Call for Papers

2011 ACM SYMPOSIUM ON APPLIED COMPUTING

Special Track on Self-organizing Complex Systems

March 21-25, 2011
Tunghai University, TaiChung, Taiwan

For the past twenty-five years, the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing has been a primary gathering forum for applied computer scientists, computer engineers, software engineers, and application developers from around the world.

SELF-ORGANIZATION COMPLEX SYSTEMS TRACK

Increasingly inexpensive processors and sensors have made computing systems pervasive to every aspect of our lives. These systems can range from active sensor networks monitoring a facility to passive tags storing location-based information. As these systems become more common, and increase in size and complexity, challenges arise for their programming and control; they become true complex systems. A key challenge is to provide powerful programming models to facilitate the development of applications in dynamic and heterogeneous environments. The main conceptual difficulty is that we typically have direct control only over the local activities of individual components, while the application task is often expressed at the global scale. Bridging the gap between local and global activities is not easy, but it is possible: distributed algorithms have been designed for many tasks ranging from sensor networks and MANET (mobile ad-hoc networks) to organization of information in complex networks. However, most of these algorithms are closely tied to the application task and domain, making them difficult to generalize to solve other tasks.

One promising framework is that of self-organization, where control is widely distributed, and the many separate components act and interact in such a way as to produce a desired global result. Although this approach is potentially very powerful, with numerous examples of biological and social systems that robustly work in this way, there are many aspects of designing such systems that are not yet well understood.

The aim of this track is to foster research and discussion on the above two sets of problems. In particular, the goal is to bring together researchers and practitioners working on both the theory and the deployment of self-organizing and complex systems, with the goal of cross-pollination between different fields and approaches. Participants will share analytical tools and real-world experiences, make contacts leading to new applications, and advance the understanding of self-organization and its use in pervasive systems.

Topics to be covered in this track include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Theory of self-organizing systems: understanding how global results emerge from local actions, etc.
• Complex Systems: Complex Networks, Swarm Systems, Bio-Inspired Systems.
• Control of self-organizing systems: designing low-level behaviors to achieve desired high-level results, etc.
• Leveraging properties of self-organizing systems: robustness, scalability, etc.
• Macro-programming
• Nature Inspired Computing
• Middleware services and agent technologies for pervasive computing
• Intelligent environments, smart devices and smart spaces
• Wireless sensor networks and RFID technologies
• Mobile/wireless computing systems and services
• Context-aware computing

Format and Submission

Important Dates