TPNC 2016: 1st call for papers*To be removed from our mailing list, please respond to this message with UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line*   *************************************************************************** 5th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF NATURAL COMPUTING   TPNC 2016   Sendai, Japan   December 12-14, 2016   Organized by:   Cyberscience Center Tohoku University   Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC) Rovira i Virgili University   http://grammars.grlmc.com/TPNC2016/ ***************************************************************************   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:   http://www.cc.tohoku.ac.jp/HTML/   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.   STRUCTURE:   TPNC 2016 will consist of:   - invited talks - invited tutorials - peer-reviewed contributions - posters   INVITED SPEAKERS:   tba   PROGRAMME 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)   ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:   Masayuki Fukumitsu (Ebetsu) Carlos Martín-Vide (Tarragona, co-chair) Takaaki Mizuki (Sendai, co-chair) Hideaki Sone (Sendai) Miguel A. Vega-Rodríguez (Cáceres) Florentina Lilica Voicu (Tarragona)   SUBMISSIONS:   Authors are invited to submit non-anonymized papers in English presenting original and unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 single-spaced pages (including eventual appendices, references, proofs, etc.) and should be prepared according to the standard format for Springer Verlag's LNCS series (see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0).   Submissions have to be uploaded to:   https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tpnc2016   PUBLICATIONS:   A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS series will be available by the time of the conference.   A special issue of a major journal 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.   REGISTRATION:   The registration form can be found at:   http://grammars.grlmc.com/TPNC2016/Registration.php   DEADLINES:   Paper submission: July 26, 2016 (23:59h, CET) Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: September 2, 2016 Final version of the paper for the LNCS proceedings: September 9, 2016 Early registration: September 9, 2016 Late registration: November 28, 2016 Submission to the post-conference journal special issue: March 14, 2017   QUESTIONS AND FURTHER INFORMATION:   florentinalilica.voicu (at) urv.cat   POSTAL ADDRESS:   TPNC 2016 Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics (GRLMC) Rovira i Virgili University Av. Catalunya, 35 43002 Tarragona, Spain   Phone: +34 977 559 543 Fax: +34 977 558 386   ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:   Tohoku University Universitat Rovira i Virgili