UCNC 2021

Aims and Scope

The International Conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation (UCNC) is a meeting where scientists from many different backgrounds are united in their interest in novel forms of computation, human-designed computation inspired by nature, and computational aspects of natural processes. UCNC provides a forum for these scientists to meet and discuss their work. The 19th UCNC will be hosted by Aalto University in Espoo, within the Helsinki metropolitan area in Finland.

Conference proceedings will be published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series by Springer-Verlag. Extended versions of selected papers from the proceedings will appear in a special issue of the Natural Computing journal.

Topics of interest

Papers and poster presentations are sought in all areas that relate to unconventional computation and natural computation. Both theoretical and experimental papers are welcome. Typical, but not exclusive, topics are:

• Programmable matter, material computing, molecular (DNA) computing, quantum computing, optical computing, chaos computing, collision-based computing
• Self-assembling and self-organising systems, cellular automata, neural computation, evolutionary computation, swarm computing, artificial life, artificial immune systems, amorphous computing, membrane computing, physarum computing, super-Turing computation
• Computational neuroscience, computational systems biology, synthetic biology, cellular (in vivo) computing

Invited Speakers

Keynote presentations at the conference will be given by:

• Corentin Coulais (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
• Cody Geary (Aarhus University, Denmark)
• Mikko Möttönen (Aalto University, Finland)
• Andrew Phillips (Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK)
• Damien Querlioz (CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, France)

Workshops

The following independent workshops are organised concurrently to the conference:

• Rapid Reconfiguration of Programmable Matter, organised by Christian Scheideler (Paderborn University, Germany) and Matthew Patitz(University of Arkansas, USA)
• Third International Workshop on Theoretical and Experimental Material Computing (TEMC 2021), organised by Susan Stepney(University of York, UK)

Registration

UCNC2021 will be a primarily on-site event, with opportunities for real-life personal contacts, discussions and networking. However the presentations at the main conference will be streamed and recorded (pending permission from the speakers), and can be followed and downloaded by remote participants, who can also participate in the discussions. Read more on how to register.

More information

• Contact: [email protected]
• Event website: https://ucnc2021.cs.aalto.fi