School hosts successful international workshop

A report has been published highlighting the success of a summer workshop hosted by the University of Kent. The sixth International Workshop on Nature Inspired Cooperative Strategies for Optimisation (NICSO 2013) was held on the Canterbury Campus from 2-4 September 2013 and attracted participants from around the world and paper submissions from 22 different countries.

The NICSO 2013 workshop was the latest in a series of symposia dedicated to all aspects of natural and unconventional computing for optimisation, learning and  adaptation. Fernando Otero from the School of Computing organised the event. He said; 'the size of the workshop meant that it was small enough for all of the delegates to interact and have the opportunity for discussions. We could be together in one room having coffee. That made it easier to establish new collaborations and get to know people who are working in the same areas on a personal level.'

Authors of the best papers presented in the workshop will be invited to submit an extended version of their work to a special issue of the 'Journal of Memetic Computing' under the theme ‘Nature Inspired Cooperative Strategies for Optimization’.

This was the first NICSO workshop to offer PhD scholarships to cover the student registration fee. There were 20 scholarships in total, from where 15 of these were sponsored by TRUCE (Training and Research in Unconventional Computation in Europe) and 5 scholarships were sponsored by the School of Computing.

For more information about the workshop go to the full report.