Artificial Life

Scope and Theme:

This special session will stress the development of our understanding of fundamental principles from biological systems underlying this success, and promote the development of a scientific and professional community that seeks to systematically study and apply them. Artificial Life promotes a unified view of biology and technological design by identifying their common reliance on (1) adaptability to changing environments via interaction and (2) evolutionary methods. Organic evolution has achieved the only known solutions to the tremendous problems of scalability, robustness and adaptability in systems that may consist of astronomical numbers of elements (with even more interactions and dependencies between them, such as for cells in the body of a multicellular plant or animal, or for neurons in the brain).

These (bottom-up) solutions achieved by biology are, moreover, grounded in particular physical and system constraints, coordinate robust stability through different levels of hierarchical organization, and are capable of growing, developing, and adapting dynamically in a complex environment with changing requirements. Such problems represent a complexity ceiling for traditional human engineering methods that fail to scale up to today's development and maintenance problems in software, telecommunications and control. Particular areas of current explosive growth in scientific understanding relevant to the success we see in biological systems include the study of interaction, development, symbiosis (and its evolutionary extreme, symbiogenesis), embodiment, epigenetics, and developmental robustness and plasticity, higher-level units of individuality (with heritability of fitness), evolutionary developmental morphogenesis with genetic regulatory control, and massively parallel and distributed multicellular networks with special connectivity characteristics. Current practice in robotics and evolutionary computation is benefitting from ever deeper understanding of these principles and mechanisms underlying the success of life-on-earth, as generalized to other domains by Artificial Life. Target topics in this special session will include, but not necessarily be be limited to, the following:

Focus Topics

• Applications of Artificial Life (in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Telecommunications)
• Design by Evolution
• Social Robotics and Interaction Dynamics
• Development and Evolution of Multicellular Systems
• Demonstrations of Self-Repair, Self-Maintenance, & Self-Production Mechanisms
• Demonstrations of Growth, Regeneration and Apoptosis Mechanisms
• Methods and Applications of Evolutionary Developmental Systems (e.g. developmental genetic-regulatory networks (DGRNs), multicellularity)
• Signal Transduction and Genetic Regulatory Control in Life-like Systems
• Degrees of Embodiment and Applications
• Self-Reproducing Automata and their Applications
• Minimal Robotic Mechanisms for Life-like Systems
• Evolutionary Robotics and Control
• Sensor Evolution
• Nanotechnology and Compilable Matter
• Cellular Automata and Automata Networks
• Systems Biology Applications of Artificial Life
• Information-Theoretic and Dynamical Systems Methods in the Foundation of Engineering Applications of Life-like Systems
• Constructive Biology: Validation of Biological Theory through Building (and applications)
• Evolution of Information Flow in the Perception-Action Loop
• Symbiogenesis and Applications
• Phenotypic Plasticity and Adaptability in Scalable, Robust Growing Systems
• Evolutionarily Guided Design in Novel Media (e.g. liquid crystal, reaction-diffusion systems, etc.)
• Applications in Space Sciences, Aeronautics & Medicine
• Evolvability and Genetic Systems
• Interaction Dynamics
• Biological Clocks and their Generalizations in Synchronization and Control
• Computational Morphogenesis
• Hertiability of Fitness and Epigenetics

Scientific Program Committee Members

• Hussein Abbass (University of New South Wales, Australia)
• Aude Billard (EPFL, Switzerland)
• Cynthia Breazeal (MIT Media Lab, USA)
• Terry Bossomaier (Charles Sturt University, Australia)
• Larry Bull (University of the West of England, UK)
• Mathieu Capcarrere (University of Kent, UK)
• Peter Cariani (Tufts University, USA)
• Kerstin Dautenhahn (Univ. Hertfordshire, UK)
• Dario Floreano (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland)
• Robert A. Freitas, Jr (Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, USA)
• James M. Goodwin (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
• David Green (Monash University, Australia)
• Auke Jan Ijspeert (EPFL, Switzerland)
• Takashi Ikegami (University of Tokyo, Japan)
• Peter McOwan (Queen Mary, University of London)
• Akira Namatame, (National Defense Academy, Japan)
• Chrystopher L. Nehaniv (University of Hertfordshire, UK; Chair)
• Stefano Nolfi (Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technology, Italy)
• Jan T. Kim (University of East Anglia, UK)
• Hod Lipson (Cornell University, USA)
• Paul Marrow (British Telecom, UK)
• Julian F. Miller (University of York, UK)
• Daniel Polani (Univ. Hertfordshire, UK)
• Hiroki Sayama (University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan)
• Brian Scassellati (Yale University, USA)
• Richard Tateson (British Telecom, UK)
• Janet Wiles (University of Queensland, Australia)

Submissions and Important Dates

All submissions will be peer-reviewed according to IEEE standards. Submissions should be in IEEE two-column format up to 6 pages according to instructions on IEEE CEC website giving format and uploading requirement details. (Authors should indicate this special session when uploading their submission.)

Organized with the support of:
The IEEE Working Group on Artificial Life and Complex Adaptive Systems
The U.K. EPSRC Network on Evolvability in Biological and Software Systems

Special Session Homepage and Updates: http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/IEEE-CEC05-AL.html