[alife] Call for abstracts: Workshop on Steering living and life-like systems at ALife XV, Cancún, Mexico, July 2016

[Rob Mills]

Workshop announcement and call for abstracts:

*Steering Living and Life-like Complex Systems*, to be held at ALife XV in
Cancún, Mexico Monday, 4 July  – Friday, 8 July 2016


===== TOPIC AND SCOPE =====
New technologies that exploit or emulate the unique properties of living
systems have great potential, but living and life-like systems inherently
exhibit non-linearity and complexity, for which conventional “brute force”
approaches appear insufficient. An emerging collection of approaches use
“steering”, whereby we continually interact with systems and attempt to
move them between attractors.  This may be achieved, for instance, via
manipulating the abiotic environment (e.g. in the evolution of biofilms) or
by artifacts injecting social information (e.g. in bio-hybrid societies),
in each case, understanding system dynamics and using effective leverage
points can thus reduce the effort needed to retain a given desirable
state.  Conceptually-related approaches are also being proposed in
life-like complex adaptive systems such as regional economies, industrial
networks and smart cities.  Numerous crucial living and life-like systems
consist of, or are profoundly influenced by, interconnected ecological,
economic and social dynamics; and thus developing steering approaches may
require the integration of participatory or political processes with tools
from artificial life and complexity science.


===== EVENT DETAILS =====
The workshop will be a broad-ranging and discursive event, with a number of
short, provocative talks covering key themes and questions in steering
complex systems from different perspectives.  To maximise output and
progress on ideas, it will comprise two main sessions, as well as a
workshop dinner and informal scheduled coffee time discussion meetups.  The
main sessions aim to: (1) frame the dialogue and identify issues,
opportunities and challenges in steering complex living and life-like
systems and (2) pull together and develop ideas from the preceding
interactions for a position paper in an interdisciplinary journal [venue is
being negotiated].

===== SUBMISSIONS =====
We invite contributions in the form of one-page abstracts for oral
presentation, indicating ideas, challenges, or solutions in steering
complex living or life-like systems (please see the full list of topics
below).  Abstracts will be selected on the alignment with topic and
capacity to provoke debate.

More information: https://steeringcomplexsystems.wordpress.com/
Main conference website: http://xva.life/

kind regards,
Alexandra Penn (University of Surrey) a.penn at surrey.ac.uk
Rob Mills (University of Lisbon) rob.mills at fc.ul.pt
Emma Hart (Edinburgh Napier University) E.Hart at napier.ac.uk


===== KEY THEMES =====
Key topics include:
Conceptual, philosophical and technical issues in steering living systems
-- what are the key challenges, opportunities and methodologies?
Examples of steering living or life-like systems: Case studies, experiments
and models
Ethical and societal issues in manipulating natural or life-like systems
Technical, philosophical and social implications of a “life-like” systems
approach to societal issues – metaphor or more?
Strategies for predicting, mitigating or adapting to unintended
consequences of intervention in complex systems
Methods for identifying key points of intervention or “system levers”
Manipulating selective contexts and fitness landscapes for system steering
Designing interventions in complex systems
Adaptive management, whole-systems and complexity design approaches
Impact of intervention in models of self-organisation and collective
behaviour
Synthetic ecology, living technology and bio-hybrid societies and systems
Societal involvement in system steering: participatory approaches,
narratives for understanding complexity, political processes, policy design
and evaluation in the context of complex adaptive systems.
Experiential steering of complex systems: intuition, craft and interaction
vs modelling and scientific understanding. Constructing experiential
environments for understanding complexity
“natural complex system steerers” – niche constructors, environmental
engineers etc
Other perspectives: approaches to steering complex adaptive systems from
other domains, what can we learn?