Ph.D.Nadia Nedjah
State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Nadia Nedjah graduated in 1987 in Systems Engineering and Computation and in 1990 obtained an M.Sc. degree also in Systems Engineering and Computation. Both degrees were obtained form University of Annaba, Algeria. Since 1997 she holds a Ph.D. degree from University of Manchester – Institute of Science and Technology, UK. She joined the Department of Electronics Engineering and Telecommunications of the Engineering Faculty of the State University of Rio de Janeiro as an Associate Professor. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journals of High Performance System Architecture and the International Journals of Innovative Computing Applications, both published by Inderscience, UK. She published three authored books about Functional and Rewriting Languages, Hardware/Software Co-design for Systems Acceleration and Hardware for soft Computing vs. Soft Computing for Hardware. She executed 25 research projects in different Computer Science and Engineering topics. She guest edited more than 20 special issues for high impact journals and more than 45 organized books on computational intelligence related topics, such as Evolvable Machines, Genetic Systems Programming and Swarm Intelligent Systems. She authored about 120 journal papers, 45 book chapters and more than 170 conference papers. She is Associate Editor of more than 15 international journals, such as the Francis & Taylor’s International Journal of Electronics, Elsevier’s Integration, The VLSI Journal and Microprocessors and Microsystems and IET’s Computer & Digital Techniques. She organized two major conferences related to computational intelligence: the 7th edition of Intelligent Systems Design and Application and the 5th edition of Hybrid Intelligent Systems. She also was one of the co-founder of the International Conference on Adaptive and Intelligent Systems.
Title of the Talk:Trends in Swarm Robotics
Abstract:
Swarm Robotics is an extension of the study of Multi-Robot Systems that exploits concepts of communication, coordination and collaboration among a large number of robots. The massive parallelization yielded by the robots working together can make a task faster than in the case of the usage of a single complex robot. One of the main aspects in robotic swarms is that the control is decentralized by definition and distributed among the robots of the swarm, improving the system robustness and fault-tolerance. Furthermore, this characteristic often allows the emergence of collective behaviors from the robot’s interaction with each other and with the environment through their embodied sensors and actuators. In most cases, the number of inputs from sensor readings turns analytical solutions hard or even impossible. Thus, many ad-hoc approaches are contributed to deal with the situation. The main goal of this talk is to find out, through the study of existing research works of the field, the reason behind the lack of exploitation of swarm robotic systems in real-world applications. For this purpose, we first review the different possibilities of study in SR: physical and simulated robotic platforms, development methodologies and the variety of basic tasks and collective behaviors. We then briefly describe some fields, related do swarm robotics, that have a big impact on the development of swarm robotics. After that, based on existing taxonomies, we categorize existing research works in two large main groups: those that deal with systems design and those that deal with tasks as required in swarm robotics. We will make a review some promising existing robots and techniques, showing a diversity of approaches. Nonetheless, it is easily noticeable from these works that there is a clamant absence of solid real-world applications of swarm robotics. An analysis of the interests and bottlenecks of this field indicates that the number of research works is smaller than those in other related areas. This suggests that, even though with many research studies, the field of SR is not yet mature enough, mainly due the absence of a universal methodology and generic robots that can be used in any, or at least in many, applications. Thus, we discuss and analyze the urgent need for standardization of many aspects in SR, including hardware and software, as to allow a possible flourishing of swarm applicability to real-world applications. This standardization could accelerate a great deal the field, thus facilitating the development of solutions for applications that impact our daily life.
Keywords:Computational intelligence, Swarm Intelligence, Swarm Robotics
Prof. Dr. Reda Alhajj
University of Calgary, Canada
Prof. Dr. Reda Alhajj received his B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering in 1988 from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. After he completed his BSc with distinction from METU, he was offered a full scholarship to join the graduate program in Computer Engineering and Information Sciences at Bilkent University in Ankara, where he received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Currently, he is Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He published over 500 papers in refereed international journals and conferences. He served on the program committee of several international conferences. He is founding editor in chief of the Springer premier journal “Social Networks Analysis and Mining”, founding editor-in-chief of Springer Series “Lecture Notes on Social Networks”, founding editor-in-chief of Springer journal “Network Modeling Analysis in Health Informatics and Bioinformatics”, founding co-editor-in-chief of Springer “Encyclopedia on Social Networks Analysis and Mining”, founding steering chair of the flagship conference “IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining”, and three accompanying symposiums FAB, FOSINT-SI and HI-BI-BI. He is member of the editorial board of the Journal of Information Assurance and Security, Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics, Journal of Data Mining, Modeling and Management; he has been guest editor of a number of special issues and edited a number of conference proceedings. Dr. Alhajj's research concentrates primarily on DATA SCIENCE and NETWORK SCIENCE from management to integration and analysis. Current research efforts include: (1) data management, analysis and mining, (2) social media and network analysis, (3) systems and computational biology, bioinformatics, health informatics, (4) homeland security, terror and criminal networks, etc., (5) sequence analysis with emphasis on domains like financial, weather, traffic, energy, etc. Dr. Alhajj's is proud to have a number of successful teams, including SANO who ranked first in the Microsoft Imagine Cup Competition in Canada and received KFC Innovation Award in the World Finals held in Russia in July 2013, TRAK who ranked in the top 15 teams in the 2014 open data analysis competition in Canada, Go2There who ranked first in the Imagine Camp competition organized by Microsoft Canada in March 2014, Funiverse who ranked first in Microsoft Imagine Cup Competition in Canada in May 2014.
