10th International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry (ACRI 2011)

The first call for papers is out for the 10th International Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry (ACRI 2012), to be held on Santorini Island, Greece, September 24-27, 2012.

The main website is at http://acri2012.duth.gr/
Important dates at http://acri2012.duth.gr/dates.html - submissions are due March 19, 2012.
Other important information includes that the proceedings will be published in Springer LNCS.

This year I am part of the program committee, which should be quite interesting. I've come across many papers from this conference series, including "Local Information in One-Dimensional Cellular Automata" which influenced my own work on filtering CAs. I'm looking forward to going, and hope to see you there.

Topical Issue on Guided Self-Organization

Following the success of the third and fourth Guided Self-Organization workshops (this year and last), there is a call for papers out for a topical issue on Guided Self-Organization in Advances in Complex Systems next year.

Important dates are:

• expression of interest (tentative title and list of authors) to guest editors : 4. November 2011
• submission to ACS: 31 January 2012
• notification: 30 April 2012
• camera-ready papers: 31 May 2012

Full details of the CFP are at http://informatics.indiana.edu/larryy/gso4/cfp/index.html and an excerpt is below:

The goal of Guided Self-Organization (GSO) research is to leverage the strengths of self-organization while still being able to direct the outcome of the self-organizing process. The ACS Topical Issue on Guided Self-Organization aims to condense the current state-of-art in guided self-organizing systems, including, but not limited to information- and graph-theoretic foundations of GSO and the information dynamics of cognitive systems.

A number of attempts have been made to formalize aspects of GSO within information theory and dynamical systems: empowerment, information-driven evolution, robust overdesign, reinforcement-driven homeokinesis, predictive information-based homeokinesis, interactive learning, etc. However, the lack of a broadly applicable mathematical framework across multiple scales and contexts leaves GSO methodology incomplete. Devising such a framework and identifying common principles of guidance are the main themes of GSO.

Papers need not be regarding work presented at the workshops, new work is also solicited. Good luck with your submissions!

GSO 4

A quick note to promote the Fourth International Workshop on Guided Self-Organization (GSO 4):

The goal of Guided Self-Organization (GSO) is to leverage the strengths of self-organization while still being able to direct the outcome of the self-organizing process. The GSO-2011 workshop will bring together invited experts and researchers in self-organizing systems, with particular emphasis on the information- and graph-theoretic foundations of GSO and the information dynamics of cognitive systems.
...
The following topics are of special interest: information-theoretic measures of complexity, graph-theoretic metrics of networks, information-driven self-organization (IDSO), applications of GSO to systems biology, computational neuroscience, cooperative and modular robotics, sensor networks, and cognitive modeling.

Some good friends of mine have been behind this series (this year, Daniel Polani, Larry Yaeger, and my old supervisor Mikhail Prokopenko). The series started at our lab in Sydney 3 years ago, and it's pleasing to see that it has really got some momentum behind it now.

Unfortunately I have to miss it this year, but if this sounds like your field then I recommend that you go, as this will be an excellent meeting.

Abstracts are due by July 31, the workshop itself is on Sept 8-10 2011 in Hertfordshire, UK.

Carbon tax shenanigans

It's been a little strange watching all the debate at home about the incoming carbon tax. The commentators on the right are getting so frothy-mouthed and vicious about the whole thing. Hardly a surprise I suppose.

The weirdest thing is the loss of perspective. I think it's best summarised in this blog post (tip to Elliot):
http://www.heathenscripture.com/you-shut-your-goddamn-carbon-taxin-mouth/
It's a great shot of perspective there. And I have to agree - if you can't afford $10 a week out of your $100k+ income for something for your kids' futures like this, my heart bleeds. Really.

I also wanted to share something I saw on the BBC news this morning. After a story on the impending (real) Italian financial crisis, they reported that consumer confidence in Australia had reached a low point, noting with unhidden incredulity that this was despite (and I paraphrase) "near zero unemployment, strong growth and record standard of living" but seemed "related to fears about a carbon tax". It's difficult not to feel embarrassed about that.

I must start writing again ...

Well it's been a while, and a lot has happened since I last wrote.

In the last 18 months or so, I've submitted my PhD thesis, worked some more hours in my software engineering job, wrote up a few papers, graduated, moved to Leipzig, Germany and started as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences.

Life hasn't exactly settled down, but I am planning on writing about all of the above in the near future ...