Welcome

This symposium forms part of the AISB/IACAP World Congress to be held at the University of Birmingham (link), Birmingham, UK, on 2-6 July 2012, in honour of Alan Turing, to mark the centenary of his birth. The Congress is jointly organised by the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB) and the International Association of Computing and Philosophy (IACAP).

By collective phenomena we understand phenomena which arise as a result of the combined actions of many individual entities and which exhibit some form of unity or coherence that goes beyond the sum of the individual actions, e.g., the behaviour of flocks, crowds, etc, traffic phenomena, and many social activities. An important subclass of collective phenomena are spatial collectives, in which the collective behaviour takes the form of some form of spatial coherence.

This symposium will explore a range of issues arising from the effort to understand and model collective phenomena. Many of the issues can be approached either from a philosophical standpoint or from a computational one; we shall be particularly interested in the application of AI techniques (e.g., knowlege representation formalisms, algorithms for pattern recognition, machine learning methods) to the problems that they raise.