating Immune System, as it evolves a population of artificial antibodies that can bind to the input data, and performs classification through a voting process. In the beginning of the training, VALIS generates a set of random c...

One of the most relevant problems in social networks is influence maximization, that is the problem of finding the set of the most influential nodes in a network, for a given influence propagation model. As the problem is NP-hard, recent works have attempted to solve it by means of computational intelligence approaches, for instance Evolutionary Al...

In the context of social networks, maximizing influence means contacting the largest possible number of nodes starting from a set of seed nodes, and assuming a model for influence propagation. The real-world applications of influence maximization are of uttermost importance, and range from social studies to marketing campaigns. Building on a previo...

Collectible card games have been among the most popular and profitable products of the entertainment industry since the early days of Magic: The GatheringTM in the nineties. Digital versions have also appeared, with HearthStone: Heroes of WarCraftTM being one of the most popular. In Hearthstone, every player can play as a hero, from a set of nine,...

Nowadays, Self-Test strategies for testing embedded processors are increasingly diffused, especially for safety critical systems. Test programs can be effectively used for this purpose. This paper describes a set of systematic self-test techniques for in-order dual-issue embedded processors. The paper shows how to produce test programs suitable for...

Inspiring metaphors play an important role in the beginning of an investigation, but are less important in a mature research field as the real phenomena involved are understood. Nowadays, in evolutionary computation, biological analogies should be taken into consideration only if they deliver significant advantages.

Grammatical Evolution is an Evolutionary Algorithm which can evolve programs in any language described by a context-free grammar. A sequence of bits (the genotype) is transformed into a string of the language (the phenotype) by means of a mapping function, and eventually into a fitness value. Unfortunately the flexibility brought by the mapping is...

As the pervasiveness of social networks increases, new NP-hard related problems become interesting for the optimization community. The objective of influence maximization is to contact the largest possible number of nodes in a network, starting from a small set of seed nodes, and assuming a model for information propagation. This problem is of utmo...

In energy distribution systems, uncertainty is the major single cause of power outages. In this paper, we consider the usage of electric batteries in order to mitigate it. We describe an intelligent battery able to maximize its own lifetime while guaranteeing to satisfy all the electric demand peaks. The battery exploits a customized steady-state e...

The two volumes LNCS 10199 and 10200 constitute the refereed conference proceedings of the 20th European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation, EvoApplications 2017, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in April 2017, colocated with the Evo* 2016 events EuroGP, EvoCOP, and EvoMUSART. The 46 revised full papers presented togethe...

The compaction of test programs for processor-based systems is of utmost practical importance: Software-Based Self-Test (SBST) is nowadays increasingly adopted, especially for in-field test of safety-critical applications, and both the size and the execution time of the test are critical parameters. However, while compacting the size of binary test...

Predicting the market’s behavior to profit from trading stocks is far from trivial. Such a task becomes even harder when investors do not have large amounts of money available, and thus cannot influence this complex system in any way. Machine learning paradigms have been already applied to financial forecasting, but usually with no restrictions on...

One of the most notable features of collectible card games is deckbuilding, that is, defining a personalized deck before the real game. Deckbuilding is a challenge that involves a big and rugged search space, with different and unpredictable behaviour after simple card changes and even hidden information. In this paper, we explore the possibility o...

Genetic Improvement is an evolutionary-based technique. Despite its relatively recent introduction, several successful applications have been already reported in the scientific literature: it has been demonstrated able to modify the code complex programs without modifying their intended behavior; to increase performance with regards to speed, energ...

PPSN 2016 hosts a total number of 16 tutorials covering a broad range of current research in evolutionary computation. The tutorials range from introductory to advanced and specialized but can all be attended without prior requirements. All PPSN attendees are cordially invited to take this opportunity to learn about ongoing research activities in o...

The usage of electronic systems in safety-critical applications requires mechanisms for the early detection of faults affecting the hardware while the system is in the field. When the system includes a processor, one approach is to make use of functional test programs that are run by the processor itself. Such programs exercise the different parts...

This short paper contains an extended list of references to diversity preservation methodologies, classified following the taxonomy presented in a previous publication. The list has been updated according to the contributions sent to the workshop "Measuring and Promoting Diversity in Evolutionary Computation", held during the conference GECCO 2016.

The Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) phenomenon is agreed to be one of the main reliability concerns in nanoscale circuits. It increases the threshold voltage of pMOS transistors, thus, slows down signal propagation along logic paths between flip-flops. NBTI may cause intermittent faults and, ultimately, the circuit’s permanent function...

Several machine learning paradigms have been applied to financial forecasting, attempting to predict the market's behavior, with the final objective of profiting from trading shares. While anticipating the performance of such a complex system is far from trivial, this issue becomes even harder when the investors do not have large amounts of money a...

The use of anti-virus software has become something of an act of faith. A recent study showed that more than 80% of all personal computers have anti-virus software installed. However, the protection mechanisms in place are far less effective than users would expect. Mal-ware analysis is a classical example of cat-and-mouse game: as new anti-virus t...

In novel forms of the Social Internet of Things, any mobile user within communication range may help routing messages for another user in the network. The resulting message delivery rate depends both on the users’ mobility patterns and the message load in the network. This new type of configuration, however, poses new challenges to security, amongs...

The two volumes LNCS 9597 and 9598 constitute the refereed conference proceedings of the 19th European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation, EvoApplications 2016, held in Porto, Portugal, in March/April 2016, co-located with the Evo* 2016 events EuroGP, EvoCOP, and EvoMUSART. The 57 revised full papers presented together with...

In the past decades, different evolutionary optimization methodologies have been proposed by scholars and exploited by practitioners, in a wide range of applications. Each paradigm shows distinctive features, typical advantages, and characteristic disadvantages; however, one single problem is shared by almost all of them: the “lack of speciation”....

Among Real-Time Strategy games few titles have enjoyed the continued success of StarCraft. Many research lines aimed at developing Artificial Intelligences, or " bots " , capable of challenging human players, use StarCraft as a platform. Several characteristics make this game particularly appealing for researchers, such as: asymmetric balanced fact...