CFP: BICT 2015 Special Track on Swarm Robotics (SR)
9th International Conference on Bio-inspired Information and Communications Technologies (BICT 2015, formerly BIONETICS)
http://www.bionetics.org/

Paper submission deadline: August 3, 2015
December 3 (Thu) - December 5, 2015 (Sat)
New York City, NY, USA

Sponsored by European Alliance for Innovation (EAI) and Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science
In corporation with ACM (Pending)

Swarm robotics researchers design systems of individually simple robots which together exhibit some global behaviour that is either desirable from the engineering perspective, or interesting as an analog to the behaviour of swarms in nature. Most research in swarm robotics is bio-inspired wherein the observation of particular animal behaviours leads to a robotic system that either fulfills some useful function or serves as a model of the original biological system. However, in some cases it is only the general principles of swarm systems in nature that are employed: self-organization, stigmergy, and emergence. The main constraint of a swarm robotic system is the lack of centralized control. Individual robots may exchange information and materials through the medium of the environment, but they must sense, compute, and act as individuals. These characteristics ideally lead to systems that are scalable and adaptable. The main challenges are in designing such systems to yield desirable behaviour and analyzing them to understand how individual behaviours contribute to the overall behaviour.

This special track seeks high-quality original papers on the full spectrum of topics in swarm robotics, including but not limited to:

Algorithms and control strategies
Hardware design
Robot swarms as biological models
Bio-inspired techniques for design and analysis
Evolutionary robotics and other automated design techniques
Learning
Tools for design, simulation, analysis, and hardware implementation
Physicomimetics
Human-swarm interaction
Mathematical models of swarms

IMPORTANT DATES:
Regular paper submission due: August 3 --- EXTENDED to August 31
Short and poster/demo paper submission due: September 22
Notification for regular papers: September 21
Notification for short and poster/demo papers: October 1
Camera ready due: October 15

PAPER SUBMISSION:
Authors are invited to submit regular papers (up to 8 pages each), short papers (up to 4 pages each) or poster/demo papers (up to 2 pages each) in ACM's paper template. Up to two extra pages are allowed for each paper with extra page charges. See http://bionetics.org/2015/show/initial-submission for more details.

PUBLICATION:
All accepted paper will be published through ACM Digital Library and submitted for indexing by SI, EI Compendex, Scopus, ACM Library, Google Scholar and many more. Selected papers will be considered for publication in leading journals including:
IEEE Transactions on NanoBioscience
ACM/Springer Mobile Networks and Applications
Elsevier Information and Software Technology
Elsevier Information Sciences
Springer Software Quality Journal
Elsevier Nano Communication Networks Journal
Springer Complex Adaptive Systems Modeling
Int'l Journal of Soft Computing and Networking

SPECIAL TRACK CHAIR:
Andrew Vardy, Departments of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Carlo Pinciroli, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada
Justin Werfel, Harvard University, USA
Michael Rubenstein, Harvard University, USA
Vito Trianni, ICST - CNR, Italy
Eliseo Ferrante, KU Leuven, Netherlands
Todd Wareham, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
Simon Garnier, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA
Maurizio Porfiri, New York University, USA
Diana Spears, Swarmotics, LLC
Marco Dorigo, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Thomas Schmickl, University of Graz, Austria
Heiko Hamann, University of Paderborn, Germany
Jon Timmis, University of York, UK
Sabine Hauert, University of York, UK