[alife] CFP: Special Issue on Swarm Intelligence and Swarm Robotics of the Neural Computing & Applications journal

[Roderich GROSS]

[Apologies if you receive this more than once]


Call for Papers on

-------   SWARM INTELLIGENCE AND SWARM ROBOTICS   -------

for a special issue of the journal Neural Computing & Applications
http://www.springer.com/journal/521


-------   AIM AND SCOPE   -------

Swarm intelligence refers to the phenomenon of a system of spatially
distributed individuals coordinating their actions in a decentralized
and self-organized manner so as to exhibit complex collective
behavior. Such systems tend to have large numbers of individual
agents that interact with each other in simple ways. This allows
swarm-intelligent systems to be inherently robust and flexible.
Moreover, systems with these properties can range in size from the
nano to the macro scale.

Swarm-intelligent systems are common throughout nature. Examples are
bacteria colonies, social insects, and flocks/herds of vertebrates. In
addition, humans have produced a variety of (artificial) swarm systems
ranging from swarm-based optimization algorithms to sensor networks,
swarms of robots, and smart materials. In each of these natural or
artificial systems, populations of agents change their spatiotemporal
configuration (in computational space or the real world) solely based
on the agents' local interactions with each other and the environment.

This special issue aims to bring together contributions from studies
of computational and physical swarm systems which leverage similar
swarm-intelligent mechanisms. We thereby intend to help outline a
common methodological framework for the design and analysis of
swarm-intelligent systems. We are soliciting contributions on
(but not limited to) the following topics:

* Applications in swarm robotics (ad-hoc and sensor networks,
 coverage, actuator arrays, collective construction, etc.)

* Large-scale reconfigurable robot systems, multi-robot systems,
 self-assembling systems, smart materials

* Modeling natural or artificial swarms and mixed biological /
 artificial systems

* Swarm-intelligent optimization techniques including Particle Swarm
 Optimization

* Amorphous Computing, Spatial Computing, Organic Computing, Neural
 Computing

* Design methodologies for swarm-intelligent systems (global-to-local
 programming, evolution of swarming algorithms and hardware, etc.)

* Theoretical and empirical analysis and benchmarking (consensus,
 distributed optimization, flocking, shape changing, task allocation,
 etc.)


-------   MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSION   -------

Authors are encouraged to submit high-quality, original work that has
neither appeared in, nor is under consideration by, other journals.
Manuscripts should be submitted to: http://nca.edmgr.com/. Please
select article type: "Swarm Intelligence and Swarm Robotics".

Important dates:

May 1, 2009, Submission deadline
August 1, 2009, Notification of acceptance
October 1, 2009, Revised / Final manuscript

The special issue is expected to be published by Springer early 2010.


-------   GUEST EDITORS   -------

Dr. Nikolaus Correll (nikolaus at csail.mit.edu)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Prof. Zhihua Cui (cuizhihua at gmail.com)
Taiyuan University of Science and Technology, P.R. China

Dr. Xiao-Zhi Gao (gao at cc.hut.fi)
Helsinki University of Technology, Finland

Dr. Roderich Gross (roderich.gross at epfl.ch)
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland



-- 
Roderich GROSS, PhD
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
EPFL, LSRO
Station 9
CH-1015 Lausanne
http://people.epfl.ch/roderich.gross