Introduction

One is confronted with the necessity to adapt sensoric properties and/or configuration to a situation or task at hand, discovery of new sensoric modalities,the use of newly added actuators in novel ways, the necessity of reconfiguring computational hardware after being damaged, and much more. What all these requirements have in common is that, in general, there cannot be a full a priori appreciation of the possible scenarios that can occur during the lifetime of the involved hardware and software.

On the other hand, biological systems are capable to tackle such problems on a regular basis. E.g. the recovery of functionality in experiments where sensoric or neural tissues are transplanted to other than the original locations show that biological systems have a powerful potential to reconfigure their "hardware" and "software" to suit the relevant situation. Biologically inspired approaches, e.g. evolutionary and neural methods, as well as self-organization to tackle these challenges, have been increasingly found to be fruitful. Evolutionary sensorics, self-organizing controllers, neural strategies have all provided new insights, methodologies, towards the achievement of self- and externally modified sensomotoric loops.

Solving these problems has an enormous potential: it would allow the construction of robust, cheap autonomous vehicles, sensor/actuator networks consisting of a large number of autonomous sensor/actuator units ('agents') that interact with each other to obtain the best results. It would open the way to apply novel sensing/actuation materials for the construction of agents because the self-organized adaptation mechanisms would be able to deal with the novelty.

Call for Contributions

Topics

• evolution or self-organization of physical sensors and actuators (artificial, bio-inspired, and biological)
• abstract models for the evolution, self-organization and adaptation of sensors, actuators and processing, and for detection of emergent behaviour
• evolution of controllers (including, but not limited to neural or cellular architectures)
• self-monitoring and self-repair of damaged sensoric, computational and communication architectures
• self-organization in sensomotoric loops
• self-organized adaptive communication (e.g. mechanisms for the emergence of communication protocols)
• evolution or self-organized modularity and hierarchies
• identification of relevant information and features in sensoric input and of relevant behaviours and activities in actuatoric output

Important Dates

Submission

Please note that papers should be no longer than 8 pages. Papers longer than this will be subject to an additional page charge. For further details, please refer to the KES Submission page.

For the draft paper, Springer requires a pdf version of your paper, formatted according to above instructions. To submit to the "Evolutionary and Self-Organizing Sensors, Actuators and Processing Hardware" (ESOSAPH) session, make sure you submit the paper at the invited session page, invited session number 47. If you have any questions, please contact the session chairs.

Program Committee (preliminary)