[alife] IEEE CEC 2005 - Special Session on Artificial Life

Chrystopher Nehaniv C.L.Nehaniv at herts.ac.uk
Fri Sep 10 13:10:58 PDT 2004



                     IEEE CEC 2005 - Special Session on

                              Artificial Life

                               September 2005
                             Edinburgh, Scotland

Special Session Organizer:

   Chrystopher L. Nehaniv
   University of Hertfordshire, UK

  Scope and Theme:

   Artificial Life is the study of the simulation and synthesis of living
   systems. In particular, this science of generalized living and
   life-like systems provides engineering with billions of years of
   design expertise to learn from and exploit through the example of the
   evolution of organic life on earth. Increased understanding of the
   massively successful design diversity, complexity, and adaptability of
   life is rapidly making inroads into all areas of engineering and the
   Sciences of the Artificial. Numerous applications of ideas from nature
   and their generalizations from life-as-we-know-it to
   life-as-it-could-be continually find their way into engineering and
   science.

   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)
     * * Terry Bossomaier (Charles Sturt University, Australia)
     * * Larry Bull (University of the West of England, UK)
     * * Mathieu Capcarrere (University of Kent)
     * * Peter Cariani (Eaton Peabody Laboratory of Auditory Physiology,
       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)
     * * Stefano Nolfi (Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technology,
       Italy)
     * * Jan T. Kim (University of Luebeck, Germany)
     * * 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)

   [* = already confirmed PC member]

   All submissions will be peer-reviewed by three reviewers according to
   IEEE standards.

   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
     _________________________________________________________________


    Last update 10 September 2004
    C.L.Nehaniv at herts.ac.uk

-----------
Dr. Chrystopher L. Nehaniv
Professor of Mathematical & Evolutionary Computer Sciences

Adaptive Systems & Algorithms Research Groups
School of Computer Science
University of Hertfordshire
College Lane
Hatfield, Hertfordshire AL10 9AB
United Kingdom
e-mail: C.L.Nehaniv at herts.ac.uk
phone:  +44-1707-284-470
fax:    +44-1707-284-303
URL:    http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/welcome.html

Director, EPSRC Network on Evolvability in Biological & Software Systems
Associate Editor, BioSystems
Associate Editor, Interaction Studies




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