Organized by

Cyberscience Center, Tohoku University
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC), Rovira i Virgili University

Aims

TPNC is a conference series intending to cover the wide spectrum of computational principles, models and techniques inspired by information processing in nature. TPNC 2016 will reserve significant room for young scholars at the beginning of their career and particular focus will be put on methodology. The conference aims at attracting contributions to nature-inspired models of computation, synthesizing nature by means of computation, nature-inspired materials, and information processing in nature.
Venue

TPNC 2016 will take place in Sendai, in the northeast (Tohoku) region of Japan. The city was founded in 1600 and is nicknamed the "city of trees". It is the second largest city north of Tokyo. It takes about 100 minutes to reach Sendai from Tokyo by bullet train (Shinkansen). The venue will be the Cyberscience Center, Aobayama Campus, Tohoku University:
Scope

Topics include, but are not limited to:

Theoretical contributions to
amorphous computing
ant colonies
artificial chemistry
artificial immune systems
artificial life
bacterial foraging
cellular automata
chaos computing
collision-based computing
complex adaptive systems
computing with DNA
computing with words and perceptions
developmental systems
evolutionary computing
fractal geometry
fuzzy logic
gene assembly in ciliates
granular computing
intelligent systems
in-vivo computing
membrane computing
nanocomputing
neural computing
optical computing
physarum machines
quantum computing
quantum information
reaction-diffusion systems
rough sets
self-organizing systems
swarm intelligence
synthetic biology
Applications of natural computing to
algorithmics
bioinformatics
control
cryptography
design
economics
graphics
hardware
human-computer interaction
knowledge discovery
learning
logistics
medicine
natural language processing
optimization
pattern recognition
planning and scheduling
programming
robotics
telecommunications
web intelligence

A flexible "theory to/from practice" approach would be the perfect focus for the expected contributions.

A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS series will be available by the time of the conference. A special issue of the journal Soft Computing (Springer, 2014 JCR impact factor: 1.304) will be later published containing peer-reviewed substantially extended versions of some of the papers contributed to the conference. Submissions to it will be by invitation.


Program Committee:
Andrew Adamatzky University of the West of England, UK
Zixing Cai Central South University, China
Óscar Castillo Tijuana Institute of Technology, Mexico
Óscar Cordón University of Granada, Spain
Gianni Di Caro Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research, Switzerland
Marco Dorigo Free University of Brussels – ULB, Belgium
Austin G. Fowler Google, USA
Michel Gendreau Montreal Polytechnic, Canada
Debasish Ghose Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
Jin-Kao Hao University of Angers, France
Inman Harvey University of Sussex, UK
Wei-Chiang Hong Nanjing Tech University, China
Amir Hussain University of Stirling, UK
Robert John University of Nottingham, UK
Joshua Knowles University of Birmingham, UK
Kwong-Sak Leung Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
Seth Lloyd Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
José A. Lozano University of the Basque Country, Spain
Vittorio Maniezzo University of Bologna, Italy
Carlos Martín-Vide Rovira i Virgili University, Spain, chair
Philip K. McKinley Michigan State University, USA
Jerry M. Mendel University of Southern California, USA
Marjan Mernik University of Maribor, Slovenia
Radko Mesiar Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia
Chrystopher Nehaniv University of Hertfordshire, UK
Vilém Novák University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
Linqiang Pan Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China
Frederick E. Petry Naval Research Laboratory, USA
Dan Ralescu University of Cincinnati, USA
Francisco C. Santos University of Lisbon, Portugal
Friedrich Simmel Technical University of Munich, Germany
Andrzej Skowron University of Warsaw, Poland
John A. Smolin IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, USA
Ying Tan Peking University, China
Guy Theraulaz Paul Sabatier University, France
Tommaso Toffoli Boston University, USA
Vicenç Torra University of Skövde, Sweden
Edward Tsang University of Essex, UK
Sergi Valverde Pompeu Fabra University, Spain
José Luis Verdegay University of Granada, Spain
Fernando J. Von Zuben University of Campinas, Brazil
K. Birgitta Whaley University of California, Berkeley, USA
Darrell Whitley Colorado State University, USA
Xin‐She Yang Middlesex University, UK
Hao Ying Wayne State University, USA
Mengjie Zhang Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Zhi-Hua Zhou Nanjing University, China