[alife] CFP: IEEE CEC ARTIFICIAL LIFE - deadline 11 April

[Chrystopher Nehaniv]

                  IEEE CEC 2005 - Special Session on

                           Artificial Life

        at the 2005 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation
               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 (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

   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

-----------
Prof. Dr. Chrystopher L. Nehaniv
Research 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