Cambridge Conservation Forum / RELU 2008 Summer Symposium

Future farming in the UK: global implications for society and biodiversity

New Hall, Cambridge Thursday 3rd July 2008

Background and aim

UK agriculture could change radically over the next few decades as a result of global economic development, population growth, climate change, technological advances (e.g. biofuels) and rising oil prices. Indeed such international linkages have been illustrated recently by events, such as droughts in Australia and increasing biofuel production, that have led to significant increases in wheat prices.

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Title: ICSA2008
Location: Sapporo, Japan
Description: “Sustainability on Food, Feed, Fiber, Water, Energy: Science, Technologies, and Global Strategies”
Start Date: 2008-07-02
End Date: 2008-07-06

By Tom Heap Costing the Earth, Radio 4 Cows consume 8kg of grain for 1kg of meat Feel-good food just got tricky. It was easy when “good” meant anything which could have stepped off a John Constable canvas: free range chicken, foraging pigs and grazing cattle. But then climate change came along. No one noticed at first, still concentrating their fire on the obvious targets like 4×4s, long flights and coal power stations; but our meaty diet is laden with greenhouse gases, and trying to reduce them throws up some unpalatable choices.

Read More at the BBC

Agricultural countermeasures in nuclear emergency management: a stakeholders’ survey for multi-criteria model development
Turcanu, C; Carle, B; Hardeman, F
JOURNAL OF THE OPERATIONAL RESEARCH SOCIETY 59 (3): 305-312 MAR 2008

Information and its management for differentiation of agricultural products: The example of specialty coffee
Niederhauser, N; Oberthur, T; Kattnig, S; Cock, J
COMPUTERS AND ELECTRONICS IN AGRICULTURE 61 (2): 241-253 MAY 2008

Procedure for the classification and characterization of farms for agricultural production planning: Application in the Northwest of Spain
Riveiro, JA; Marey, MF; Marco, JL; Alvarez, CJ
COMPUTERS AND ELECTRONICS IN AGRICULTURE 61 (2): 169-178 MAY 2008

Wither agricultural DSS?
Matthews, KB; Schwarz, G; Buchan, K; Rivington, M; Miller, D
COMPUTERS AND ELECTRONICS IN AGRICULTURE 61 (2): 149-159 MAY 2008

Decision modelling for environmental protection: The contingent valuation method applied to greenhouse waste management
Parra, S; Aguilar, FJ; Calatrava, J
BIOSYSTEMS ENGINEERING 99 (4): 469-477 APR 2008

Call For papers

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies  (IJMSO)

Special Issue on: “Agricultural Metadata and Semantics”

A common vision that may serve as an enabler for sustainable development, environmental preservation and fighting hunger in the world is the involvement, collaboration and coordination of activities dealing with the production, organisation and exchange of agricultural knowledge. Numerous technical and subject experts are working on related topics, tackling with issues such as classifications and taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, thesauri, authority files, glossaries, metadata specifications and their application profiles, as well as ontology-driven applications.
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We are moving close to the point where to conference database will be polled for titles and authors to use in the invitational program.  The call for papers remains up until at least the end of June.  We currently have 14 submissions in our stream and a few that we know are in the pipe line. We probably represent around 7-10% of the conference activity at this stage.

Lluis Pla and myself are leading two plenary debates where we raise issues from agriculture and set them into a wider OR debate, each lasting around 90minutes.  The deabtes will be transcribed by the OR society for publication in OR INSIGHT, the society’s magazine. The titles are:

1) Sustainability! Cometh the hour, cometh the Operational Researcher?

2) Strategic Applied OR: Wither Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries, etc or wither not?

Within the setting of the conference we will also be holding meeting for EWG-ORAFM and for the UK Special Interest Group

    Learning and Intelligent OptimizatioN Conference

                              LION 3
                                  

                14-18 January, 2009. Trento, Italy

              More details and up-to-date information at
                www.intelligent-optimization.org/LION3

                                  
Building on the success of the previous editions we are organizing a new event for January 2009. The LION conference is aimed at exploring the boundaries and uncharted territories between machine learning, artificial intelligence, mathematical programming and algorithms for hard optimization problems. The main purpose of the event is to bring together experts from these areas to discuss new ideas and methods, challenges and opportunities in various application areas, general trends and specific developments.

The conference program will consist of plenary presentations, introductory and advanced tutorials, technical presentations, and it will give ample time for discussions.

Relevant Research Areas
========================

LION 3 solicits contributions dealing with all aspects of learning and intelligent optimization. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Stochastic local search methods and meta-heuristics
- Hybridizations of constraint and mathematical programming with
meta-heuristics
- Supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning applied to
heuristic search
- Reactive search (online self-tuning methods)
- Algorithm portfolios and off-line tuning methods
- Algorithms for dynamic, stochastic and multi-objective problems
- Interface(s) between discrete and continuous optimization
- Experimental analysis and modeling of algorithms
- Theoretical foundations
- Parallelization of optimization algorithms
- Memory-based optimization
- Prohibition-based methods (tabu search)
- Memetic algorithms
- Evolutionary algorithms
- Dynamic local search
- Iterated local search
- Variable neighborhood search
- Swarm intelligence methods (ant colony optimization, particle swarm
optimization etc.)
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The Second International Conference
on Computer & Computing Technologies in Agriculture (CCTA2008)
  October 18th-20th, 2008 Beijing, China

Dear Sir/Madam,
We are pleased to inform you that the Second International Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture (CCTA2008) will be held in Beijing, China in October 18-20, 2008. The URL Address is http://www.iccta.cn.
The conference will focus on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture and targeted participants are from universities, institutes, research organizations, government, large companies, and regional development agencies and consultants all over the world. The conference will provide a forum for original research contributions and practical system design, implementation, and applications of computer and computing technologies in agriculture.
All accepted papers will be published in the Proceedings of CCTA 2008. Selected best papers will be published in a special issue of the International Journals (we have applied, and will let you know the results as soon as possible). Other papers will be published in the IFIP Series in Spinger Press in USA, which was listed in ISI Proceedings.
All abstracts should be submitted to the Secretary of the Conference at ccta2008@sina.com, by not later than February 29, 2008.

Topics and areas of interest include, but are not limited to the following Technologies in Agriculture:
Applied Mathematics
Numerical Analysis
Simulation, Optimization, Modeling
Systems Theory
Circuits and Systems
Neural Networks
Fuzzy Systems
Optimization
Multidimensional Systems
Computing & Computational Science
Statistics
Telecommunications
Signal Processing
Computer Science
Multimedia
Wireless and Optical Communications
Agricultural Decision Support System and Expert System
GIS, GPS, RS and Precision Farming
Agricultural System Simulation
Intelligent Monitoring and Control
ICT applications in Rural Area
(more…)

Members of the Operational Research Society and proven Members of affiliated EURO national OR Societies (http://www.euro-online.org/display.php?page=societies&) can claim discounted fees of around 20%. 

Students recieve a discount of c. 70% 

Also see the very restricted Assisted Places Scheme with deadline of 30th June

http://www.orsoc.org.uk/orshop/(nusgkj55o3zmft45bu5di5fy)/orcontent.aspx?inc=or50_assisted.htm

 Agriculture and natural resources stream

Dates:

Papers can be accepted for presentation at any stage before the conference, but bear in mind these dates to obtain maximum impact and publicity.

1. As Soon As Possible submit a working title and authors
2. By 25th April submit a finalized title and authors for inclusion in the invitational programme
3. By 1st July submit a finalized 250 word abstract for the conference handbook

Abstracts are submitted via the OR society’s website  http://www.theorsociety.com

Attendence fees are discuounted to members of the Operational Research society and to the affiliated societies within EURO

In addition to meeting at OR50 a relaunch event is planned for February 2009. Send expressions of interest in this special interest group to Daniel Sandars, Cranfield University, e-mail daniel.sandars@cranfield.ac.uk