NICSO 2011 is the fifth edition of the International Workshop on Nature Inspired Cooperative Strategies for Optimization. Previous NICSOs were held in Granada (2006,2010), Acireale (2007), Puerto de la Cruz (2008). Papers arising from these workshops were published in books (NICSO 2007, NICSO 2008, NICSO 2010) and in journal special issues:J. of Natural Computing Special issue on Nature Inspired Cooperative Strategies for Optimisation (NICSO) and J. of Memetic Computing.
The motivation behind the NICSO series is to promote, showcase and motivate cutting-edge research at the interface of, on the one hand, optimisation and machine learning and, on the other hand, physics, chemistry and biology with a specific focus on nature inspired cooperative strategies applied to optimisation and search problems of any kind.
Cooperative behavior occurs at all temporal and spatial scales, from the molecular, to the cellular, all the way to ecological and social systems. The NICSO series seeks to uncover principles, processes, mechanisms and protocols occurring at all spatial and temporal scales in which “cooperation”, understood here in a wide sense, plays a role in problem solving and that could be distiled into algorithms useful for search and optimisation.