[alife] Announcement: PPSN 2014 Workshop on Nature-inspired Techniques for Robotics

[Claudio Rossi]

The Parallel Problem Solving from Nature Conference (PPSN 2014) will host the Workshop on Nature-inspired techniques for robotics (September 13, 2014, Ljubljana, Slovenia).

The purpose of the workshop is to analyze the state-of-art / state-of-knowledge in the field of nature based computation techniques to automatically design robot controllers and/or morphology, as well as learning and optimization of real or simulated autonomous robots. We consider such nature-inspired techniques from the perspective of both engineering (designing efficient robots wrt. a task) and biology (understanding biological mechanisms using robots).

This workshop aims at bringing together researchers and experts in different disciplines, fostering interdisciplinary debate between fields such as neuro-evolution, evolutionary design, artificial life, evolutionary robotics, developmental and learning in robotics, adaptive collective robotic systems, etc. The workshop is intended as a melting pot for engineers and researchers working on any of the topics listed above but also for any other attendant to PPSN who can be interested in the potential application to robotics of his/her field of expertise.

Topics:
        • Collective adaptive systems: swarm, social intelligence, etc.
        • Evolutionary robotics: co-evolution, open-ended evolution, shaping,
        • Development and learning with robots
        • Bio-inspired robotic design: evolvable hardware, morpho-functional machines, modular robotics, etc.
        • Bio-inspired controller design: artificial neural networks, etc.
        • Modelling and simulation with robots: artificial life, individual-based modelling, mixed societies, etc.

This half-day single-track workshop will feature:
- keynote talks from different researchers in the field: S. Doncieux (UPMC, France), E. Haasdijk (Free University Amsterdam, the Netherlands), H. Hamman (University of Paderborn, Germany), J-B. Mouret (UPMC, France), A. Prieto (University of A Coruña, Spain), S. Risi (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
- research spotlight (10 min presentation) from submitted works
- a panel discussion

HOW TO PARTICIPATE

We invite authors to submit a 1- or 2-page abstract describing research or a review/discussion related to the topics listed above. Summary of already published research (journals or conferences) as well as sumary of research program are very welcome. Participants with accepted contributions will be given a 10-minutes slot for presenting their work in a spotlight session.

Please submit your abstract through e-mail in PDF only at claudio.rossi at upm.es and nicolas.bredeche at isir.upmc.fr

Important dates:
        • Submission: May 31st, 2014
        • Notification of acceptance: June 6th, 2014
        • Workshop:  September 13th, 2014

For more information:
http://www.disam.upm.es/NIR_workshop_2014 
http://ppsn2014.ijs.si/?show=workshops
http://ppsn2014.ijs.si

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