The Computer Science Department at Indiana University Bloomington presents "The 2005 Midwest NKS Conference," a conference dedicated to the intrinsic beauty of (mathematical) problems with simple initial conditions and complex overall behavior. The conference theme this year will be "Systems based on numbers". Submissions of proposals for high-quality papers, posters, tutorials or plenary presentations are invited and topics for submission include but are not limited to: iterated maps, successive powers, recursive sequences, PDEs, rewriting systems, tag systems, cellular automata, Turing machines, and register machines. We particularly encourage submissions from NKS Summer School graduates (classes of 2003, 2004 and 2005). Submission of papers, posters and tutorials covering the full range of the NKS applications are also highly entertained and will be presented in concurrent sessions and/or specialized tracks.

The conference website is located at http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dgerman/2005midwestNKSconference and includes a web forum and a mechanism for contacting the steering committee. A list of sponsors and a larger advisory committee is in the making. In keeping up with the true spirit of NKS we plan to collect feedback and suggestions from the conference participants on the tentative conference program and the keynote address(es) and to allow prospective participants to review the abstracts submitted (and vote for their inclusion into the conference program) on the website. Our hope is that by allowing this extensive, and considerably larger and more public peer-review process to occur ahead of the conference (and in preparation for it) the time spent at the conference will be considerably more profitable for participants. At the same time and from a wider perspective we hope that the conference will thus better serve the larger (international) NKS community. If you would like to participate on any of the committees below, please contact us indicating your academic affiliation and qualifying experience and we will create accounts in the conference software so you can participate in the review of the conference submissions.