Workshop on Bio-Inspired Solutions for Wireless Sensor Networks (BIS-WSN 2011) July 12-13, 2011 Dublin, Ireland Satellite workshop of the 2011 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) Largest Conference in the Field of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation. A recombination of the 20th International Conference on Genetic Algorithms (ICGA) and the 16th Annual Genetic Programming Conference (GP).

Description

Wireless sensor networks consist of spatially distributed autonomous computing units that cooperatively monitor a variable property, for example, environmental conditions such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants. They are being used in many application areas, including industrial process monitoring and control, machine health monitoring, environment and habitat monitoring, healthcare applications, home automation, and traffic control.

Apart from begin equipped with different sensors, each node in a sensor network is generally equipped with a very limited battery, a rather small memory device, a small hard disk, a simple processing unit, and a radio transceiver or another alternative device for wireless communication. Communication via these devices results in the fact that a sensor network is a wireless ad-hoc network. Each sensor node usually supports multi-hop routing algorithms where nodes function as forwarders, relaying data packets to a base station. Those communication capabilities, together with their very reduced computing and storage capabilities, poses a new challenge for computer scientists: to use sensor networks not only for monitoring, but also for computing. Some of the algorithmic issues that must be addressed in sensor networks concern, for example, event detection, data gathering, object tracking, base station initiated querying, power saving, etc.

The mentioned particularities of the computing units in sensor networks, together with their growing size, ask for a new computing paradigm. Clearly, conventional engineering paradigms seem not to be very well suited for their control and management. The fact that a complex sensor network is composed of simple computing units has an analogy with certain animal societies, whose individuals are often very simple but together they result in a much more complex and capable entity. Thus, from an algorithmic point of view, bio-inspired solutions, such as swarm intelligence techniques, artificial immune systems, or evelutionary algorithms may provide valuable alternatives for solving problems in sensor networks. Genetic and evolutionary algorithms, for example, may be used to solve large-scale optimization problems occuring in sensor networks. On the other side, self-organization may help in distributed controll and management tasks.

For this workshop we invite original, and so-far unpublished, contributions from the following topic areas:

• All contributions must deal with algorithmic aspects in wireless sensor networks
• Applications of genetic and evolutionary computation principles
• Use of swarm intelligence principles such as self-organization
• Other bio-inspired computing paradigms such as artificial immune systems

Proceedings

Workshop proceedings will be published in the ACM Digital Library. Accepted authors must submit a copyright form assigning copyright to ACM. Authors are responsible for sending their copyright form to the ACM by the deadline and submitting electronic (PDF) versions of their workshop materials by the deadline. Camera-ready format and submission instructions will be posted on the conference web site.

Workshop Organizers

Dr. Maria J. Blesa
ALBCOM, Dept. Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Jordi Girona 1-3, Omega 213, Campus Nord
08034 Barcelona (Spain)

Dr. Christian Blum
ALBCOM, Dept. Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Jordi Girona 1-3, Omega 112, Campus Nord
08034 Barcelona (Spain)