ANTS 2016

Call for Papers

Conference Scope

Swarm intelligence is the discipline that deals with the study of self-organizing processes both in nature and in artificial systems. Researchers in ethology and animal behavior have proposed a number of models to explain interesting aspects of social insect behavior such as self-organization and shape-formation. Recently, algorithms and methods inspired by these models have been proposed to solve difficult problems in many domains. ANTS 2016 will give researchers in swarm intelligence the opportunity to meet, to present their latest research, and to discuss current developments and applications.

Relevant Research Areas

ANTS 2016 solicits contributions dealing with any aspect of swarm intelligence. Typical, but not exclusive, topics of interest are:
  • Behavioral models of social insects or other animal societies that can stimulate new algorithmic approaches.
  • Empirical and theoretical research in swarm intelligence.
  • Application of swarm intelligence methods, such as ant colony optimization or particle swarm optimization, to real-world problems.
  • Theoretical and experimental research in swarm robotics systems.

Important Dates

  • New submission deadline: March 14, 2016, 5:00 PM Brussels time. No further extensions will be granted.
  • Submission deadline: March 2, 2016
  • Notification of acceptance: April 26, 2016
  • Camera ready copy: May 15, 2016
  • Conference: September 7-9, 2016
Springer LNCS Volume 9882
Call for papers in PDF format

Location

Registration Fee

The ANTS2016 registration fee is 420 EUR.

The conference fee includes:

  • Admission to all technical sessions
  • One copy of the conference proceedings.

Coffee breaks and a conference dinner will be offered by the organizing committee.

Registration Procedure

Address

Auditorium R42.4.502
Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management
Campus du Solbosch
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Av. F.D. Roosevelt 42
1050 Brussels, Belgium.

Contacts

ANTS 2016
IRIDIA-CoDE, CP 194/6
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Av. F. D. Roosevelt 50
1050 Bruxelles, Belgium
Tel +32-2-6502729
Fax +32-2-6502715
email: ants@iridia.ulb.ac.be

Accommodation

For accommodation we suggest to book directly at a hotel of your choice or through websites such as booking.com. Unfortunately, there are no hotels that are very close to the university, the closest being at ca. 20 minutes walking distance.

To give an idea of possible hotel locations from which the conference site can easily be reached by the tram 94 line (exit at stop Jeanne), check the map indicating a few hotels in yellow. An alternative is to take a hotel in the center of Brussels and to reach the conference site, for example, by the bus line 71 (exit at stop Jeanne).

This is a list of possible restaurants for lunch breaks.

Avenue de L'université

Fresh corner (fresh food) map
Exki (healthy / vegetarian) map

Corner of Avenue de L'Université and Chaussée de Boondael

Brasserie La Bastoche (belgian-french) map
La Bécasse (belgian-french) map
Le Pain Quotidien (café) map

Chaussée de Boondael

Mamma Roma (pizza) map
Quick (burgers) map
Seven days (kebab) map
Poussières d'Etoiles (thai) map
Tout près (sandwiches/salad/pizza) map
Sogno d'Italia map

Conference Information

Wednesday Sep 7, 2016

8:30-16:00 REGISTRATION
9:00-9:30 Welcome
9:30-10:30 Invited plenary talk
Metaphor-based metaheuristics: who's to blame?
Kenneth Sörensen (University of Antwerp)
10:30-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-12:00 Session 1: Oral presentations
11:00-11:30 Ant Colony Optimisation Based Classification using Two Dimensional Polygons
Morten Goodwin and Anis Yazidi
11:30-12:00 Monotonicity in Ant Colony Classification Algorithms
James Brookhouse and Fernando Otero
12:00-14:00 Free time for lunch
14:00-15:30 Session 2: Oral presentations
14:00-14:30 Communication Diversity in Particle Swarm Optimizers
Marcos Oliveira, Diego Pinheiro, Bruno Andrade, Carmelo Bastos-Filho and Ronaldo Menezes
14:30-15:00 A Study of Archiving Strategies in Multi-Objective PSO for Molecular Docking
José García-Nieto, Esteban López-Camacho, María Jesús García Godoy, Antonio J. Nebro, Juan J. Durillo and Jose F. Aldana-Montes
15:00-15:30 Parameter Selection in Particle Swarm Optimisation from Stochastic Stability Analysis
Adam Erskine, J. Michael Herrmann and Thomas Joyce
15:30-15:45 Session 3: Preview highlights
Avoidance Strategies for Particle Swarm Optimisation in Multi-Objective Power Generation Scheduling
Karl Mason, Jim Duggan and Enda Howley
Stealing items more efficiently with ants
Markus Wagner
Route Assignment for Autonomous Vehicles
Nick Moran and Jordan Pollack
A Swarm Intelligence Approach in Undersampling Majority Class
Haya Alhakbani and Mohammad Majid Al-Rifaie
Optimizing PolyACO training with GPU-parallelization
Torry Tufteland, Guro Ødesneltvedt and Morten Goodwin
Motion Reconstruction of Swarm-like Self-organized Motor Bike Traffic from Public Videos
Benjamin Reh and Katja Mombaur
Particle Swarm Optimisation with Diversity Influenced Gradually Increasing Neighbourhoods
Karl Mason, Caitriona Kellehan, Jim Duggan and Enda Howley
15:45-17:45 Poster session 1: Papers and previews presented in Sessions 1, 2, and 3 (coffee served at 16:15)

Thursday Sep 8, 2016

9:00-10:00 Invited plenary talk
Collective Sensing and Decision-Making in Animal Groups: From Fish Schools to Primate Societies
Iain Couzin (Max Planck Institute)
10:00-10:30 Coffee break
10:30-12:00 Session 4: Oral presentations
10:30-11:00 Random walks in swarm robotics: an experiment with Kilobots
Cristina Dimidov, Giuseppe Oriolo and Vito Trianni
11:00-11:30 Collective Perception of Environmental Features in a Robot Swarm
Gabriele Valentini, Davide Brambilla, Heiko Hamann and Marco Dorigo
11:30-12:00 Continuous Time Gathering of Agents with Limited Visibility and Bearing-Only Sensing
Levi Itzhak Bellaiche and Alfred Bruckstein
12:00-13:30 Free time for lunch
13:30-14:30 Session 5: Oral presentations
13:30-14:00 Observing the effects of overdesign in the automatic design of control software for robot swarms
Mauro Birattari, Brian Delhaisse, Gianpiero Francesca and Yvon Kerdoncuff
14:00-14:30 Synthesizing Rulesets for Programmable Self-Assembly of Robots: A Case Study on Floating Miniaturized Robots
Bahar Haghighat, Brice Platerrier, Loic Waegeli and Alcherio Martinoli
14:30-18:30 Special session: SwarmOrgan FET project
14:30-14:50 Welcome & intro to SwarmOrgan: James Sharpe
14:50-15:30 Invited lecture: René Doursat (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Crossing the reality gap between biological morphogenesis and morphogenetic swarm robotics
15:30-16:00
15:30-15:45 Multi-cellular Modelling of Root Development
Tyler McCleery
15:45-16:00 3D Mutlicellular Modelling of Gastrulation
Jaap Kaandorp
16:00-16:30 Coffee Break
16:30-17:10 Invited lecture: Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol)
From swarm of flying robots to nanobots for cancer applications
17:10-18:10
17:10-17:25 Getting Robots to Behave Like Cells: Sorting
Martin Hinsch
17:25-17:40 Collective Movement of a Robotic Swarm
Ata Ramezan Shirazi
17:40-17:55 Self-organising Swarm Organs: The Theory
Noemi Caranza
17:55-18:10 Self-organising Swarm Organs: The Practice!
Ivica Slavkov
18:10-18:30 Wrapping up: James Sharpe
18:30 Meeting at conference location - We walk to the dinner together
19:00 Conference dinner

Friday Sep 9, 2016

9:00-10:00 Invited plenary talk
Aggregate Programming
Jacob Beal (BBN Technologies)
10:00-10:30 Coffee break
10:30-12:30 Session 6: Oral presentations
10:30-11:00 A New Continuous Model for Segregation Implemented and Analyzed on Swarm Robots
Benjamin Reh, Felix Aller and Katja Mombaur
11:00-11:30 Human-Robot Swarm Interaction with Limited Situational Awareness
Gabriel Kapellmann-Zafra, Nicole Salomons, Andreas Kolling and Roderich Gross
11:30-12:00 A Macroscopic Privacy Model for Heterogeneous Robot Swarms
Amanda Prorok and Vijay Kumar
12:00-12:30 Design and Analysis of Proximate Mechanisms for Cooperative Transport in Real Robots
Muhanad Mohammed, Aparajit Narayan and Elio Tuci
12:30-14:00 Sandwich lunch at conference site
14:00-15:00 Session 7: Oral presentations
14:00-14:30 Population Coding: A New Design Paradigm for Embodied Distributed Systems
Heiko Hamann, Gabriele Valentini and Marco Dorigo
14:30-15:00 Dynamic task partitioning for foraging robot swarms
Edgar Buchanan, Andrew Pomfret and Jon Timmis
15:00-15:15 Session 8: Preview highlights
Autonomous Task Allocation for Swarm Robotic Systems using Hierarchical Strategy
Yufei Wei, Toshiyuki Yasuda and Kazuhiro Ohkura
On Stochastic Broadcast Control of Swarms
Ilana Segall and Alfred Bruckstein
On the Definition of Self-organizing Systems: Relevance of Positive/Negative Feedback and Fluctuations
Yara Khaluf and Heiko Hamann
Achieving Synchronised Behaviour in Swarm Robotics Applying Networked Q-Learning with Action Filtering
Christopher Deeks
Hybrid Deployment Algorithm of Swarm Robots for Wireless Mesh Network -RSSI-Based Rough Movement Direction Control and Detouring Obstacle by Movement Function along Walls-
Kiyohiko Hattori, Naoki Tatebe, Toshinori Kagawa, Yasunori Owada, Kiyoshi Hamaguchi and Keiki Takadama
On heterogeneity in foraging by ant-like colony: how local affects global and vice versa
Yuichiro Sueoka, Kazuki Nakayama, Masato Ishikawa, Yasuhiro Sugimoto and Koichi Osuka
Consideration Regarding the Reduction of Reality Gap in Evolutionary Swarm Robotics
Toshiyuki Yasuda, Motoaki Hiraga, Akitoshi Adachi and Kazuhiro Ohkura
15:15-17:00 Poster session 2: Papers and previews presented in Sessions 4 to 8 (coffee served at 15:30)
17:00-17:15 Award Ceremony
17:15 Conference conclusion

Metaphor-based metaheuristics: who's to blame?

Kenneth Sörensen (University of Antwerp)

Abstract: There is no doubt that early metaphor-based metaheuristics (evolutionary algorithms, simulated annealing, ant colony optimization, ...) have contributed immensely to the arsenal of metaheuristic techniques currently available, as well as to our understanding of metaheuristics as general-purpose optimization frameworks. The last decade, however, has witnessed an explosive increase in the number of processes, natural or man-made, that have been used as a metaphor for the development of supposedly novel metaheuristics. Indeed, a subculture seems to have arisen within the metaheuristics community in which the value of a heuristic is judged solely by the novelty of the process it purportedly models. The result is an enormous jungle of "novel" techniques that neither perform well, nor provide any useful insight. Together with the increasing outlandish nature of these processes, no doubt a result of the exhaustion of the more obvious processes that actually optimize something, comes an increasing awareness that there is something seriously wrong with this way of doing "research". Several journals have now modified their editorial policies to explicitly prohibit "novel" metaphor-based methods and many researchers have spoken out against them. When investigating the reasons why it was the metaheuristics community that fell victim to the metaphor fallacy, and why papers that have no discernible scientific value do get published in this field, we have to conclude that the responsibility lies, at least partially, with the community itself. We make a plea for a "scientification" of the field of metaheuristics, which includes swearing off some of its old habits and customs.

Bio: Kenneth Sörensen is professor at the Faculty of Applied Economics of the University of Antwerp, where he also obtained his PhD. Kenneth Sörensen chairs the research group ANT/OR (University of Antwerp Operations Research Group), a group that focuses on applications of Operations Research in diverse domains, and on the development of optimization algorithms, especially metaheuristics. Kenneth Sörensen has published extensively on applied (heuristic) optimization and is a leading expert on the development of metaheuristics. He also founded the largest working group on metaheuristics: EU/ME - the metaheuristics community.

Kenneth Sörensen's Picture

Collective Sensing and Decision-Making in Animal Groups: From Fish Schools to Primate Societies

Iain Couzin (Max Planck Institute for Ornithology)

Abstract: Understanding how social influence shapes biological processes is a central challenge in contemporary science, essential for achieving progress in a variety of fields ranging from the organization and evolution of coordinated collective action among cells, or animals, to the dynamics of information exchange in human societies. Using an integrated experimental and theoretical approach I will address how, and why, animals exhibit highly-coordinated collective behavior. I will demonstrate new imaging technology that allows us to reconstruct (automatically) the dynamic, time-varying networks that correspond to the visual cues employed by organisms when making movement decisions. Sensory networks are shown to provide a much more accurate representation of how social influence propagates in groups, and their analysis allows us to identify, for any instant in time, the most socially-influential individuals within groups, and to predict the magnitude of complex behavioral cascades before they actually occur. I will also investigate the coupling between spatial and information dynamics in groups and reveal that emergent problem solving is the predominant mechanism by which mobile groups sense, and respond to complex environmental gradients. Evolutionary modeling demonstrates such ‘physical computation’ readily evolves within populations of selfish organisms, and allowing individuals to compute collectively the spatial distribution of resources and to allocate themselves effectively among distinct, and distant, resource patches, without requiring information about the number, location or size of patches. Finally I will reveal the critical role uninformed, or unbiased, individuals play in effecting fast and democratic consensus decision-making in collectives, and will test these predictions with experiments involving schooling fish and wild baboons.

Bio: Iain Couzin is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Department of Collective Behaviour, and the Chair of Biodiversity and Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Previously he was a Full Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, and prior to that a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, and a Junior Research Fellow in the Sciences at Balliol College, Oxford. His work aims to reveal the fundamental principles that underlie evolved collective behavior, and consequently his research includes the study of a wide range of biological systems, from insect swarms to fish schools and primate groups. In recognition of his research he has been recipient of the Searle Scholar Award in 2008, top 5 most cited papers of the decade in animal behavior research 1999-2010, the Mohammed Dahleh Award in 2009, Popular Science’s "Brilliant 10” Award in 2010, National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award in 2012 and the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London in 2013.

Iain Couzin's Picture

Aggregate programming

Jacob Beal (BBN Technologies)

Abstract: We live in a world with an ever-increasing density of computing devices, pervading every aspect of our environment. Programming these devices is challenging, due to their large numbers, potential for frequent and complex network interactions with other nearby devices, and the open and evolving nature of their capabilities and applications. Aggregate programming addresses these challenges by raising the level of abstraction, so that a programmer can operate in terms of collections of interacting devices. In particular, field calculus provides a safe and extensible model for encapsulation, modulation, and composition of services. On this foundation, a set of resilient “building block” operators support development of APIs that can provide resilience and scalability guarantees for any service developed using them. In this talk, the power of this approach will be illustrated by discussion of several recent applications, including crowd safety at mass public events, disaster relief operations, construction of resilient enterprise systems, and network security.

Bio: Dr. Jacob Beal is a scientist at BBN Technologies and a research affiliate of MIT and the University of Iowa. His research interests center on the engineering of robust adaptive systems, with a focus on problems of modeling and control for spatially-distributed systems like sensor networks, robotic swarms, and natural or engineered biological cells. Dr. Beal completed his Ph.D. in 2007 under Prof. Gerald Jay Sussman at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Jacob Beal's Picture

From swarm of flying robots to nanobots for cancer applications

Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol)

Abstract: Nanoparticles for cancer applications are increasingly able to move, sense, and interact the body in a controlled fashion. The challenge is to discover how trillions of these nanobots can work together to improve the detection and treatment of tumours. Towards this end, the field of swarm robotics offers tools and techniques to control large numbers of agents with limited capabilities. Our swarm strategies are designed in realistic simulators using bio-inspiration, machine learning and crowdsourcing. Strategies are then translated to 1000 kilobots, or to experiments under the microscope in tissue-on-a-chip devices. Lessons learned could also enable large-scale swarm deployments in outdoor applications.

Bio: Sabine Hauert is Assistant Professor in Robotics at the University of Bristol in the UK. Her research focuses in engineering swarms that work in large numbers (>1000), and at small scales (<1 cm). Swarm strategies are either inspired from nature or are automatically discovered using machine learning and crowdsourcing. Before joining the University of Bristol, Sabine engineered swarms of nanoparticles for cancer treatment at MIT as a Human Frontier Science Program Cross-Disciplinary Fellow, and deployed swarms of flying robots at EPFL. Sabine is also the President and Co-founder of Robohub.org, a non-profit dedicated to connecting the robotics community to the public. As an expert in science communication, she is often invited to discuss the future of robotics, including in the journal Nature, at the European Parliament, and as a member of the Royal Society's Working Group on Machine Learning.

Sabine Hauert's Picture
Invited speakers have been graciously supported by the SwarmOrgan FET Open project.

ANTS 2016, continuing a tradition started with ANTS 2002, assigns a "Best paper award".

In addition to a certificate signed by the conference organizers, the award consists of a sculpture of an ant expressly created for ANTS 2016 by the Italian sculptor Matteo Pugliese.

ANTS 2016 award

The best paper award has been graciously supported by LNCS Springer.


The winning paper was:

Random walks in swarm robotics: an experiment with Kilobots

Cristina Dimidov, Giuseppe Oriolo and Vito Trianni



ANTS 2016 award
ANTS 2016 award

Organizers

Organizing Committee

General chair
Marco Dorigo, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Vice-chairs
Mauro Birattari, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Thomas Stützle, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Technical chairs
Xiaodong Li, RMIT University, Australia
Manuel López-Ibáñez, University of Manchester, UK
Kazuhiro Ohkura, Hiroshima University, Japan
Publication chair
Carlo Pinciroli, Polytechnique Montréal, Canada
Liaison chair for Africa
Andries Engelbrecht, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Liaison chair for Asia
Fumitoshi Matsuno, Kyoto University, Japan
Liaison chair for North America
Magnus Egerstedt, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Program Committee

  • Afnizanfaizal Abdullah, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
  • Andrea Perna, Université Libre de Bruxelles
  • Andy Adamatzky, University of the West of England
  • Ann Nowe, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
  • Daniel Angus, The University of Queensland
  • Prasanna Balaprakash, Argonne National Laboratory
  • Jacob Beal, BBN Technologies
  • Giovanni Beltrame, Polytechnique Montréal, Canada
  • Gerardo Beni, University of California
  • Spring Berman, Arizona State University
  • Tim Blackwell, Goldsmiths, University of London
  • Maria J. Blesa, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
  • Christian Blum, University of the Basque Country
  • Mohammad Reza Bonyadi, The University of Adelaide
  • Alexandre Campo, Université Libre de Bruxelles
  • Stephen Chen, York University
  • Ran Cheng, University of Surrey
  • Marco Chiarandini, University of Southern Denmark
  • Anders Christensen, Lisbon University Institute
  • Carlos Coello Coello, CINVESTAV-IPN
  • Oscar Cordon, University of Granada / European Centre for Soft Computing
  • Nikolaus Correll, University of Colorado at Boulder
  • Ana Luisa Custodio, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
  • Swagatam Das, Indian Statistical Institute
  • Gianni Di Caro, Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale
  • Luca Di Gaspero, University of Udine
  • Karl Doerner, Johannes Kepler University Linz
  • Haibin Duan, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
  • Mohammed El-Abd, American University of Kuwait
  • Andries Engelbrecht, University of Pretoria
  • Hugo Jair Escalante, INAOE
  • Susana Esquivel, Universidad Nacional de San Luis
  • Nazim Fates, LORIA
  • Eliseo Ferrante, KU Leuven
  • Ryusuke Fujisawa, Hachinohe Institute of Technology
  • Luca Gambardella, Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale
  • José García-Nieto, University of Málaga
  • Roderich Gross, The University of Sheffield
  • Frédéric Guinand, Le Havre University
  • Walter Gutjahr, University of Vienna
  • Julia Handl, Manchester Business School
  • Kiyohiko Hattori, NICT
  • Tim Hendtlass, Swinburne University of Technology
  • Michael Hsiao, Virginia Tech
  • Thomas Jansen, Aberystwyth University
  • Mark Jelasity, University of Szeged
  • Guillermo Leguizamón, Universidad Nacional de San Luis
  • Simone Ludwig, North Dakota State University
  • Stephen Majercik, Bowdoin College
  • Vittorio Maniezzo, Università di Bologna
  • Antonio David Masegosa Arredondo, University of Granada
  • Massimo Mastrangeli, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems
  • Clerc Maurice, Independent Consultant on Optimisation
  • Michalis Mavrovouniotis, De Montfort University
  • Yi Mei, Victoria University of Wellington
  • Ronaldo Menezes, Florida Institute of Technology
  • Bernd Meyer, Universität Hamburg
  • Martin Middendorf, University of Leipzig
  • Seyedali Mirjalili, Griffith University
  • Roberto Montemanni, Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale
  • Melanie Moses, University of New Mexico
  • Frank Neumann, The University of Adelaide
  • Randal Olson, Michigan State University
  • Koichi Osuka, Osaka University
  • Ender Ozcan, University of Nottingham
  • Konstantinos Parsopoulos, University of Ioannina
  • Paola Pellegrini, IFSTTAR
  • Jorge Peña, Max-Planck-Institut für Evolutionsbiologie
  • Günther Raidl, Vienna University of Technology
  • Andrea Roli, Università di Bologna
  • Mike Rubenstein, Harvard University
  • Erol Sahin, Middle East Technical University
  • Thomas Schmickl, Universität Graz
  • Kevin Seppi, Brigham Young University
  • Jurij Šilc, Jožef Stefan Institute
  • Christine Solnon, LIRIS CNRS
  • Dirk Sudholt, University of Sheffield
  • Jon Timmis, University of York
  • Colin Torney, University of Exeter
  • Vito Trianni, ISTC-CNR
  • Elio Tuci, Aberystwyth University
  • Richard Vaughan, Simon Fraser University
  • Michael Vrahatis, University of Patras
  • Justin Werfel, Harvard University
  • Alan Winfield, UWE Bristol
  • Masahito Yamamoto, Hokkaido University
  • Yanjun Yan, Western Carolina University

Instructions

Initial submission instructions

The submission page is here: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ants20160.

Submitted papers must be between 8 and 12 pages long, written in English, typeset in LaTeX, and formatted in the LNCS Springer style. Please download the LNCS package (zip, 219 Kb) for LaTeX and the instruction file (pdf, 160 Kb) directly from the Springer web site. Authors are expected to use the default font and font size of the LNCS LaTeX style. Papers that do not respect these guidelines will be rejected.

Authors are expected to submit their manuscript in PDF format.

All 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 the authors will be asked to reduce the length of the submitted paper accordingly. The authors of all accepted papers will be asked to improve their papers on the basis of reviewers' comments.

Camera ready submission instructions

Authors of the accepted papers are expected to provide the camera-ready copy in PDF format, and all source files—i.e. LaTex file(s), figures and references—needed for obtaining the final version of their paper. Papers that do not comply with all requirements might fail to be included in the conference proceedings.

By submitting a camera-ready paper, the author(s) agree that at least one author will attend and present the paper at the conference.

The submission page is here: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ants20160.

Number of pages and deadline

Full-length papers are allotted 12 pages in the proceedings; short papers, 8 pages; and extended abstracts, 2 pages.

The camera-ready version of your paper must be submitted by May 15.

Preparing the camera-ready copy

Take into account the comments contained in the reviews of your paper when preparing the camera-ready copy of your contribution.

Only contributions typeset in LaTeX will be included in the ANTS 2016 proceedings. Download the package llncs2e.zip from Springer and format your contribution using the LaTeX class llncs included therein. References must be formatted using the BibTeX style splncs03 which is included in llncs2e.zip, too. References must follow the Number-Only system. Please refer to the class documentation included in the package.

Do not alter in any way the parameters defined by the llncs class. In particular, do not change font family, font size, line spacing, and margin width. Original Springer's class/style files should not be manipulated. Do not include the llncs class among the file you submit. Your paper will be recompiled by Springer using the original llncs class: If you make any modification to this file, the paper will not compile correctly. In this case, your paper will not be included in the proceedings.

Concerning the name of authors given in the latex field \author{}, please provide the full first name and not just the initial. Do not include the academic title, e.g.: Prof. or Dr.

Provide the following information for all authors at the beginning of the contribution: department, faculty, university, company (as applicable), city, country and email address. Do not include street address and ZIP code: This is not supposed to be the full postal address.

To allow you to include this information the llncs class provides the command \institute. To add email addresses, use the command \email within the \institute command. Example:

\institute{SomeLab, University of Somecity, Somecity, Somecountry \email{mymail@somelab.somecity-university.edu}}

After the \institute command please include an \index entry for each of the authors. Example:

\index{Last_name_of_author1, First_name_of_author1}
\index{Last_name_of_author2, First_name_of_author2}
\index{Last_name_of_author3, First_name_of_author3}

For further details, please refer to the documentation of the llncs class.

Acknowledgements, if any, should be given in a final subsubsection at the end of the paper, just before the list of references. Use the following command:

\bigskip
\subsubsection*{Acknowledgments. } 
%

Do not provide acknowledgments in a footnote to the title or to the author's name.

Notice that the proceedings will be printed in black and white. Make sure that the figures do not rely on colors to pass a message and they are understandable also when printed in black and white.

A contribution accepted as an extended abstract must not contain an abstract: after the \maketitle command, the body of the paper should start immediately.

By May 15, you must upload the final version of your contribution to the on-line conference system: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ants20160.

In particular, you should upload a compressed archive, either in the zip or tgz format, containing:

  • The camera-ready copy in PDF format (.pdf)
  • The final LaTeX file (.tex)
  • All figures (if you have any)
  • The BibTeX file (.bib)

IMPORTANT

The camera-ready copy of your contribution (including references) must not exceed the allotted number of pages. Please notice that contributions that do not comply with all above requirements cannot be included in the ANTS 2016 proceedings.

Copyright Form

You must fill in and sign the Springer's copyright form. The form should be emailed to ants@iridia.ulb.ac.be.

IMPORTANT

Please notice that the copyright form must be at the conference organization offices by May 15, otherwise the contribution cannot be included in the ANTS 2016 proceedings.

Conference proceedings are published by Springer in the LNCS series, Volume 9882.

The journal Swarm Intelligence will publish a special issue dedicated to ANTS 2016 that will contain extended versions of the best research works presented at the conference.

Site designed and maintained by Carlo Pinciroli, Rachael Walker, and Mauro Birattari. Last modification: September 7th, 2016.