[alife] Call for abstracts: Workshop on “Social Learning and Cultural Evolution (SlaCE)" at ALife XV

[James Borg]

This is a call for abstracts for the First International Workshop on
“Social Learning and Cultural Evolution (SlaCE)”, which will be held
at ALIFE XV in Cancun, Mexico.

Organizers:
Chris Marriott <dr.chris.marriott at gmail.com>,
Paul Smaldino <paul.smaldino at gmail.com>,
Peter Andras <p.andras at keele.ac.uk>,
James Borg <j.borg at keele.ac.uk>

Submission deadline: 29th May, 2016
Notification of acceptance: 10th June, 2016
Submission website: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=slace2016
Workshop website: http://www.climbinggiants.com/slace/index.html
Contact e-mail: slace2016 at easychair.org

The first half of this workshop aims to provide an interdisciplinary
overview of the fields of social learning and cultural evolution. By
doing this we hope to extend the scope of research in the social
learning ALife community to incorporate more interdisciplinary
concepts and provide a firm basis for interdisciplinary discussion and
collaboration. We also hope to provide a robust background for
research on social learning and cultural evolution from multiple
perspectives. This is aimed to help newcomers to the field in their
initial research and to invigorate established researchers in the
field to re-consider the bigger interdisciplinary questions of the
field. In the first half of the workshop we will have talks by invited
speakers and tutorials by experts in a range of relevant fields.

The second half of the workshop will consist of short presentations
from contributors on their work in the field (current or historical),
collective research goals and milestones in social learning and
cultural evolution or new concepts, modelling techniques or research
questions. Presenters are encouraged to address any of the following
topics (though this list is not exhaustive):
- Social Learning Mechanisms
- Social Information Transfer
- The interaction between social and non social learning
- The interaction between learning and evolution
- Environmental Variability, Environmental Complexity, and Social Learning
- Social Learning Strategies
- Social Learning and Life History Evolution
- Models of Learning in Nature
- The Evolution of Culture
- Communication
- Social Networks and Social Contagion on networks
- Group structure and learning bias
- Social Robotics
- Grounded (Animat) models of Social Learning
- Do our definitions match those used in other related fields (i.e
Imitation, Culture, ...)
- Human Cultural Evolution (Cumulative Culture)
- Co-operation
- Gene-Culture Co-Evolution/ Dual Inheritance Theory
- Philosophy of Culture
- Memetics

The workshop will conclude with an open discussion on future of Social
Learning and Cultural Evolution research in ALife.

We ask potential contributors to submit an extended abstract (1 page).
Authors of accepted submissions will present during the second half of
the workshop. We are open to presenters who are contributing during
the main ALife conference to also talk about this work during the
workshop in order to have additional discussion. PhD students and
young career academics who are new to the field are encouraged to
submit to this workshop.

SLACE-2016 will be held on July 7 2016, at ALIFE XV

Kind Regards,
James, Chris, Peter and Paul

=============================================
 James Borg
 Teaching Fellow & PhD Candidate
 School of Computing and Mathematics
 Room CR122
 Colin Reeves Building
 Keele University
 Keele, Staffordshire
 United Kingdom, ST5 5BG
 Phone: (01782) 733415
 email: j.borg at keele.ac.uk
=============================================