ANTS 2020
Twelfth International Conference on Swarm Intelligence
October 26-28, 2020. Barcelona
Sadly, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the social, economic, and academic life in large parts of the world. Moreover, it seems very hard to forecast the near (even medium) term future. Therefore, we have decided to hold ANTS 2020 as an online conference. The way in which accepted papers are presented will be published in due time on this website.
The proceedings are published in the Springer LNCS Series (volume 12421): access to the proceedings.
Call for papers in PDF format
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Residencia d'Investigadors Carrer de l'Hospital, 64 08001 Barcelona Catalonia, Spain |
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ANTS 2020 (Attn: Dr. Christian Blum) Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC) Campus of the UAB 08193 Bellaterra Catalonia, Spain |
Tel +34-93-5809570 Fax +34-93-5809661 email: ants.conf@gmail.com |
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ANTS 2020 (Attn: Dr. Maria J. Blesa) Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) Omega Building, Office 213 Campus Nord, Carrer de Jordi Girona 1-3 08034 Barcelona Catalonia, Spain |
| As the conference location is in the heart of Barcelona, you will find many options for accommodation in all price ranges. |
| It is even possible to reserve accommodation at the conference location. The Residencia d'Investigadors offers rooms at affordable prices: check it out! |
The conference is located in the Raval neighbourhood, which offers a very large selection of restaurants and street food. For sure you will find a convenient place to satisfy your appetite! Look at the map and choose your favourite place. We will distribute a list of recommended places at the conference!
| 9:30-9:40 | Conference Opening | ||||||||
| 9:40-11:15 | Session: Robotics 1 ( Chair: Vito Trianni)
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| 11:15-11:30 | Time to grab a quick coffee, beer, or whatever suits you | ||||||||
| 11:30-12:30 | Session: Other SI Topics 1 (Chair: Andreagiovanni Reina)
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| 12:30-15:00 | Time for breakfast, dinner, or lunch, depending where you are. | ||||||||
| 15:00-16:00 | Invited plenary talk Collective Ecophysiology and Physics of Social Insects Orit Peleg, University of Colorado, Boulder, United States (Chair: Heiko Hamann) Watch the video of the talk. (it works with Chrome and with Firefox.) |
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| 16:00-16:10 | Time to grab a quick coffee, beer, or whatever suits you | ||||||||
| 16:10-17:25 | Session: Other SI Topics 2 (Chair: Heiko Hamann)
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| 9:30-10:30 | Invited plenary talk Complex Networks in Search and Optimisation Gabriela Ochoa, University of Stirling, Scotland (Chair: Christian Blum) Watch the video of the talk. (it works with Chrome and with Firefox.) |
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| 10:30-10:40 | Time to grab a quick coffee, beer, or whatever suits you | ||||||||
| 10:40-12:10 | Session: Optimization 1 (Chair: Thomas Stützle)
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| 12:10-15:00 | Time for breakfast, dinner, or lunch, depending where you are. | ||||||||
| 15:00-16:20 | Session: Robotics 2 (Chair: Volker Strobel)
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| 16:20-16:30 | Time to grab a quick coffee, beer, or whatever suits you | ||||||||
| 16:30-18:00 | Session: Optimization 2 (Chair: Christian Blum)
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| 9:30-11:10 | Session: Robotics 3 (Chair: Mary Katherine Heinrich)
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| 11:10-11:20 | Time to grab a quick coffee, beer, or whatever suits you | ||||||||
| 11:20-12:15 | Session: Robotics 4 (Chair: Yara Khaluf)
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| 12:30-15:00 | Time for breakfast, dinner, or lunch, depending where you are. | ||||||||
| 15:00-16:00 | Invited plenary talk The Collective Intelligence of Army Ants, and the Robots They Inspire Radhika Nagpal, Harvard University, Massachusetts, United States (Chair: Marco Dorigo) Watch the video of the talk. (it works with Chrome and with Firefox.) |
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| 16:00-16:10 | Time to grab a quick coffee, beer, or whatever suits you | ||||||||
| 16:10-17:40 | Session: Robotics 5 (Chair: Michael Allwright)
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| 17:40-18:00 | Paper award ceremony and conclusion |
Authors of accepted paper will be required to pay a registration fee for each accepted paper that will appear in the conference proceedings. The ANTS2020 registration fee is 160 Euros.
The conference fee includes:
Please make your registration here. You will be able to pay by credit card or by bank transfer.
Abstract: In nature, groups of thousands of individuals cooperate to create complex structure purely through local interactions -- from cells that form complex organisms, to social insects like termites that build meter-high mounds and army ants that self-assemble entire nests, to the complex and mesmerizing motion of fish schools and bird flocks. What makes these systems so fascinating to scientists and engineers alike, is that even though each individual has limited ability, as a collective they achieve tremendous complexity.
What would it take to create our own artificial collectives of the scale and complexity that nature achieves? My lab investigates this question by using inspiration from biological collectives to create robotic systems, e.g. the Kilobot thousand robot swarm inspired by cells, and the Termes robots inspired by mound-building termites. In this talk, I will discuss a recent project in my group - Eciton robotica - to create a self-assembling swarm of soft climbing robots inspired by the living architectures of army ants. Our work spans soft robotics, new theoretical models of self-organized self-assembly, and new field experiments in biology. Most critically, our work derives from the collective intelligence of engineers and scientists working together.
Biography: Radhika Nagpal is the Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University and a member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. At Harvard, she leads the Self-organizing Systems Research Group (SSR) and her research interests span computer science, robotics, and biology. Recent work includes the Termes robots for collective construction and the Kilobot thousand-robot swarm (Science 2014). Her awards include the Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship (2005), NSF Career Award (2007), Borg Early Career Award (2010), Radcliffe Fellowship (2012), the McDonald Mentoring Award (2015), and an invited TED speaker (2017). Nagpal was named by the journal Nature as one of the top ten influential scientists and engineers of the year (Nature 10 award, Dec 2014). Nagpal is also the co-founder of Root Robotics, an educational robotics company aimed at democratizing AI and robotics through early education; her lab's Kilobots have also been commercialized with over 8000 robots sold worldwide.
Abstract: Collective behavior of organisms creates environmental micro-niches that buffer them from environmental fluctuations e.g., temperature, humidity, mechanical perturbations, etc., thus coupling organismal physiology, environmental physics, and population ecology. This talk will focus on a combination of biological experiments, theory, and computation to understand how a collective of bees can integrate physical and behavioral cues to attain a non-equilibrium steady state that allows them to resist and respond to environmental fluctuations of forces and flows. We analyze how bee clusters change their shape and connectivity and gain stability by spread-eagling themselves in response to mechanical perturbations. Similarly, we study how bees in a colony respond to environmental thermal perturbations by deploying a fanning strategy at the entrance that they use to create a forced ventilation stream that allows the bees to collectively maintain a constant hive temperature. When combined with quantitative analysis and computations in both systems, we integrate the sensing of the environmental cues (acceleration, temperature, flow) and convert them to behavioral outputs that allow the swarms to achieve a dynamic homeostasis.
Biography: Orit Peleg is a broadly trained physicist with a passion for living systems. Her research is aimed at understanding how organisms buffer themselves against large environmental fluctuations and accommodate adaptation over a wide range of length and time scales. This includes protein assemblies that remain intact under varying external mechanical and chemical stimuli, beetles that navigate using volatile celestial cues, and honeybee clusters that change their morphology to both withstand mechanical stresses, and to regulate their bulk temperature. Peleg is an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. She draws from a multidisciplinary background; She holds a B.S. in physics and computer science and an M.S. in physics from Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She then moved to Switzerland to get her Ph.D. in materials science at ETH Zurich, and then to Boston for a Postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University in first chemistry, and then applied mathematics.
Abstract: This talk will present our recent findings and visual (static, animated, 2D, and 3D) maps characterising computational search spaces. Many natural and technological systems are composed of a large number of highly interconnected units; examples are neural networks, biological systems, social interacting species, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. A key approach to capture the global properties of such systems is to model them as graphs whose nodes represent the units, and whose links stand for the interactions between them. This simple, yet powerful concept has been used to study a variety of complex systems where the goal is to analyse the pattern of connections between components in order to understand the behaviour of the system.
This talk overviews recent results on local optima networks (LONs), a network-based model of fitness landscapes where nodes are local optima and edges are possible search transitions among these optima. We will also introduce search trajectory networks (STNs) as a tool to analyse and visualise the behaviour of metaheuristics. STNs model the search trajectories of algorithms. Unlike LONs, nodes are not restricted to local optima but instead represent given states of the search process. Edges represent search progression between consecutive states. This extends the power and applicability of network-based models. Both LONs and STNs allow us to visualise realistic search spaces in ways not previously possible and bring a whole new set of quantitative network metrics for characterising and understanding computational search.
Biography: Gabriela Ochoa is a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Her research lies in the foundations and applications of evolutionary algorithms and metaheuristics, with emphasis on autonomous search, fitness landscape analysis and visualisation, combinatorial optimisation and applications to healthcare. She holds a PhD from the University of Sussex, UK, and has held academic and research positions at the University Simon Bolivar, Venezuela, and the University of Nottingham, UK. Her recent work on network-based models of fitness landscapes has enhanced their descriptive and visualisation capabilities, producing a number of publications including 4 best-paper awards and 3 other nominations at leading venues. She has been active in organisation and editorial roles within leading Evolutionary Computation venues such as the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN), and the Evolutionary Computation Journal (ECJ).
Continuing with a tradition started at ANTS 2002, the "Best Paper Award" at ANTS 2020 consists of a sculpture of an ant specially made for the ANTS conference series by the Italian sculptor Matteo Pugliese.
The best paper award has been graciously sponsored by Technology Innovation Institute and Springer LNCS.
| Best Paper Award Ceremony | Nominees and the Winner (in bold) | |
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Constrained Scheduling of Step-Controlled Buffering Energy Resources with Ant Colony Optimization Jörg Bremer and Sebastian Lehnhoff |
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A New Approach for Making Use of Negative Learning in Ant Colony Optimization Teddy Nurcahyadi and Christian Blum |
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Grey Wolf, Firefly and Bat Algorithms: Three Widespread Algorithms that Do not Contain any Novelty Christian Leonardo Camacho Villalón, Thomas Stützle and Marco Dorigo |
Submission link: Submit a paper!
Deadline: May 1, 2020
Submissions may be a maximum of 11 pages, excluding references, when typeset in the LNCS Springer LaTeX template. Submissions should be a minimum of 7 full pages.
This strict page limit includes figures, tables, and all supplementary sections (e.g., Acknowledgements). The only exclusion from the page limit is the reference list, which should be of any length that properly positions the paper with respect to the state of the art.
Papers should be prepared in English, in the LNCS Springer LaTeX style, using the default font and font size. Authors should consult Springer’s authors’ guidelines and use their proceedings template for LaTeX, for the preparation of their papers. Please download the LNCS Springer LaTeX template package (zip, 294 Kb) and authors' guidelines (pdf, 288 Kb) directly from the Springer website. Please also download and consult the ANTS 2020 sample LaTeX document (zip, 203 Kb), which shows the correct options to use within the Springer template.
Submissions that do not respect these guidelines will not be considered.
Note: Authors may find it convenient that Springer’s proceedings LaTeX templates are available in Overleaf
The initial submission must be in PDF format.
Please note that in the camera-ready phase, authors of accepted papers will need to submit both a compiled PDF and all source files (including LaTeX files and figures).
The camera-ready phase will have more detailed formatting requirements than the initial submission phase. Authors are invited to consult these camera-ready instructions preemptively.
Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed on the basis of technical quality, relevance, significance, and clarity. If a submission is not accepted as a full length paper, it may still be accepted either as a short paper or as an extended abstract. In such cases, authors will be asked to reduce the length of the submission accordingly. Authors of all accepted papers will be asked to execute revisions, based on the reviewers’ comments.
Accepted papers are to be revised and submitted as a camera-ready version. Reviewers’ comments should be taken into account and should guide appropriate revisions. The camera-ready submission must include the compiled PDF and all source files needed for compilation—including the LaTex file, reference file, and figures.
By submitting a camera-ready paper, the author(s) agree that at least one author will attend the conference and give a presentation of the paper. At least one author must be registered by the deadline for camera-ready submissions.
Camera-ready submissions that do not comply with all given requirements might have to be excluded from the conference proceedings.
After formatting the paper as explained below, please follow the subsequent instructions for submitting a zip/tar file that contains your camera-ready paper sources:
Deadline for submission: July 24, 2020
Papers must be prepared in the LNCS Springer LaTeX style, using the default font and font size. Authors should consult Springer’s authors’ guidelines and use their proceedings template for LaTeX, for the preparation of their papers. Please download the LNCS Springer LaTeX template package (zip, 294 Kb) and authors' guidelines (pdf, 288 Kb) directly from the Springer website. The LaTeX class and references style (llncs.cls and splncs04.bst) included in this package should not be modified. Please also download and consult the ANTS 2020 sample LaTeX document (zip, 203 Kb), which shows the correct options to use within the Springer template.
Your submission should be uploaded as a compressed archive (zip, tgz), containing the final camera-ready versions of the following:
Figures should be in their original vector format (pdf, eps), if applicable. Otherwise, figures provided in raster format (png, jpeg, tiff, bmp) must be high-resolution (if including linework, at least 800 dpi at the final size, otherwise, at least 300 dpi at the final size).
Although figures in the digital proceedings will be in full color, the print proceedings of ANTS 2020 will be printed in grayscale. Authors should therefore ensure that their figures will be appropriately legible when printed in grayscale.
Springer encourages authors to include their ORCIDs in their papers. In addition, the corresponding author of each paper, acting on behalf of all of the authors of that paper, must complete and sign a Consent-to-Publish form. The corresponding author signing the copyright form should match the corresponding author marked on the paper. Once the files have been sent to Springer, changes relating to the authorship of the papers cannot be made.
Information regarding the copyright form. The proceedings title will be Swarm Intelligence, 12th International Conference, ANTS 2020. The editors of the proceedings will be Marco Dorigo, Maria J. Blesa, Christian Blum, Heiko Hamann, Mary Katherine Heinrich, Volker Strobel.
Full-length Papers are strictly limited to 11 pages + references, and Short Papers are strictly limited to 7 pages + references.
These page limits include figures, tables, and all supplementary sections (e.g., Acknowledgements). The only exclusion from these page limits is the reference list, which should have an appropriate length with respect to the state of the art.
Extended Abstracts are strictly limited to 2 pages (including references).
All page limits refer to papers prepared in the LNCS Springer LaTeX template, according to the instructions provided here. Do not modify the template defaults, such as those for margins, line spacing, or font size.
Submissions must be prepared in LaTeX, and the source files (tex, bib, bbl) must be provided. Authors should use the LaTeX class and references style files (llncs.cls and splncs04.bst) as provided in the LNCS Springer LaTeX template package. These files should not be modified. Also, do not add formatting modifications to the main document (tex) to override the template defaults. Do not use, for instance, any line spacing modifications (e.g., \vspace{} or \\*[0pt]), or font size modifications (e.g., \fontsize{}). Please do not add any special fonts. Please do not add packages or custom commands that change the formatting (e.g., do not use the package subcaption, as it overrides the default caption formatting in the template).
During the final preparation of the proceedings, any formatting modifications in the main document (tex) will be removed if they do not match the template, potentially causing a change in paper length. Springer will also recompile all papers using their original llncs class file (llncs.cls). If authors make any modifications to the llncs file, their paper will not compile correctly in the final step, and cannot be included in the proceedings.
References must be formatted using the provided references style file (splncs04.bst). In this references style, in-text citations will appear as numbers, and the numbered reference list will be ordered alphabetically.
For further information, please refer to the class documentation included in the LNCS Springer LaTex package, and to the LNCS Springer authors’ guidelines.
It is mandatory that submissions to ANTS 2020 follow certain options within the LNCS Springer template. The ANTS 2020 sample LaTeX document (zip, 203 Kb) shows the correct template options to use. These mandatory template options are as follows.
Running header:
\documentclass[runningheads]{llncs}.
\authorrunning{}, give the initial of the first name(s) and the full surname. Always give the first author's name. If there are precisely two authors, then give both the first and second authors' names. If there are more than two authors, use ‘et al.’ after the name of the first author.
\titlerunning{Abbreviated paper title}.
Title and headings:
\newline command with the title.
Author names and affiliations:
\author{} field, provide the full first name (not only the initial).
\orcidID{} within the LaTex field \author{}.
\institute{} and \email{} fields: department, faculty, university, company (if applicable), city, country, and email address. Do not include the street address or ZIP code (it is not a postal address). The email address of the corresponding author is mandatory to include in the \institute{} and \email{} fields.
\institute{} entries, include an \index{} entry for each author, giving the full surname, followed by the full first name(s).
For further details, please refer to the documentation of the llncs class.
Acknowledgements:
Keywords:
For contributions accepted as Extended Abstracts:
Conference proceedings will be published by Springer in the LNCS series (volume 12421).
The journal Swarm Intelligence will publish a special issue dedicated to ANTS 2020, containing extended versions of the best papers presented at the conference.