September 12, 2016

Summary of the Conference

The 16th UK Workshop on Computational Intelligence (UKCI 2016) was held at Lancaster University, UK, 7-9 September 2016. The Workshop was sponsored by Springer through best paper awards for academics and students and by the Faculty of Science and Technology, Lancaster University.

UKCI has been the premier UK event for presenting leading research on all aspects of Computational Intelligence since 2001. The aim of UKCI 2016 was to provide a forum for the academic community and industry to share and exchange recent ideas about developing and using Computational Intelligence techniques.

Computational Intelligence is a rapidly expanding research field, attracting a large number of scientists, engineers and practitioners working in areas such as fuzzy systems, neural networks, evolutionary computation, evolving systems and machine learning. A growing number of companies are employing Computational Intelligence techniques to improve previous solutions and to deal with new problems. These include evolving systems that allow high performance in spite of changes which are either external or internal to the system, thereby increasing the re-usability of developed systems. These also include smart, intelligent, autonomous, self-learning, self-adapting, self-calibrating and self-tuning systems.

Although, UKCI has been advertised mainly as a national event for the UK, it has always attracted significant attention from further afield. UKCI 2016 continued this trend by featuring papers and participants from a number of countries on four continents such as USA, Japan, China, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The UKCI 2016 programme featured plenary lectures by three world class researchers in the field of Computational Intelligence – Dr. Jose Principe, Distinguished Professor at the University of Florida, USA; Professor Steve Furber, University of Manchester, UK and Prof. Trevor Martin, University of Bristol, UK. Prof. Principe is Fellow of the IEEE, Past President of INNS and recipient of numerous awards. Prof. Furber is CBE, a Fellow of the Royal Society as well as of the Royal Academy of Engineering as well as ICL Professor. Professor Trevor Martin is also a Senior Research Fellow at BT. All three lectures were well attended and provided a broad overview of novel and promising developments in the field from both theoretical, applied and indutrial perspective.

There were 35 presentations at the UKCI 2016 including the key note talks. All accepted papers were carefully selected from 50+ submissions following a stringent peer review process. Authors of selected high quality papers will be invited after the conference to submit extended versions of their papers for possible publication in special issues for the Springer Journals on Evolving Systems and Soft Computing.