Keynote Speaker

Nazmul Siddique
School of Computing, Engineering and Intelligent Systems, Ulster University, Northland Road, Londonderry, BT48 7JL, United Kingdom
Title: Dialectics of Nature: New Approaches to Computing
Abstract: Nature does things in an amazing way. Behind the visible phenomena, there are innumerable invisible and hidden causes at times. Philosophers and scientists have been observing these phenomena in the nature for centuries and trying to understand, explain, adapt and replicate them in artificial systems. There are countless agents and forces within the living and non-living world, most of which are unknown and the underlying complexity is beyond human comprehension. These agents are acting in parallel and very often against each other giving form and feature to nature, and regulating the harmony, beauty and vigour of life. This is the dialectics of nature which lies in the concept of the evolution of the natural world. The evolution of complexity in nature follows a distinctive order. There is also information processing in nature performed in a distributed, self-organised and optimal manner without any central control. All these phenomena known or partially known so far are emerging as new fields of science, technology, and computing that study problem solving techniques inspired by nature as well as attempts to understand the underlying principles and mechanisms of natural, physical, chemical and biological organisms that perform complex tasks in a befitting manner with limited resources and capability.

Mankind has been trying to understand nature ever since by developing new tools and techniques. The field of nature-inspired computing (NIC) is interdisciplinary combining computing with knowledge from different branches of sciences, e.g. physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, mechanics, thermodynamics, and engineering, that allows development of new computational tools such as computing algorithms and analysis of patterns, behaviours, and organisms. This talk will focus on advances made in the emerging field of nature-inspired computing (NIC) and highlight on the physics and chemistry-based approaches to computing and optimisation.

Biography: Nazmul Siddique is with the School of Computing, Engineering and Intelligent Systems, Ulster University. He obtained Dipl.-Ing. degree in Cybernetics from the Dresden University of Technology, Germany, MSc in Computer Science from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology and PhD in Intelligent Control from the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of Sheffield, England. His research interests include: cybernetics, computational intelligence, nature-inspired computing, stochastic systems and vehicular communication. He has published over 170 research papers including five books published by John Wiley, Springer and Taylor & Francis. He guest-edited eight special issues of reputed journals on Cybernetic Intelligence, Computational Intelligence, Neural Networks and Robotics. He is on the editorial board of seven international journals including Nature Scientific Research. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a senior member of IEEE and member of different committees of IEEE SMC Society and UK-RI Chapter. He was involved in organising many national and international conferences and co-edited seven conference proceedings.