Invited talk by Dario Floreano

I will present the long-term vision, approach, and results obtained so far to let robots live in the 3rd dimension. Taking inspiration from nature, I will start by describing how robots could take off the ground by jumping and gliding. I will then move on to autonomous flight in cluttered environments and on the issue of perception and control for small flying systems in indoor environments. This will lead to the next step resulting in outdoor flying robots that can autonomously regulate altitude, steering, and landing using only perceptual cues. I will then expand the perspective by describing how multiple robots could fly in swarm formation in outdoor environments by means of evolved controllers and how these achievements could possibly lead to fleets of personal aerial vehicles in the not-so-far future. I will close the talk by going back indoor with current work on radically new concepts of flying robots that collaborate with teams of terrestrial and climbing robots and of flying robots designed to survive and even exploit collisions.

Prof Dario Floreano is the Director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Switzerland (EPFL) and Director of the Swiss National Center of Robotics, a national strategic initiative which brings together all major robotics labs in Switzerland. His research focuses on the convergence of biology, artificial intelligence, and robotics. He published three books on the topics of evolutionary robotics, bio-inspired artificial intelligence, and bio-mimetic flying robots with MIT Press and Springer Verlag. 1988 M.A. University of Trieste; 1991 M.S. University of Stirling; 1995 PhD University of Trieste; 1998, Sony Computer Science Laboratories; since 2000 professor positions at EPFL; 2001 co-founder of the International Society of Artificial Life, Inc.; 2003-2008 Board of Governors of the International Society of Neural Networks; 2009 Advisory Board of the Future Emerging Technologies of the European Commission; 2009 co-founder of senseFly Ltd.

Invited talk by Marco Tomassini

Cooperation and coordination are notoriously difficult goals to achieve.  Using basic evolutionary game theory, it can be shown that cooperation is typically doomed, while coordination on inferior Pareto equilibria is commonplace. However, these results are based on mixing populations in which interactions may happen between any pair or group of agents.  In this talk it will be shown that, if one takes into account the typical social networks structures that permeates society, the prospects are less gloomy and socially efficient steady states may be achieved.

Marco Tomassini is a professor of Computer Science at the Information Systems Department of the Business and Economics Faculty of the University of Lausanne,  Switzerland. He graduated in physical and chemical sciences and obtained a Doctorate in theoretical chemistry from the University of Perugia, Italy, working on computer simulations of condensed matter systems. After some years in crystal and molecular physics research, he switched to computer science, with particular interest in the fields of parallel computing and cellular automata modeling. His current research interests are centered around the application of biological ideas to artificial systems and the network dimension of complex systems.  He is active in evolutionary computation, especially spatially structured systems, genetic programming, and the structure of hard combinatorial search spaces.  He is also active in evolutionary games on networks and the evolution of coordination and cooperation, including the dynamical properties of networked complex systems. He has been Program Chair of several international events and has published more than 230 scientific papers and several authored and edited books in these fields.

evotransfer: 1st evo* technology-transfer event

evotransfer is a novel technology-transfer event debuting this year as part of evo* 2012. Evotransfer aims at promoting the establishment of liaisons between the research community on evolutionary computation and industry, in a moment in which the economy is struggling to emerge from a crisis, and entrepreneurs are beginning again to look for opportunities to invest in solutions that may increase their competitiveness.

Evotransfer will bring an audience of potential industrial partners from all over Europe in front of evo* researchers that have valuable techniques and knowledge to contribute to the solution of real-world problems arising in all areas of business and industry.

Participating researchers will have a chance to showcase their expertise in solving real-world problems with evolutionary algorithms, and interested industrial participants will have the possibility of illustrating problems arising in their business, for which a solution is wanted.

Format

The format of the event will be completely different from the typical format of an academic workshop. The attendees will belong to two categories: technology “providers” and technology “users”.
Technology providers are academic or industrial researchers that belong to the evolutionary computation community, who have gained expertise in the application of evolutionary methods to real-world problems.
Technology users are engineers, technical staff in general, managers, and decision makers from industry, finance, and all areas of business, who are interested in learning more about what evolutionary computation might do to help them solve their problems.
a short presentation of their expertise and/or a demo of their techniques aimed at an industrial audience.
The event will run on one half day, namely Thursday morning, 12 April, and will comprise a mix of short presentations by both technology providers and users, demos, and face to face meetings.

Registration

Participation in evotransfer is included in the general evo* registration. Technology users not interested in attending the other evo* conferences and workshops will have an option to register for the evotransfer event only.
More details about the fees will be published shortly.

Chair

Prof. Andrea G. B. Tettamanzi
Università degli Studi di Milano
andrea.tettamanzi(at)unimi.it

Evotransfer will bring an audience of potential industrial partners from all over Europe in front of evo* researchers that have valuable techniques and knowledge to contribute to the solution of real-world problems arising in all areas of business and industry.

Participating researchers will have a chance to showcase their expertise in solving real-world problems with evolutionary algorithms, and interested industrial participants will have the possibility of illustrating problems arising in their business, for which a solution is wanted.

Format

The format of the event will be completely different from the typical format of an academic workshop. The attendees will belong to two categories: technology “providers” and technology “users”.
Technology providers are academic or industrial researchers that belong to the evolutionary computation community, who have gained expertise in the application of evolutionary methods to real-world problems.
Technology users are engineers, technical staff in general, managers, and decision makers from industry, finance, and all areas of business, who are interested in learning more about what evolutionary computation might do to help them solve their problems.
a short presentation of their expertise and/or a demo of their techniques aimed at an industrial audience.
The event will run on one half day, namely Thursday morning, 12 April, and will comprise a mix of short presentations by both technology providers and users, demos, and face to face meetings.

Registration

Participation in evotransfer is included in the general evo* registration. Technology users not interested in attending the other evo* conferences and workshops will have an option to register for the evotransfer event only.
More details about the fees will be published shortly.

Chair

Prof. Andrea G. B. Tettamanzi
Università degli Studi di Milano
andrea.tettamanzi(at)unimi.it

Accommodation information can be found here.

Information on how to obtain a letter of invitation and on how to apply for  travel bursaries are also available.

Due to a severe power failure the evostar submission sites have been down during the weekend. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Additionally, authors of selected evomusart papers will be invited to submit expanded versions of their work for one of the two planned special issues on Evolutionary Art and Music of the Springer journal Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (GPEM) and of the International Journal of Arts and Technology (IJART).

For this special joint session, we encourage submission of papers that cover, among other possible ones, the following topics:

• applications of genetic programming to problems in computational biology;
• new biology-inspired models for evolving computer programs.

Papers on these subjects can be submitted either to evobio or to eurogp, and the authors are asked to indicate their intention to submit the article to the joint session by emailing to any of the Program Chairs. A committee formed by the program chairs of the two events will select papers for this special session.

Authors of selected papers that will be presented in this session will be invited to submit extended versions of their work to a planned special issue of the Springer journal Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines.

evobio program chairs

Mario Giacobini
University of Torino, Italy
mario.giacobini(at)unito.it

Leonardo Vanneschi
ISEGI, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
DISCo, Università di Milano-Bicocca, Italyl
vanneschi(at)isegi.unl.pt

William S. Bush
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA
william.s.bush(at)vanderbilt.edu

eurogp program chairs

Sara Silva
INESC-ID Lisboa, Portugal
sara(at)kdbio.inesc-id.pt

Alberto Moraglio
University of Birmingham, UK
a.moraglio(at)cs.bham.ac.uk