Bio-inspired computing is a field of study that loosely knits together subfields related to the topics of connectionism, social behavior and emergence. It is often closely related to the field of artificial intelligence, as many of its pursuits can be linked to machine learning. It relies heavily on the fields of biology, computer science and mathematics. Briefly put, Biologically inspired computing is a major subset of natural computation

Bio-inspired computation is a field that includes different computational approaches that are based on principles or models of biological systems. The used methods rely heavily on the fields of biology, computer science and mathematics. In general speaking, bio-inspired computing uses computers to model nature in the hope that the study of nature may improve the usage of computers. This class of methods, such as evolutionary algorithms, ant colony optimization, and swarm intelligence, complements traditional techniques. Bio-inspired computational methods are nowadays applied to large-scale applications where only little is known about the treated problem and where the well-known classic approaches generally fail. Therefore, bio-inspired methods are becoming increasingly important to face of the complexity of today's demanding applications. Their usage has been very promising in various fields ranging from computer, electronics and mechanical engineering to chemical engineering and molecular biology.

This special session is dedicated to putting together a collection of scientific and technical contributions to the field of Efficient implementations of bio-inspired computation and applications, including parallel architectures of software and hardware accelerators, special-purpose processors, embedded systems, System-On-Chip and Network-On-Chip based implementations. Therefore, we seek original manuscripts for this Special session on Bio-inspired Computing and Applications as well as related topics, scheduled to appear in the proceedings of ICCSA 2012 (http://www.iccsa.org/), to be published by LNCS, Springer-Verlag.

Authors of the best papers of the special issue will be asked to extend their work to be considered for publication in a special issue of periodical journal.

Prospective authors that need further information on the related topics, please, do not hesitate to contact the organizers.

Organizers:
Nadia Nedjah, Department of Electronics Engineering and Telecommunications, Faculty of Engineering, State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), nadia@eng.uerj.br

Luiza de Macedo Mourelle, Department of Systems Engineering and Computation, Faculty of Engineering, State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), ldmm@eng.uerj.br

Felipe M. G. França, COPPE, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), felipe@cos.ufrj.br