[alife] Artificial Life at IEEE CEC - Edinburgh, Scoltand (CFP)

[Chrystopher L. Nehaniv]

 Call for Papers:  Special Sessions at IEEE CEC 2005
 (Sept 2005, just before ECAL) Submission: Deadline 11 April 2005


      IEEE CEC 2005 - Special Session on


  Artificial Life


      at the 2005 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation
      <http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/%7Edwcorne/cec2005/>
      Edinburgh, Scotland - 2-5 September 2005


      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)
    * 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 (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; 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

Submissions Deadline: 11 April 2005
Notification to Authors: 11 May 2005
Camera-Ready Copies Due: 11 June 2005

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 
<http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/%7Enehaniv/IEEE-CEC05-AL.html>