Intelligensys - Formulating Knowledge

Developing Better Products Faster

January 2010 Newsletter

Welcome to the Intelligensys newsletter, and please accept our best wishes for a prosperous and successful 2010.

Hottest news is the latest release of our modelling and optimization program INForm, now with a new modelling technique that develops 'transparent' models in the form of equations. FormData, our design of experiments program, is currently being updated to be compatible with the latest versions of Windows. And a few months ago, MacroPac was updated so that it allows containers of user-defined shape.

We've updated our Posters page with details of conference presentations by our collaborators, and added some new papers to the Review Articles page.

INForm gets 'transparent' models

We have added a new technique, Gene Expression Programming (GEP, a close relative of genetic programming) into the latest version of INForm, released this month. This develops models directly from data, but presents them in the form of equations. It takes considerably more time to develop GEP models than neural network ones, but if you want to see the form of the models in terms of an equation, it can be a useful approach. Within any given problem, some properties can be trained with GEP while others are trained with Neural Networks - the prediction and optimization make use of whatever models you've chosen to develop. Read more about the new INForm here.

New Releases

FormRules now includes the 'continental' number convension, and FormData is being revamped to include D-optimal designs. In future, FormData will be available as a networkable licence, as a sub-module of INForm.

Last summer, MacroPac v7 was released, with the ability for users to define the shapes of their containers - find out about the rest of the enhancements here. And if you want to be added to the list of recipients for our MacroPac-specific newsletter please let us know.

Publications Updates and Company News

Ray Rowe and Liz Colbourn have contributed a chapter on 'Data Mining Methods in Pharmaceutical Formulation' to Pharmaceutical Data Mining: Approaches and Applications for Drug Discovery, edited by K V Balakin and published by Wiley in 2009. For copyright reasons, we are unable to provide you with a copy of this paper, but hope you will be able to get it from your library.

In late October, Liz Colbourn spoke at the symposium celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Belgrade. This also marks the beginning of a collaboration with the group of Professor Svetlana Ibric in Belgrade.

Peter York and Liz Colbourn will be organizers and co-chairs of a symposium to be held at the AAPS in New Orleans, November 2010. The theme of the symposium is "Intelligent Pharmaceutical Product Design and Processing Using Data Mining Methods" and speakers include Professor M Turkoglu of Marmara University (Turkey), Professor S Ibric of the University of Belgrade (Serbia) and Professor K Takayama of Japan.

The review articles page has been updated with 2 new papers by Ray and Liz.

We've also updated the posters page, where you can download posters describing the excellent work done by our academic coworkers.