[alife] Reminder: Workshop on Synthesizing Concepts from Bio and CS at ALife XV

[Emily Dolson]

This is a gentle reminder that abstracts for the Synthesizing Concepts from
Biology and Computer Science workshop at this year's Artificial Life
conference are due in slightly under a month. Let us know if you have any
questions!

Call for Abstracts:

*Synthesizing Concepts from Biology and Computer Science*
*Workshop at ALife XV*, July 4-8, 2016, Cancun, Mexico
Organizers: Emily Dolson <http://EmilyLDolson.com> and Charles Ofria
<http://ofria,com>
Submission deadline: May 15th, 2016
Notification of acceptance: June 1st, 2016
Website: http://emilydolson.github.io/scbcs/

Sick of constantly having to write background sections that summarize the
same intersection of literature? Wish there was a review paper that you
could cite to explain to people from all fields how the research fits
together? Now’s your chance to make it happen!

Often, research done by scientists in one field can take a long time to
percolate to scientists in another field. This is especially true in
Biology and Computer Science, even with closely related sub-fields such as
evolutionary computation and evolutionary biology. Such delays can
substantially slow down scientific discovery, leading to the premium that
many funding agencies have placed on research that cuts across disciplines.
The field of Artificial Life is populated by such interdisciplinary
scientists, who are well-positioned to improve this situation by surveying
research from the constituent communities and synthesizing it into a
coherent whole, including evolutionary biology, ecology, animal behavior,
molecular biology, evolutionary computation, robotics, philosophy, and many
other areas of biology and computer science.

*The goal of this workshop*​ is to discuss how to write such synthesis
paper, identify important cross-disciplinary topics related to Artificial
Life, and organize interested attendees into longer-term working groups to
write a series of reviews*.* To this end, we will be accepting 5-10
proposals for this workshop. Each proposal should summarize a topic for a
cross-disciplinary review paper relevant to Artificial Life, including a
description of which fields/bodies of research the review would draw upon.
Authors of accepted proposals will give a 10-15 minute talk about their
proposed topic during the first half of the workshop. After the talks,
interested attendees will break into working groups to begin planning out
review papers for each topic. Because the goal of these papers is to bring
together a wide range of ideas and experience, large working groups in
which everyone contributes a small piece to the paper are encouraged, and
working groups will be encouraged to invite additional contributions to
their reviews from beyond the Artificial Life community. At the end of the
workshop, we will reconvene to discuss overarching ideas and plan logistics
for writing the review series. We will also set up organizational structure
and a target timeline to facilitate completion of the reviews after the
conference.

Possible topics include: complexity, emergence, fitness landscapes,
information flow, modularity, open-ended evolution, plasticity,
recombination, robustness. Feel free to contact the workshop organizers to
identify others working in similar directions.

The workshop organizers plan to lead a synthesis paper on the contributions
of ecology, evolutionary computation, and other fields to research on
population diversity.  An example abstract on this topic will be available
on the workshop webpage.



*Workshop outline:*1. Overview of motivations and issues in writing
cross-disciplinary synthesis papers
2. Presentation of accepted topics followed by short discussion
3. Workshop attendees organize into break-out groups around each of the
presented topics to begin collaborating
4. Full group discussion to plan next steps for writing manuscripts and
submitting them as a paper series, collection, or special journal issue

*Instructions for submission:*
Proposals should be approximately 1-2 pages, and address the following
questions:
- What topics will the review address?
- Which subfields will the review bring together?
- How will synthesizing these bodies of research benefit the field(s)?
- Examples of terms and/or concepts used differently across the fields

*Expectations of accepted proposals:* By submitting a proposal to this
workshop, you are expressing interest in taking the lead on organizing the
resulting review paper and agreeing that one of the proposers will give a
~10-15 minute talk on your proposed topic. It is recommended that you plan
on bringing a rough outline of the review with you to the workshop as
jumping off point for further discussion. All proposals and any outlines
provided to us before the conference will be made available on the website.

For more information or to submit a proposal, contact Emily Dolson (
dolsonem at msu.edu) and Charles Ofria (ofria at msu.edu)