The collective behavior research group uses a combination of mathematical models and experiments to understand the dynamics of animal and human groups. See http://www2.math.uu.se/~david/web/ for details of their current research. Some current projects on humans involve the study of socially contagious activities, such as audience clapping, and of how individuals integrate social and personal information when trying to answer trivia questions. They collaborate closely in this work with an experimental research group led by Prof. Jens Krause in Berlin.

An opening is currently available for a postdoctoral researcher to work on similar projects, from a perspective that combines mathematical modelling with experimental work.

Full details of the position and how to apply can be found at: http://www2.personalavd.uu.se/ledigaplatser/2450postDOC.html. Applications should be submitted no later than November 18th, 2011. 

Call for papers prepared on October 4, 2011. More details and up-to-date information at http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/ants2012.

Important Dates

Submission deadline           March 2, 2012

Notification of acceptance    May 3, 2012

Camera ready copy             May 17, 2012

Conference                    September 12-14, 2012

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 2012 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 12-14, 2012. 

Relevant Research Areas

ANTS 2012 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.

Publication Details

Conference proceedings will be published by Springer in the LNCS series.

The journal Swarm Intelligence will publish a special issue dedicated to ANTS 2012 that will contain extended versions of the best research works presented at the conference. Further details will soon be published on the web site.

Best Paper Award

A best paper award will be presented at the conference.

Further Information

Up-to-date information will be published on the web site http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/ants2012/. For information about local arrangements, registration forms, etc., please refer to the above-mentioned web site or contact the local organizers at the address below.

Conference Address

ANTS 2012 - IRIDIA CP 194/6, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Av. F. D. Roosevelt 50, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium.

Tel: +32-2-6502729

Fax: +32-2-6502715

Website: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/ants2012

Email: ants@iridia.ulb.ac.be

ANTS 2012 Organizing Committee

General Chair: 

Marco Dorigo, IRIDIA, ULB, Brussels, Belgium

Technical Program Chairs:

Christian Blum, ALBCOM, LSI, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Andries Engelbrecht, University of Pretoria, South Africa

Roderich Groß, Sheffield University, UK

Publication Chair:

Anders Lyhne Christensen, Instituto Universitario de Lisboa, Portugal

Organization Chairs:

Mauro Birattari, IRIDIA, ULB, Brussels, Belgium

Thomas Stützle, IRIDIA, ULB, Brussels, Belgium

Local Arrangements:

Andreagiovanni Reina, IRIDIA, ULB, Brussels, Belgium

Arne Brutschy, IRIDIA, ULB, Brussels, Belgium

What are the principles that keep our society together? This question is even more difficult to answer than the long-standing question, what are the forces that keep our world together. However, the social challenges of humanity in the 21st century ranging from the financial crises to the impacts of globalization, require us to make fast progress in our understanding of how society works, and how our future can be managed in a resilient and sustainable way. This book can present only a few very first steps towards this ambitious goal. However, based on simple models of social interactions, one can already gain some surprising insights into the social, “macro-level'' outcomes and dynamics that is implied by individual, “micro-level'' interactions. Depending on the nature of these interactions, they may imply the spontaneous formation of social conventions or the birth of social cooperation, but also their sudden breakdown. This can end in deadly crowd disasters or tragedies of the commons (such as financial crises or environmental destruction). Furthermore, we demonstrate that classical modeling approaches (such as representative agent models) do not provide a sufficient understanding of the self-organization in social systems resulting from individual interactions. The consideration of randomness, spatial or network interdependencies, and nonlinear feedback effects turns out to be crucial to get fundamental insights into how social patterns and dynamics emerge. Given the explanation of sometimes counter-intuitive phenomena resulting from these features and their combination, our evolutionary modeling approach appears to be powerful and insightful. The chapters of this book range from a discussion of the modeling strategy for socio-economic systems over experimental issues up the right way of doing agent-based modeling. We furthermore discuss applications ranging from pedestrian and crowd dynamics over opinion formation, coordination, and cooperation up to conflict, and also address the response to information, issues of systemic risks in society and economics, and new approaches to manage complexity in socio-economic systems. Selected parts of this book had been previously published in peer reviewed journals.

These mini robotic doughnuts spontaneously form from metal particles floating between a layer of oil and water, and could potentially be used to manipulate chemical reactions, deliver medical treatments in the body or clean surfaces.

“It’s really counter intuitive,” said physicist Igor Aranson, co-author of a study in Nature Materials, August 7. “There is nothing fancy about magnetic particles, you can just buy them. But if you pour them on the surface of a liquid, you can form robots which can do something useful.”(…)

Read the rest of this article by Danielle Venton on Wired.com: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/self-assembling-robots/

• How do ant colonies forage for food?
• Why do cockroaches tend to aggregate in clumps?
• How can we design robotic swarms to do what we want them to?
• How can we design molecular computers using self-assembling DNA molecules?

All of these problems are related. All of them have large numbers of individual agents (be they bugs, robots, or molecules) acting independently to accomplish some goal. The students will explore behavior of these systems using a variety of mathematical techniques.

For more information, you can visit the course webpage.

Artificial Life is an interdisciplinary undertaking that investigates the fundamental properties of living systems through the simulation and synthesis of biological entities and processes. It also attempts to design and build artificial systems that display properties of organisms, or societies of organisms, out of abiotic or virtual parts.

In the early 1990's, the first two ECAL conferences in Paris and Brussels were mainly centered on theoretical biology and the physics of complex systems. Today, the Alife comunity can look back on these origins and take more inspiration from new developments at the intersection between computer science and theoretical biology — thus this year's ECAL will refocus on complex biological systems. Closing a loop, this ECAL will mark the 20th anniversary of the 1st ECAL and will be framed as a tribute to the late Francisco Varela, co-organizer in 1991 with two of this year's committee members (Paul Bourgine and Hugues Bersini).

All information about the conference can be found at this addres: www.ecal11.org

When selecting a resource to exploit, an insect colony must take into account at least two constraints: the resource must be abundant enough to sustain the whole group, but not too large to limit exploitation costs, and risks of conflicts with other colonies. Following recent results on cockroaches and ants, we introduce here a behavioral mechanism that satisfies these two constraints. Individuals simply modulate their probability to switch to another resource as a function of the local density of conspecifics locally detected. As a result, the individuals gather at the smallest resource that can host the whole group, hence reducing competition and exploitation costs while fulfilling the overall group's needs. Our analysis reveals that the group becomes better at discriminating between similar resources as it grows in size. Also, the discrimination mechanism is flexible and the group readily switches to a better suited resource as it appears in the environment. The collective decision emerges through the self-organization of individuals, that is, in absence of any centralized control. It also requires a minimal individual cognitive investment, making the proposed mechanism likely to occur in other social species and suitable for the development of distributed decision making tools.

The article can be found here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019888

The first article of the series has been posted today at the following address: http://myrmecos.net/2011/02/06/what-are-army-ants/.  

• Theoretical advances of particle swarm optimization, ant colony optimization. 
• Optimization techniques in dynamic, multi-objective, constrained environments. 
• Grid and distributed computing, machine learning, data mining, data clustering, graph partitioning, and decision making based on swarm intelligence principles. 
• Adaptation and applications of swarm intelligence principles to real world problems in various domains, including : medicine, biology, chemistry, finance, insurance, economics, social sciences, transportation, tourism, education, defense, telecommunications, energy, management, information retrieval, software engineering, fraud detection, environment, remote-sensing, 
• Robot swarm,…

Hereafter are the important dates for paper submissions:

• Submission deadline: March 10, 2011 
• Notification of acceptance: April 20, 2011 
• Camera / CD ready: May 10, 2011 
• Registration for authors (deadline): May 20, 2011 
• Conference: June 14-15, 2011 

Selected papers will be proposed for submission in special issues of selected International Journals: Computers & Operations Research, Computers & Industrial Engineering, Algorithmic Operations Research. 

The organizers also encourage scientists to submit proposals for special sessions, workshops and panels. For more details about the conference and submission process, visit the conference website at: http://icsi11.eisti.fr/

We are seeking a postdoctoral research associate to work with us on our project entitled “Experimental and Theoretical Analysis of Collective Dynamics of Swarming Systems”, funded by the National Science Foundation.

The proposed research will focus on the study of schooling fish experimentally, from the perspective of non-equilibrium statistical physics. We have developed detailed digital tracking of all individuals in schools, which allows us to investigate biologically meaningful collective states to search for both generic, and specific, characteristics of animal groups. For example, an investigation of the adaptability, rapid response, consensus, and robustness requirements of group motion will allow us to reveal how individual interactions produce functional complexity at the group level. The successful candidate will: 1. Perform controlled laboratory experiments where hundreds, or thousands, of fish are tracked concurrently and their response to stimuli recorded (such experiments and tracking technologies are already well developed in the laboratory). 2. Develop detailed, and idealized, models to capture specific and universal aspects of groups, and to apply physics-inspired analytical tools to groups, such as correlation lengths, clustering, information flow, defect dynamics, etc. 3. Investigate collective effects that are typical of non-equilibrium dynamical systems; e.g.: scaling-laws, pattern formation, or transitions. 4. Test if some collective states follow a generic behavior due to the system adaptations and, if so, exploit the consequences of this for theoretical analysis.

Applicants must have proven ability to pursue quantitative experimental research (including data collection and analysis); experience with biological systems is a bonus.

The position will initially be for a period of 12 months with a possibility of extension of up to 24 months. The position is available immediately but, if needed, the start date is flexible.

We welcome informal inquiries. To apply please send a CV and a cover letter explaining your suitability for the position to icouzin@princeton.edu. Please include the word “Swarm” in the subject line.

Princeton University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer and particularly welcomes nominations of women and members of underrepresented minority groups.