3.14  CFP: International Journal of General Systems
Contributed by: Bo Shen, shenbodh@gmail.com

CALL FOR PAPERS

"Distributed Estimation and Control for General Systems"
A Special Issue of International Journal of General
Systems

Networked systems arise as natural models in many areas of engineering and sciences with examples including sensor
networks, autonomous unmanned vehicles, biological networks, and animal cooperative aggregation and flocking.
In addition to the universal attributes of the complex networks, networked systems do possess their own
characteristics due mainly to the large number of simple systems interacting through a communication medium. The
past decade has seen successful applications of network systems in many practical areas ranging from military
sensing, physical security, air traffic control, to distributed robotics and industrial and manufacturing
automation. Accordingly, theoretical research on large-scale networked systems has gained an increasing
attention from multiple disciplines including engineering, computer science and mathematics. Lying in the core part
of the area are the distributed estimation and control problems that have recently been attracting growing
research interests.
 
For distributed estimation and control problems, the networked system is comprised of a large number of simple
systems (i.e. nodes) with computing and wireless communication capabilities, where the nodes are spatially
distributed to form an ad hoc network and every node has its own notion of time. Each individual node in the
network locally estimates/controls the system state from not only its own measurement but also its neighbouring
nodes' measurements according to the given topology. The possible complexity of such a topology poses many
challenges for scientists and engineers, and it is difficult to analyse these networks thoroughly with
currently available estimation/control algorithms. Therefore, there is an urgent need to research on into
modelling, analysis of behaviours, systems theory, and estimation/control algorithms in networked systems.
Numerous fundamental questions have been addressed about the connections between network topology and dynamic
properties including stability, controllability, robustness and other observable aspects. However, some
major problems have not been fully investigated, such as the behaviour of stability, estimation and control for
networks with incomplete/imperfect/stochastic topology, as well as their applications in, for example, distributed
signal processing.
 
This special issue aims to bring together the latest approaches to understanding, estimating and control
complex systems in a distributed way.
 
Topics include, but are not limited to the following
aspects of sensor networks:
• Coordinated control and estimation over networks;
• Multivehicle systems, flocking, and consensus;
• Control under communication constraints: quantization,
limited bandwidth, erasure channels;
• Decentralized algorithms for computation over sensor
networks;
• Randomized, gossip, and message passing algorithms;
• Distributed and decentralized signal processing;
• Distributed and cooperative optimization;
• Cooperation in the presence of adversaries;
• Networked games;
• Robust coordination under malicious attacks.

Guest Editorial Board:

Prof. Zidong Wang
Dept. Info. Syst. & Computing
Brunel University
Uxbridge, UB8 3PH, UK
Email: Zidong.Wang@brunel.ac.uk

Prof. Renquan Lu
Inst. of Information & Control
Hangzhou Dianzi University
Hangzhou 310018, P. R. China.
Email: rqlu@hdu.edu.cn

Dr. Bo Shen
Inst. Automatic Control and Complex Systems
University of Duisburg-Essen
Duisburg 47057, Germany.
Email: bo.shen@uni-due.de

About IJGS

The International Journal of General Systems is a crossdisciplinary periodical devoted primarily to the
publication of original research contributions to system science, basic as well as applied. However, relevant
tutorial and survey articles, invited autobiographical articles, book reviews, bibliographies, and letters to the
editor are also published.
The principal aim of the journal is to promote original systems ideas (concepts, principles, methods, theoretical
or experimental results, etc.) that transcend the boundaries between traditional academic disciplines. The
term "general system" in the name of the journal is intended to indicate this aim 3/4 the orientation to
systems ideas that have a general applicability. Some typical subject areas covered by the journal include:
systems analysis, modeling, simulation and design; uncertainty; information; complexity; inductive and
deductive reasoning; learning; and theoretical as well as experimental knowledge regarding various categories of
systems, such as adaptive, anticipatory, autopoietic, cellular, chaotic, dynamic, fuzzy, hierarchical,
immune-like, neural, quantum, self-organizing, self-producing, sel-freferential, etc. The journal also
contains a special area section devoted to intelligent
systems.
 
please visit the following web for more details.

http://wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/asjc.

Important Dates:

Full Paper Submission Deadline: 31 August 2013
Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: 30 November 2013
Final Paper Submission: 31 January 2014
Target Publication Date: Early 2014

How to submit:

Potential authors should submit the full paper through the website
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ggen.
Authors
should indicate that their manuscript is being submitted for the Special Issue on Distributed Estimation and
Control for General Systems. After submission, the authors must provide the guest editor with the reference number of
the paper.

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4. Conferences

4.1 3rd Australian Control Conference
Contributed by: Victor Sreeram, Victor.Sreeram@uwa.edu.au

3rd Australian Control Conference (AUCC2013), Perth 4-5
November 2013
AUCC2013 is dedicated to the memory of Professor John
Moore (1941-2013).

Two types of contributions are sought:
Regular papers, 8 pages for submission, 6 pages for proceedings (peer reviewed, presented orally or as posters
to be decided by the technical program committee, published in proceedings)
Industrial abstracts, 2 pages (peer reviewed, typically presented as posters or in a special oral session on
industrial problems, published in proceedings)
Submit a contribution to AUCC2013 at
http://controls.papercept.net

Important Dates:
Submission of papers: 26th April, 2013
Author notification: 28th June, 2013
Final upload of papers: 2nd September, 2013

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4.2 3th International Conference on Systems and Control
Contributed by: Prof. Mohamed DJEMAI,
mohamed.djemai@univ-valenciennes.fr

3th International Conference on Systems and Control，29-31 October 2013, Hilton Hotel, Algiers, Algeria

The third edition of the International Conference on Systems and Control will be held on, 2013, in Algiers,
Algeria. The first edition was initiated by the late Prof. E.-K. Boukas and was held in 2007 in Marrakesh. The second
edition has been taken place in Marrakech.(Al-Jazaïr) is the capital and largest city of Algeria.
Called El-Behdja or alternatively “Algiers the White” for the glistening white of its buildings as seen rising up
from the sea, Algiers is situated on the west side of a bay of the Mediterranean Sea. The modern part of the city
is built on the level ground by the seashore; the old part, the ancient city of the deys, climbs the steep hill
behind the modern town and is crowned by the Casbah or citadel. This event will provide the opportunity for
worldwide researchers and practitioners to share together the latest developments and new trends in systems and
control. Both theoretical and applied papers are welcomed for submission to this event. Keynote speeches are to be
conducted by well-known experts in systems and control.

Topics of interest include but not limited:

Bond Graphs, Linear and nonlinear systems, Modeling of complex systems, Robust control and Hinf control, Hybrid
dynamical systems, Variable structure Systems, Discrete event systems, Stochastic control, Estimations and
identification, Observation and Observer, Intelligent and AI based control, Multivariable control, Mathematical
systems theory, Time-delay systems, Fuzzy and neural systems, Industrial control Robotics,  Manufacturing
systems, Control algorithms implementation, Control applications, Control Education, Guidance and control
theory, Motion control, Optimal control, Real time systems, Mechatronics, Networks optimization, Fault
Diagnosis, Power systems, Modeling and simulation, Optimization, Fault Tolerant control, Data Communications,
Embedded Systems, Process control and instrumentation, Control of telecommunications systems, Transportation
Systems, Renewable Energy, Robot

Paper submission: Papers must be submitted electronically
via the Web upload system only
http://lias.labo.univ-poitiers.fr/icsc/icsc2013/.
The guidelines are given at the ICSC’13 Web site. Full papers should be submitted in standard IEEE
double-column format for conferences. The first page of the paper, centred on the top below the top margin, should
include the paper title, the authors' names and their  affiliations, an abstract, and keywords. Six pages are
allowed for each paper. Submitted papers will undergo a  peer review process, coordinated by the Program Chairs and
the IPC. The paper should be submitted only if you intend to present the paper at the conference. The authors are
invited to submit the full version of their manuscripts online through the online paper submission

https://controls.papercept.net/conferences/scripts/start.pl

Important Dates:
Submission site opening: December 1st, 2013
Invited Session proposal: June 15th, 2013
Notification of acceptance/rejection: July 29th, 2013
Final paper submission: September 9th, 2013
Congress opening: October 28th, 2013

Honorary Chairs :
Elena Maria Valcher, Italy
Panos Antsaklis, USA
Hasan Khalil, USA

General Chairs :
Mohamed Djemai, France
Mohamed Boudour, Algeria
Abdelaziz Hamzaoui, France

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4.3 Interdisciplinary Symposium on Signals and Systems for Medical Applications
Contributed by: Antoine
Chaillet,antoine.chaillet@supelec.fr

Call for abstracts/financial support: Interdisciplinary Symposium on Signals and Systems for Medical Applications

We are pleased to announce the Interdisciplinary Symposium on Signals and Systems for Medical Applications (ISSSMA
2013).
The symposium will take place at Institut Henri Poincaré, in the heart of Paris, France, on the 3rd and 4th June
2013.
It is organized by members of the Laboratoire des Signaux et Systèmes (Gif sur Yvette, France) and aims at fostering
interaction between medical practitioners, medical device developers and signals and systems researchers.

The symposium is made of three independent workshops:
- Workshop 1: Feedback and synchronization in neuroscience- Workshop 2: Modeling and analysis of cancer cell
dynamics
- Workshop 3: Medical imaging.

Financial support will be provided to a selection of PhD students. Do not hesitate to encourage your students to
submit a poster abstract !
Full information is available at:
http://isssma2013.sciencesconf.org

IMPORTANT DATES:
- Poster submission Deadline: March, 15th 2013
- Deadline for application to financial support: March,
15th 2013
- Notification of acceptance/rejection: April 2013
- Workshop: June 3-4, 2013.

We look forward to seeing you there.
The ISSSMA 2013 Organizing committee

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4.4 10th International Conference on Autonomic Computing
Contributed by: Xiaoyun Zhu,xzhu@vmware.com

June 26-28, 2013 San Jose, CA
Co-held with the 2013 USENIX Federated Conferences Week
Sponsored by USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems
Association
https://www.usenix.org/conference/icac13

* Important Dates
Paper registrations (title and abstract) due: February 25, 2013, 11:59 p.m. PST
Paper submissions due: March 4, 2013, 11:59 p.m. PST Poster/demo and Ph.D. forum proposals due: March 11, 2013
Notification to authors: April 15, 2013
Final paper files due: May 22, 2013

* Overview
ICAC is the leading conference on autonomic computing techniques, foundations, and applications. Large-scale
systems of all types, such as data centers, compute clouds, sensor networks, embedded or pervasive
environments, and the Internet of Things are becoming increasingly complex and burdensome for people to manage.
Autonomic computing systems reduce this burden by managing their own behavior in accordance with high-level goals. In
autonomic systems, resources and applications are managed to maximize performance and minimize cost, while
maintaining predictable and reliable behavior in the face of varying workloads, failures, and malicious threats.
Achieving self-management requires and motivates research that spans a wide variety of scientific and engineering
disciplines, includingdistributed systems, artificial intelligence, machine learning, modeling, control theory, optimization,
planning, decision theory, user interface design, data  management, software engineering, emergent behavior, and
bio-inspired computing. ICAC brings together researchers and practitioners from disparate disciplines, application
domains, and perspectives, enabling them to discover and share underlying commonalities in their approaches to
making resources, applications, and systems more autonomic.

* Topics
Papers are solicited from all areas of autonomic computing, including (but not limited to):
- Self-managing components, such as compute, storage, and networking devices; embedded and real-time systems; and
mobile devices such as smart phones- AI and mathematical techniques, such as machine
learning, control theory, operations research, probability and stochastic processes, queuing theory, rule-based
systems, and bio-inspired techniques, and their use in autonomic computing
- End-to-end design and implementations for management of resources, workloads, availability, performance,
reliability, power/cooling, security, and others- Monitoring systems that can scale to large environments
- Hypervisors, operating systems, middleware, or application support for autonomic computing
- Novel human interfaces for monitoring and controlling autonomic systems
- Goal specification and policies, including specification and modeling of service-level agreements, behavior
enforcement, IT governance, and business-driven IT management
- Frameworks, principles, architectures, and toolkits, from software engineering practices and experimental
methodologies to agent-based techniques- Automated management techniques for emerging
applications, systems, and platforms, including social networks, Big Data systems, multi-core processors, and
Internet of Things
- Fundamental science and theory of self-managing systems for understanding, controlling, or exploiting emergent
system behaviors to enforce autonomic properties- Applications of autonomic computing and experiences with
prototyped or deployed systems solving real-world problems in science, engineering, business, or society
- Papers will be judged on originality, significance, interest, correctness, clarity and relevance to the
broader community. Papers are strongly encouraged to report on experiences, measurements, user studies, and
provide an appropriate quantitative evaluation if at all possible.

* Paper Submissions
Full papers (a maximum of 10 pages) and short papers (4 pages) are invited on a wide variety of topics relating to
autonomic computing. Both full and short papers should be typeset in two-column format in 10 point type on 12 point
(single-spaced) leading, with the text block being no more than 6.5" wide by 9" deep. Both kinds of papers should be
submitted via the Web submission form at
https://papers.usenix.org/hotcrp/icac13/.
Complete formatting and submission instructions can be found at
https://www.usenix.org/conference/icac13/requirements-icac-13-authors.
Authors are also encouraged to submit a poster or demo that summarizes or augments their paper (see below).

Simultaneous submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously published work, or
plagiarism constitutes dishonesty or fraud. USENIX, like other scientific and technical conferences and journals,
prohibits these practices and may take action against authors who have committed them. See the USENIX Conference
Submissions Policy for details. Papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms will not be considered. If
you are uncertain whether your submission meets USENIX's guidelines, please contact the program co-chairs,
icac13chairs@usenix.org, or the USENIX office, submissionspolicy@usenix.org.
At least one author of an accepted paper is expected to present the paper in person at the conference. The
accepted papers will be available online to registered attendees before the conference and will also appear in
proceedings distributed via USB drives at the conference. If your accepted paper should not be published prior to
the event, please notify production@usenix.org. The papers will be available online to everyone beginning on June 26,
2013. Accepted submissions will be treated as confidential prior to publication on the USENIX ICAC '13 Web site;
rejected submissions will be permanently treated as confidential.

* Special Tracks
To facilitate community collaboration and exchange of ideas in emergent technological areas, ICAC '13 will host
two special tracks, each of which will be reviewed by its own subcommittee. Each track has its own schedule for
submissions; please review the respective schedules carefully. More information regarding the special track on
Self-Aware Internet of Things is available at https://www.usenix.org/conference/icac13/self-iot-self-aware-internet-things.
More information regarding the special track on Management of Big Data Systems is available at
https://www.usenix.org/conference/icac13/mbds-management-big-data-systems.

* Posters, Demonstrations, and Exhibitions ICAC '13 will also feature a poster and demonstration
session consisting of research prototypes and technology artifacts that demonstrate autonomic software or autonomic
computing principles. For formatting and submission instructions, plus the Web submission form specific to
this session, see
https://www.usenix.org/conference/icac13/icac-13-call-posters.

* PhD Thesis Digest Forum
Current Ph.D. students who are working on topics relevant to autonomic computing are invited to submit a short
summary (up to 2 pages) of their work. Top selected submissions will be presented at a Ph.D. forum during the
ICAC '13 conference, to receive constructive feedback from experts in the field and peers. For detailed submission
instructions, see
https://www.usenix.org/conference/icac13/doctoral-forum.

* Workshops
Two workshops will take place in conjunction with ICAC '13 during USENIX Federated Conferences Week: Feedback
Computing'13
(https://www.usenix.org/conference/feedback13) and ESOS'13 (https://www.usenix.org/conference/esos13).

* Conference Organizers:
General Chair: Jeffrey Kephart, IBM Research Program Co-Chairs: Calton Pu, Georgia Institute of
Technology; Xiaoyun Zhu, VMware
Poster/Demo/Exhibit Chair: Samuel Kounev, Karlsruhe  Institute of Technology
PhD Forum Chair: Rean Griffith, VMware
Publicity Chairs: Martina Maggio, Lund University; Ming Zhao, Florida International University;
Daniel Batista, IME/USP (Region Chair: South America); Vartan Padaryan, Russian Academy of Sciences (Region
Chair: Russia);
Jianfeng Zhan, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Region Chair:
China)

* More information:
Web: https://www.usenix.org/conference/icac13
Email: icac13chairs@usenix.org
LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups/ICAC-Conference-4264583