Global research is striving towards ever higher degrees of automation across many aspects of everyday life, from manufacturing to shopping and transport. This is underpinned by increasingly powerful machine learning which permeates ever more pervasively into the systems and services that we interact with every day.

The way in which we build software systems, however, still lags behind in this automation, requiring large teams of programmers to be heavily involved in the fine details of how each system works. Recent research is seeking to change this, aiming to inject high levels of automation into the derivation of new software behaviours, and entire new systems, as well as automatically optimising existing systems.

We are running a two-day workshop designed to bring together researchers and practitioners in the field of emergent, adaptive, self-designing and self-organising systems to foster new links and help to enhance the UK's community of excellence in this area. Our particular focus is to unite systems-oriented researchers from computer science backgrounds with theoretical machine learning researchers from mathematical and statistical backgrounds, and optimisation researchers from operational research fields, including those who already cross these three disciplines.

The workshop will be open to anyone to attend but we do have a limited number of places: the first 50 places are free (excluding the optional evening meal), and we have capacity for a further 50 attendees for which there will be a small charge. The workshop will be highly interactive, with demos, posters, a panel session, and a future minds session which will use a set of topic-based interest groups to share and build ideas for future collaboration.

Special guest speakers for the workshop include:

Prof. Bill Langdon, University College London, on Genetic Improvement of Software
Dr. Ada Diaconescu, Telecom ParisTech, CNRS LTCI, on Adaptive Systems
Prof. Simon Dobson, University of St Andrews, on Complex Networks
Dr. Jon Shapiro, Manchester University, on theoretical Machine Learning and Optimisation
Dr. Christoforos Anagnostopoulos, Chief Data Scientist at Mentat, on Data Science and AI
Dr. Panayotis Mertikopoulos, CNRS Grenoble, on Algorithmic Learning and Optimisation

A full workshop schedule is available here.

A range of accommodation options are available around Lancaster, including the hotel on-campus, or a range of city centre hotels. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

This workshop is being jointly organised by Dr. Barry Porter (School of Computing and Communications), Prof. David Leslie (Department of Mathematics and Statistics) and Dr. Michael Epitropakis (Management School).

Emergent and Self-Adaptive Systems: Theory and Practice