[PlanetKR] UMoCoP 2012: Call for Participation

[Galton, Antony]

                       AISB/IACAP Symposium

   UNDERSTANDING AND MODELLING COLLECTIVE PHENOMENA (UMoCoP 2012)

                      Thursday 5th July 2012

                     http://umocop.3void.com 
 
            C A L L   F O R   P A R T I C I P A T I O N

            -------------------------------------------

This symposium forms part of the AISB/IACAP World Congress to be held
at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK, on 2-6 July 2012, in
honour of Alan Turing, to mark the centenary of his birth. The Congress
is jointly organised by the Society for the Study of Artificial
Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB) and the International
Association of Computing and Philosophy (IACAP) (See web links below.)

                             *  *  *

By collective phenomena we understand phenomena which arise as a
result of the combined actions of many individual entities and which
exhibit some form of unity or coherence that goes beyond the sum of
the individual actions, e.g., the behaviour of flocks, crowds, etc,
traffic phenomena, and many social activities. An important subclass
of collective phenomena are spatial collectives, in which the
collective behaviour takes the form of some form of spatial
coherence. 

This symposium will explore a range of issues arising from the effort
to understand and model collective phenomena, either from a
philosophical standpoint or from a computational one; we are
particularly interested in the application of AI techniques (e.g.,
knowledge representation formalisms, algorithms for pattern
recognition, machine learning methods) to the problems that they
raise.


The Symposium will include 

* KEYNOTE TALK: "The Ontology of Collectives", by Professor Peter
Simons from the Department of Philosophy, Trinity College Dublin.
Peter is the author of the well-known and highly influential book
Parts: A Study in Ontology (Oxford University Press 1987).

* the following REGULAR PRESENTATIONS:

- Janna Hastings, Colin Batchelor, Stefan Schulz and Ludger Jansen,
'Collective bio-molecular processes: The hidden ontology of systems
biology' 
- Maximillian Dupenois and Antony Galton, 'Maintenance of Dot Pattern
Footprints via Efficient Identification of Change'
- Gilles Kassel, Mohamed Turki, Inès Saad and Faiez Gargouri, 'From
collective actions to actions of organizations: an ontological
analysis'
- Brandon Bennett, 'A Comparative Investigation of Herding Algorithms'
- Michal B. Paradowski, 'Understanding the Social Cascading of Geekspeak'

* An INVITED PRESENTATION by Professor Richard Everson (Exeter
University): "Theta-hulls: another algorithm for characterising the
shape of a set of points". 

* BREAK-OUT SESSIONS in which participants will tackle some
outstanding problems in the field of collective phenomena

* PLENARY FEEDBACK from the break-out sessions.

Anyone with an interest in understanding and modelling collective
phenomena is warmly invited to attend this symposium. You may also wish
to consider attending other symposia in the Congress, as listed at
http://events.cs.bham.ac.uk/turing12/, at which you will also find
details about how to register.


Organisation
------------

General Chairs: Antony Galton and Zena Wood (University of Exeter, UK)

Programme Committee:

Natalia Andrienko (Fraunhofer Institute IAIS, Sankt-Augustin, Germany)
Thomas Bittner (Buffalo NY, USA)
Christophe Claramunt (Naval Academy Research Institute, Brest, France)
Matt Duckham (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Heinrich Herre (University of Leipzig, Germany)
Patrick Laube (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
Ludger Jansen (University of Rostock, Germany)
Stefan Schulz (Medical University Graz, Austria)
Johanna Seibt (University of Aarhus, Denmark)
John Stell (University of Leeds, UK)
Monica Wachowicz (University of New Brunswick, Canada)

Web links
---------
AISB/IACAP Word Congress 2012: http://events.cs.bham.ac.uk/turing12/ 
(or via http://www.aisb.org.uk/convention/aisb12/ )

AISB: http://www.aisb.org.uk/ 

IACAP: http://www.ia-cap.org/ 

This symposium: http://umucop.3void.com/