We would like to invite you to attend the 2nd International Conference on Morphological Computation ICMC2011.

Date: 12-14 Sep. 2011
Place: Palace Franchetti, Venice, Italy

The conference will be broadly interdisciplinary, including discussions in the area of robotics, frameworks for computation (reservoir computing, neural networks, computation based on spatio-temporal dynamics), chemistry and molecular biology (micro-patterning with biological polymers, interacting self-assembled micro-structures), and material science (intelligent micro materials, complex physical materials, complex surface patterning).

One key goal of the conference is to help identify a new and fruitful center of gravity at the heart of the overlapping research areas. The last conference (ICMC2007) defined a process to be a computation if (1) we can identify relation between input and output systematically, (2) the process is programmable for the generation of different classes of non-trivial input-output mappings, and (3) it is useful for some specific purposes. Starting from this definition, the mission of ICMC2011 is to bring the leading researchers from wider range of research areas including several growing areas such as reservoir computing and soft robotics in order to address the formulation and development of a new paradigm for fully embodied computation. Participants will be able to identify key open questions and key principles that can be generalized to other contexts, obtaining overview of cutting-edge research in different fields.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• soft robotics
• self-assembly systems and molecular robotics
• self-assembly systems at all scales
• embodied robotics
• reservoir computing
• physical reservoir computing
• real neural systems
• systems medicine
• functional architecture
• organization / process management
• computation based on spatio-temporal dynamics
• information theoretical approach to embodiment
• mechatronics
• amorphous computing
• molecular computing