Satellites

ALife for Social and Environmental Good (ALife4Good)

Alife Slack Channel: #workshop-ALife4Good

Keywords: artificial life, social good, sustainability, biosphere preservation, AI for good, positive future impact

Organizers: Olaf Witkowski (Cross Labs, Tokyo, Japan), Alan Dorin (Monash University, Melbourne, Australia), Julien Hubert (Progress Technologies, Tokyo, Japan), Jitka Cejkova (University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague, Czech Republic), Steen Rasmussen (University of Southern Denmark & Santa Fe Institute, NM, USA), Manuel Baltieri (Riken, Tokyo, Japan), Antoine Pasquali (Cross Labs, Tokyo, Japan)

Call For Contributions: Currently Open, see website below for more details
WORKSHOP WEBSITE

Workshop overview: The purpose of this workshop is to discuss how Artificial Life research can benefit both human society and enhance the life of all organisms on the planet. The session will invite all participants to discuss the initiation of new means to encourage Artificial Life research towards sustained, positive impact with the potential to be felt beyond the field. This will be addressed via an open-ended discussion that begins to set objectives for consideration as end-goals, and for describing means by which progress towards the goals can be monitored or assessed.

Twitter Handle: @ALife4Good

Developmental Neural Networks Workshop (DevoNN)

Alife Slack Channel: #workshop-DevoNN

Keywords: Development, Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience, Developmental Biology, Neurogenesis, Neuronal process, Synaptogenesis, Synaptic pruning

Organizers: Julian F. Miller, Sylvain Cussat-Blanc, Dennis G. Wilson

Call For Contributions: Currently Open, see website below for more details
WORKSHOP WEBSITE

Workshop Description: In nature, brains are built through a process of biological development where structural aspects of the network change while learning. Incorporating development into ANNs raises fundamental questions, such as the balance between structural learning and synaptic learning. In this workshop, we will focus on the questions of neural development, an area that is under-explored in contemporary ANN literature.

Emerging Researchers in Artificial Life

Alife Slack Channel: #workshop-eral

Organizers: Daniel Junghans, Austin J. Ferguson, Acacia Ackles, Alexander Lalejini

Call For Contributions: Currently Open, see website below for more details
WORKSHOP WEBSITE
The Emerging Researchers in Artificial Life (ERA) is the official student, post-doc, and junior researcher group for the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL). The purpose of the ISAL student group is to provide opportunities for students and post-docs interested in artificial life to interact with each other, develop professionally, and contribute to the broader artificial life community. The goal of this workshop is to provide a venue for junior researchers to meet, share their work, and network.

To give junior ALife researchers a minimal-barrier-to-entry venue to share their research with peers, we will offer sign-ups to give lightning talks on research at any stage of development, ranging from rough ideas for future projects to already published work. The workshop will conclude with ALife-themed academic karaoke, an entertaining social activity where participants present an unknown (to the presenter) series of ALife-themed slides.

Lifelike Computing Systems Workshop (LIFELIKE)

Alife Slack Channel: #workshop-LIFELIKE

Keywords: self-x properties, self-organization, self-explainability, self-improvement, self-awareness, autonomous learning, resilience, flexibility, organic computing

Organizers: Anthony Stein, Sven Tomforde, Jean Botev, Peter Lewis

Call For Contributions: Currently Open, see website below for more details
WORKSHOP WEBSITE

The LIFELIKE Computing Systems Workshop is intended to provide a forum for discussing new insights and implications from adopting Artificial Life principles to technical computing systems deployed to flexibly and robustly act in real-world environments. Thereby, we explicitly emphasize the aspects of interpretability and explainability of the involved algorithms in order to provide a basis for system transparency already at the core of its mechanisms. Besides this self-explanatory property, further key ingredients to reach a specific level of intelligence are self-awareness and the resulting ongoing pursuit for continual self-improvement by means of learning and optimization. The resulting particular tension between increasing system viability through adopting life-like characteristics, while at the same time ensuring an appropriate degree of system explainability, validation and compliance to exploration boundaries, constitutes the main motivation and unique topic of LIFELIKE.

Twitter: @lifelikecs

Symbiosis in Artificial Life (SAL)

Alife Slack Channel: #workshop-SAL

Keywords: symbiosis, artificial life, mutualism, parasitism, evolution, commensalism

Organizers: Anya E. Vostinar, Erik Hom, Luis Zaman

Call For Contributions: Currently Open, see website below for more details

WORKSHOP WEBSITE

Symbiosis, a close and long-term interaction between two or more organisms from different species, is a ubiquitous phenomenon, found at all levels of life and nearly every context that we have looked for it. This workshop aims to connect researchers interested in understanding symbiosis through artificial life by presenting the currently available models and discussing challenges, potential solutions, and next steps for the field.

Twitter: @SALWorkshop

Teaching with Artificial Life (TAL)

Alife Slack Channel: #workshop-TAL

Keywords: education, artificial life, evolution education, computer science education, object-oriented programming, experiential learning

Organizers: Anya E. Vostinar, Barbara Z. Johnson, Michael Wiser

Call For Contributions: Currently Open, see website below for more details

WORKSHOP WEBSITE

Because Artificial Life spans the fields of computer science and biology, it offers a unique perspective on the education of novices in both of those fields. This workshop aims to bring together educators and researchers in artificial life to discuss the many ways in which artificial life can be used to teach both biology and computer science.

Twitter: @TALWorkshop

The First Proteus Workshop

Alife Slack Channel: #workshop-proteus

Keywords: evolutionary algorithms, bio-inspired artificial intelligence, crowdsourcing, robotics, wet ALife

Organizers: Josh Bongard, Nick Cheney, Melanie Moses

WORKSHOP WEBSITE

Typically, investigators write code or build robots from scratch whenever starting a new AI or robotics project. This leads to specialized systems brittle to novel challenges, and lack of reproducibility. Or, off-the-shelf software such as TensorFlow is employed, which restricts work to well-studied phenomena such as synaptic plasticity. These efforts traditionally have difficulty integrating tightly with efforts in biology.

To prove this cycle can be broken, we plan to develop and deploy an open-source, continually running, cloud-based code base in which increasingly protean machines (robots and computer-designed organisms) and protean algorithms (meta learners, architecture-altering methods) are automatically designed using biological change phenomena (BCPs) incorporated as software patches. We hope that such a system could help facilitate biology-to-ALife transdisciplinary work, and help to scale up our community’s collective efforts in this regard.

To test how this approach accelerates transferal of adaptive mechanisms from biology to AI and robotics, we will host a series of workshops to initially brainstorm and then construct such a code base. Anyone willing and able to contribute code to such an effort is welcome to participate.

Twitter: @DoctorJosh

The Second International Workshop on ABMHuB

The Second International Workshop on Agent-Based Modelling for Human Behaviour (ABMHuB)

Alife Slack Channel: #workshop-ABMHuB

Keywords: Agent-based modelling Behavioural science Communication Economy Logistics Learning Social networks Collective intelligence Emergent behaviour

Organizers: Katarzyna (Kasia) Kozdon, Soo Ling Lim, Peter J. Bentley

Call For Contributions: Currently Open, see website below for more details
WORKSHOP WEBSITE

International Workshop on Agent-Based Modelling of Human behaviour brings together modelling and behavioural science to address questions related but not restricted to communication, teamwork, learning and emergent behaviours in fields such as economy, logistics and sociology.

Twitter: #ALifeBehavior2020

Interdisciplinary Approaches to A-Life and the Digital Arts (A-Life and the Arts)

Alife Slack Channel: #workshop-ALifeandtheArts

Keywords: interaction; machinic; dynamic media; machine learning; interaction; evolution; temporal shape

Organizers: Chris Salter, Takashi Ikegami, Alexandre Saunier, Sofian Audry

This hands on workshop explores the use of A-Life techniques in an area of growing research and creation practice: the new conception and design of complex interactive machines/ media environments for the arts as well as entertainment contexts.

Twitter hashtag: #alifearts

Hybrid Life III

Approaches to integrate biological, artificial and cognitive systems

Alife Slack Channel: #special-HybridLifeIII

Keywords: Dynamical systems theory, Stochastic optimal control, Cognitive robotics, Life-mind continuity thesis, Systems biology, Animal-robot interaction, Bio-inspired robotics, Bio-integrated robotics, Human-machine interaction, Augmented cognition

Organizers: Manuel Baltieri, Keisuke Suzuki, Hiroyuki Iizuka, Olaf Witkowski, Lana Sinapayen

SESSION WEBSITE

Hybrid life III focuses on the use of unifying mathematical frameworks, composite (artificial+biological) architectures and coupled systems for cognition to address highly cross-disciplinary topics at the intersection of cognitive science, artificial systems and biology.

ALIFE and Society

Alife Slack Channel: #special-ALIFEandSociety

Keywords: ALIFE/AI and societal challenges; Socio-Ecological-technical systems; steering complex systems; philosophy; ethics; politics; social sciences; ALIFE for the Anthropocene; synthetic biology/ecology; hybrid, living & lifelike complex systems; Co-evolution of self, society, biosphere/technology;

Organizers: Alex Penn, JM Siqueiros

A forum to discuss grand challenges within human socio-ecological-technical systems: ALIFE/AI for society; Philosophical, ethical & social issues; designing/steering hybrid, living and lifelike CAS; ALIFE for the Anthropocene; future visions