more snow coming

Biological diversity in a changing world

 from EvolDir:

Dear Members

The following free two-day conference to be held at the Royal Society
in April may be of interest to you.

Biological diversity in a changing world
Monday 19 and Tuesday 20 April 2010

Organised by Professor Anne Magurran and Dr Maria Dornelas

We live in a world in which biological diversity is under threat as never
before. Drawing insights from organisms ranging from microbes to mammals
this meeting will show why a deeper understanding of temporal turnover
in ecological communities in essential in coping with the changes that
the natural world will experience over the next 50 years.

http://www.royalsociety.org/biological-diversity

Registration
This discussion meeting is intended for researchers in relevant
fields and is free to attend, but pre-registration online at
royalsociety.org/biological-diversity is essential.

Venue
The Royal Society
6-9 Carlton House Terrace
London SW1Y 5AG

Claire.rawlinson@royalsociety.org

Sea Ice in the St. Lawrence River, via MODIS

Weather & OR

In a lit. review involving weather/climate and applied research, this is one of the earliest references that I came across, from the Journal of the Operations Research Society of America, published in 1953. If anyone has an electronic copy, I’d be grateful to receive it.

Evolutionary Robotics Conference

2010 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC)
Special Session on Evolutionary Robotics
----------------------------------------------------
Barcelona, Spain. July 18-23, 2010


*CALL FOR PAPERS*


*Organisers:*

Patricia A. Vargas (Heriot-Watt University - Edinburgh)
Steffen Wischmann (EPFL - Lausanne)
Dario Floreano (EPFL - Lausanne)
Phil Husbands (University of Sussex - Brighton)

Website: http://lis.epfl.ch/specialsessions/CEC10/


*Scope:*

Evolutionary Robotics (ER) aims to apply evolutionary computation
techniques, inspired by darwinian selection, to automatically design the
control and/or hardware of both real and simulated autonomous robots.
Having an intrinsic interdisciplinary character, ER is being employed
towards the development of many fields of research, among which we can
highlight neuroscience, cognitive science, evolutionary biology and
robotics. Hence the objective of this special session is to assemble a
set of high-quality original contributions that reflect and advance the
state-of-the-art in the area of Evolutionary Robotics, with an emphasis
on the cross-fertilization between ER and the aforementioned research
areas, ranging from theoretical analysis to real-life applications.

Topics of interest include (but are not restricted to):

- Evolution of robots which display minimal cognitive behaviour,
learning, memory, spatial cognition, adaptation or homeostasis.
- Evolution of neural controllers for robots, aimed at giving an insight
to neuroscientists or advancing control structures.
- Evolution of communication, cooperation and competition, using robots
as a research platform.
- Co-evolution and the evolution of collective behaviour.
- Evolution of morphology in close interaction with the environment,
giving rise to self-reconfigurable, self-designing, self-healing and
self-reproducing robots.
- Evolution of robot systems aimed at real-world applications as in
aerial robotics, space exploration, industry, search and rescue, robot
companions, entertainment and games.
- Evolution of controllers on board real robots or the real­time
evolution of robot hardware.
- Novel or improved algorithms for the evolution or robot systems.
- The use of evolution for the artistic exploration of robot design.

*Important Dates:*

Paper Submission: January 31, 2010
Notification of Acceptance: March 15, 2010
Camera-Ready Submission: May 2, 2010


*Paper Submission:*

Submissions should follow the guidance given on the IEEE CEC 2010
conference website: http://www.wcci2010.org. When submitting, please
select as the main research topic the Special Session on "Evolutionary
Robotics" (S089).
All submissions will be peer-reviewed with the same criteria used for
other contributed papers. All accepted papers will be included and
published in the conference proceedings.


*Post Conference Publication:*

Depending on the quality of the submissions, authors will be asked to
contribute to a journal special issue on the topic of "Evolutionary
Robotics".

Interesting Chapman Conference in Feb2010.

AGU Chapman Conference on Complexity and Extreme Events in Geosciences

National Geophysical Research Institute

Hyderabad, India
15–19 February 2010

Conference Objectives

Extreme events in Earth and space sciences exhibit many features of complex systems in which many interdependent components lead to organized as well as irregular features. In complex systems the knowledge of the parts does not necessarily lead to the predictable behavior of the entire system. The coupling among the components is essentially nonlinear and this leads to a rich variety of dynamical behavior, geometrical patterns and statistical distributions.
Recent advances in nonlinear dynamical process and complexity have provided new approaches to a wide variety of problems, including the nature of extreme events and natural hazards. The main connection of extreme events to nonlinear dynamics arises from the recognition that they are not isolable phenomena but must be understood in terms of interactions among different components, within and without the specific system. Complexity science thus provides a natural framework for the understanding of sudden transitions and extreme events, based on dynamical systems theory and statistical approaches.
Nonlinear dynamics and complexity is a inter-disciplinary field of research covering all areas of geosciences, e. g., Earth, atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences. In each of these areas extreme events, most of them identified with natural hazards, are of key interest. The techniques and approaches used in many studies include nonlinear modeling and prediction, state space reconstruction, statistical self-similarity and its dynamical origins, stochastic cascade models, fractals and multifractals, network theory, self-organized criticality, etc. A common theme in these systems is long-range correlations and their role in the emergence of extreme events. Recently there has been important advances in the studies of extreme events from the viewpoint of nonlinear dynamics and complexity. An important component of extreme events research is large scale numerical simulations based on first principles as well as other approaches. The analyses of simulation and observational data are providing results leading to a new perspective on extreme events.

Conveners

A. Surjalal Sharma, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, ssh@astro.umd.edu
Vijay P. Dimri, National Geophysical Research Institute, Hyderabad, India, chapmanngri@gmail.com
Armin Bunde, University of Giessen, Giessen, Germany, Armin.Bunde@theo.physik.uni-giessen.de

Program Committee

Daniel Baker, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
Bhupen Goswami, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, India
Michael Ghil, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
J.R. Kayal, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India
Vipin Srivastava, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India
Ian Main, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Bruce Malamud, Kings College, London, UK
Hernan Makse, City College, New York, USA
Peter Mueller, University of Hawaii, Hawaii, USA
Yosihiko Ogata, The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Tokyo, Japan
John Rundle, University of California, Davis, USA
Daniel Schertzer, École Nationale des Ponts et Chausses, France
Abhijit Sen, Institute for Plasma Research, Gandhinagar, India
Lev Zelenyi, Institute for Space Research, Moscow, Russia

Further Information

If you would like to receive future updates about this conference, e-mail chapman-extremeevents@agu.org, or call the AGU Meetings Department at 1-202-777-7330. For information about the scientific program, please contact the conveners by e-mail.

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