[cover] Susan Stepney, Sergey Verlan.
Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation, UCNC 2018, Fontainebleau, France, June 2018.
LNCS 10867, Springer, 2018

Preface:

The 17th International Conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation (UCNC 2018) was held June 25–29, 2018, on the campus of the IUT de Fontainebleau at the University of Paris-Est Créteil – Val de Marne, Fontainebleau, France. The UCNC series of international conferences is genuinely interdisciplinary and it covers theory as well as experiments and applications. It is concerned with various proposals for computation that go beyond the Turing model, with human-designed computation inspired by nature, and with the computational nature of processes taking place in nature. Typical, but not exclusive, topics are: hypercomputation; chaos and dynamical systems-based computing; granular, fuzzy, and rough computing; mechanical computing; cellular, evolutionary, molecular, neural, and quantum computing; membrane computing; amorphous computing, swarm intelligence; artificial immune systems; physics of computation; chemical computation; evolving hardware; the computational nature of self-assembly, developmental processes, bacterial communication, and brain processes.

More information about this conference series and its full history can be found on the following website: https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/research/groups/CDMTCS/ conferences/uc/uc.html

Submissions to UCNC 2018 comprised 22 full papers across a wide variety of topics, including (but not limited to) quantum computing, algorithmic self-assembly, and chemical reaction networks. Of these, 15 were accepted for presentation at the conference and publication in these proceedings. Each submission was reviewed by at least three, and on average 3.2, Program Committee members. Beyond the contributed papers and associated talks, UCNC 2018 was greatly enhanced by the plenary talks and tutorials provided by several prestigious speakers. Satoshi Murata from Tohoku University, Japan, gave a plenary talk entitled “Molecular Robotics Project.” Julian Miller from the University of York, UK, presented his plenary talk “The Alchemy of Computation: How to Use the Unknown.” Lee Cronin from the University of Glasgow, UK, gave a plenary talk titled “Exploring Computation in Chemical Systems with Programmable Chemical Arrays.” A tutorial titled “Rule-Based Modeling in Systems Biology: A Kappa Tutorial” was provided by Jean Krivine from CNRS and University of Paris Didérot, France.

The conference was accompanied by four workshops, which were partially included in the conference program. The Workshop on Membrane Computing was organized by Rudolf Freund from the Technical University of Vienna, Austria, and Sergiu Ivanov from the University of Évry, France. The invited speaker for that workshop was Artiom Alhazov from the Academy of Sciences of Moldova, Moldova.

The Decision Making in Nature Workshop was organized by Makoto Naruse from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan, and Matteo Cavaliere from Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. The invited speakers for this workshop were Taiki Takahasi from Hokkaido University, Japan, and Hirokazu Hori from the University of Yamanashi, Japan.

The 9th International Workshop on Physics and Computation was organized by Michael Cuffaro and Philippos Papayannopoulos from the University of Western Ontario, Canada. The invited speakers for this workshop were Judit X. Madarász from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary, and Oron Shagrir from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

The Self-Assembly Workshop was organized by Damien Woods from Inria, France, and it had the following invited speakers: Matt Patitz from the University of Arkansas, USA, Pierre-Étienne Meunier from Inria, France, and Nicolas Schabanel from CNRS and ENS Lyon, France.

UCNC 2018 was also co-located with the Machines, Computations, and Universality Conference (MCU 2018). A joint session was held on June 28 featuring an invited talk by Damien Woods from Inria, France, entitled “Molecular Computation with DNA Self-Assembly.”

UCNC 2018 brought together researchers from all over the world to share and discuss ideas on forms of computation inspired by natural systems and unconventional methods. Its success as the 17th conference in the series is owed to the great amount of help from many people and organizations. First and foremost, we would like to thank the Steering Committee co-chairs, Nataša Jonoska and Jarkko Kari, whose expert guidance and invaluable advice helped to shape all aspects of the conference. Next, a huge debt of gratitude is owed to the Program Committee members and external reviewers, who carefully reviewed all submissions and provided important feedback to help decide which papers to accept.

Partial financial support for the conference was provided by IUT de Sénart-Fontainebleau, the University of Paris-Est Créteil, Laboratoire d’Algorithmique Complexité et Logique, Faculté des Sciences et Technologies of the University of Paris-Est Créteil, and Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (Inria). We also thank the administration of IUT de Fontainebleau for the perfect infrastructure made available to UCNC 2018. Finally, we would like to thank our secretaries, Nathalie Gillet and Flore Tsila, for their extensive assistance in organizing the event and for smoothly running the conference.

Special thanks are due to Springer for the efficient cooperation in the timely production of this volume, as well as for the financial sponsorship supporting the best student paper award and some student travel grants..

@book(Stepney2018-ucnc,
  author = "Susan Stepney, Sergey Verlan",
  doi = "10.1007/978-3-319-92435-9",
  title = "Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation, UCNC 2018, Fontainebleau, France, June 2018",
  series = "LNCS",
  volume = 10867,
  publisher = "Springer",
  year = 2018
)