Hereafter is the list of the topics that will be discussed during this workshop:

• urban street patterns and urban area transportation
• foraging networks in animals
• optimality and constraints in transportation networks
• long distance air and maritime transportation
• spatial and planar networks

The following people will give a talk during this workshop:

• Thomas Courtat (Orange, France)
• Marc Barthélemy (Cea, Saclay, France)
• César Ducruet (Géographie-Cités, Paris, France)
• Mark Fricker (University of Oxford, UK)
• Michael Gastner (Imperial College, London, UK)
• Jacques Gautrais (CRCA Toulouse, France)
• Luke Heaton (Oxford)
• Christian Jost (CRCA Toulouse, France)
• Vito Latora (Università di Catania, Italy)
• Igor Lugo (postdoc, Géographie-Cités)
• Emanuele Strano (UDSU, Strathclyde Univesirsity, UK)

Registration to the workshop is free but mandatory, as the workshop attendance is limited. Details on registration and contributed talks can be found on http://iscpif.fr./tnnt2010.

During swarm robotics meetings, one can encounter computer scientists, mathematicians, roboticists or engineers. But it is less common to find a biologist in such events. Yet, swarm robotics has largely developed from biological discoveries that have been made during the last thirty years about the organization of animal societies. One reason that explains the defection of biologists is the difficulty they have to find relevant information for their own work in this new research field. They consider robots as "cool" gadgets, but not as tools able to make progress in the study of social behaviors.

In this seminar, I will review some of the ways swarm robotics can contribute to the study of collective animal behavior. I argue that robotics and affiliated disciplines can bring significant improvements in this biological field, from a technical, conceptual and pedagogical point of view. I will build my discussion on top of five observations I have made while collaborating as a biologist with computer scientists and roboticists: robots require a complete specification; robots are physical entities; robots implement new technologies; robots can be inadvertent sources of biological inspiration; and robots are indeed "cool" gadgets."

More information about the location of the lecture can be found here: http://www.stevens.edu/ses/about_soe/events/rss/index.php.

• Submission Deadline: Oct 31, 2010
• Notification Due: Dec 15, 2010
• Final Version Due: Jan 15, 2011

More information about invited speakers, registration and poster submission can be found in the flyer of the workshop or on the dedicated website (not working yet).

Click here to view the embedded video.

The original video can be found here on the Radiolab blog.

The SIMAI congress will held in Cagliari (Italy), from June 21st to June 25th 2010. The exact date of the symposium during this period is not yet decided. Expected speakers are:

• José Alfredo Cañizo (Department of Mathematics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain): Mean-field limit for collective behavior models with noise.
• Emiliano Cristiani (CEMSAC – Università di Salerno and IAC-CNR, Roma, Italy): A multiscale approach for pedestrian flow.
• Jesú Rosado (Department of Mathematics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain): A refined result of flocking for the Cucker-Smale model.
• Juliette Venel (Department of Mathematics, Université de Valenciennes et du Hainaut-Cambrésis, France): A discrete contact model for crowd motion.
• Fiammetta Venuti (Department of Structural and Geotechnical Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Italy): Crowd-structure interaction on footbridges, modelling of the coupled system and an application.
• And me, Simon Garnier (Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, USA): Trail geometry encodes heuristic information in the Argentine ant.

Call for papers is available here along with a summary of the objectives of this workshop. In short, 

This half-day workshop aims to bring together new theories and methodologies inspired by biological principles for self-organizing robotic systems. The emphasis of the workshop is on bridging multi-disciplinary research areas such as robotics, artificial life, systems biology, and evolutionary computation. Topics of this workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Morphogenetic approaches to self-organizing multi-robot systems
• Morphogenetic approaches to modular robots
• Evolutionary and developmental approaches to design of robot body-plan and controller
• Self-organized multi-robot pattern formation and boundary coverage
• Stigmergy in self-organized collective construction
• Swarm intelligence based approaches to multi-robot systems
• Unified approaches to self-assembling swarm and modular robots
• Evolutionary multi-robot organism
• Robustness, self-reparability and evolvability of self-organizing multi-robot systems

Important dates to remember are:

• Submission deadline: February 25, 2010
• Author notification: March 6, 2010
• Final version due: March 12, 2010
• Workshop: May 3, 2010

By the way, I'm giving a talk there. 

The first day of the meeting is a postgraduate workshop with short talks by invited speakers, focusing on topics of great interest for researchers in the early stages of their career. The second and third days are the Easter meeting. There will be post graduate talks, poster presentations, social events, and plenary lectures by Prof. Jane Hurst and Prof. Jens Krause as well as the presentation by Dr Andy Gardner, the 2010 winner of the ASAB Outstanding Young Investigator Award.

All information can be found at the following address: http://psychology.exeter.ac.uk/asabeaster2010/ASAB%20Easter%20Meeting%202010.html. 

Important dates for this event are:

• Deadline for abstract submission: February 28, 2010
• Registration closes: March 10, 2010

Important dates to remember: 

• Submission deadline: February 28, 2010
• Notification of acceptance: April 30, 2010
• Camera ready copy: May 14, 2010
• Conference: September 8-10, 2010

Hereafter is the scope of the conference as it can be found on the website of the conference. 

Scope of the conference

Swarm intelligence is a relatively new discipline that deals with the study of self-organizing processes both in nature and in artificial systems. Researchers in ethology and animal behavior have proposed many models to explain interesting aspects of social insect behavior such as self-organization and shape-formation. Recently, algorithms and methods inspired by these models have been proposed to solve difficult problems in many domains.

An example of a particularly successful research direction in swarm intelligence is ant colony optimization, the main focus of which is on discrete optimization problems. Ant colony optimization has been applied successfully to a large number of difficult discrete optimization problems including the traveling salesman problem, the quadratic assignment problem, scheduling, vehicle routing, etc., as well as to routing in telecommunication networks. Another interesting approach is that of particle swarm optimization, that focuses on continuous optimization problems. Here too, a number of successful applications can be found in the recent literature. Swarm robotics is another relevant field. Here, the focus is on applying swarm intelligence techniques to the control of large groups of cooperating autonomous robots.

ANTS 2010 will give researchers in swarm intelligence the opportunity to meet, to present their latest research, and to discuss current developments and applications.

The three-day conference will be held in Brussels, Belgium, on September 8-10, 2010.

Relevant Research Areas

ANTS 2010 solicits contributions dealing with any aspect of swarm intelligence. Typical, but not exclusive, topics of interest are:

• Behavioral models of social insects or other animal societies that can stimulate new algorithmic approaches.
• Empirical and theoretical research in swarm intelligence.
• Application of swarm intelligence methods, such as ant colony optimization or particle swarm optimization, to real-world problems.
• Theoretical and experimental research in swarm robotics systems.