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PATAT 2010: PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS & DEMONSTRATIONS The 8th International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling 10th August - 13th August 2010 Belfast, UK This conference is the eighth in a series of conferences that serve as a forum for an international community of researchers, practitioners and vendors on all aspects of computer-aided timetable generation. For more information about the conferences see http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/~B.McCollum/patat10/index.html Featured Keynote Speakers Graham Kendall (University of Nottingham, UK) Jeff Kingston (University of Sydney, Australia) David Ryan (University of Auckland, New Zealand) George White (University of Ottawa, Canada) <!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> <!--[endif]--> The themes of the conference include (but are not limited to): • Educational Timetabling • Transport Timetabling • Employee Timetabling and Rostering • Sports Timetabling • Complexity Issues • Distributed Timetabling Systems Research Areas, including; • Implementations • Commercial Packages • Interactive vs Batch Timetabling • Timetable Updating • Standard Data Formats • Relationship with Other Scheduling Problems • Constraint-Based Methods • Evolutionary Computation • Artificial Intelligence • Mathematical Programming • Expert Systems • Heuristic Search • Knowledge Based Systems • Operational Research • Simulated Annealing • Local Search • Ant Colony Methods • Soft Computing • Tabu Search • Meta-Heuristics • Hyper-Heuristics • Very Large Neighborhood Search • Graph Colouring • Hybrid Methods • Multi-Criteria Decision Making • Fuzzy Reasoning • Data Mining Submissions Authors are invited to submit presentations in one of three categories: (a) Full Papers. Authors should submit papers describing significant, original and unpublished work. Such papers are expected to be approximately 10-20 pages in length but this guideline is not strict. These papers will be fully refereed by the programme committee and the accepted ones will appear in conference proceedings. As in previous years, a selection of the papers will appear in a post conference volume. The second round of refereeing for this volume will take place shortly after the conference. (b) Abstracts. Authors can submit abstracts of up to 1000 words. Abstracts will be fully refereed. The accepted ones will appear in the conference proceedings. Abstracts will not go forward to the second round of refereeing for the post-conference volume. However, authors of accepted abstracts will have the opportunity to write a full paper based on their abstract and submit it for the selected papers volume. People who wish to give a talk (e.g. practitioners, researchers with preliminary or incomplete papers) but do not want to submit a full paper can submit under this category. (c) System Demonstrations. Authors can submit an abstract, describing the major properties and contribution of implemented and/or commercial timetabling systems. Abstracts should not exceed 1000 words (3-4 pages). Authors of accepted submissions in this category would be expected to provide a demonstration of their software during the conference. Demonstration submissions will be evaluated on the basis of their innovation, relevance and scientific contribution. The abstracts will be published in the conference proceedings but they will not be forwarded to the second round of refereeing for the post-conference volume. However, authors of accepted system demonstration abstracts are welcome to submit a full paper to the post-conference volume if they so wish. Submission Instructions Authors of all types of submitted papers are kindly requested to prepare a paper in English and submit it through our online submission system (available by the end of November 2009). The length of the paper should fulfil the requirements given for each category above. All papers must be submitted as a PDF file and authors will be requested to use the templates provided: • the LaTeX version is preferred, • the Microsoft Word version is also acceptable, • no other format can be accepted. Please note that all participants will need to register for the conference and pay the registration fee in order for accepted submissions to appear in the conference proceedings. Deadlines • Paper/abstract/system submissions: January 20th, 2010 • Notification: April 20th, 2010 (at the latest) Organizing and Programme Committee co-chairs Barry McCollum School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Queen's University Belfast and Edmund Burke Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning Research Group, School of Computer Science and Information Technology University of Nottingham Jubilee Campus, Nottingham NG8 1BB United Kingdom PATAT 2010 website: http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/~B.McCollum/patat10/index.html Copyright © 2009 PATAT 2010 This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an attachment may still contain software viruses, which could damage your computer system: you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications with the University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK legislation.