Conference Theme: Critical Properties of Living Systems

The conference will be organized around the theme of identifying and synthesizing the critical properties of living and life-like systems (e.g., self-replication, self-assembly, self-organization, metabolism, adaptation, evolution).

The meeting will reflect all of the main areas of artificial life research, including “wet” systems based on carbon chemistry, “soft” systems realized in software, and “hard” systems consisting of autonomous robotic agents, integration of the above areas, as well as a variety of social and technical systems that embody the critical properties of living systems.

The conference will have broad interdisciplinary interest, because “living” processes are found virtually everywhere.

Status: Looking backward, looking forward | It has been a decade since the last organized effort to identify the key open problems in artificial life. An important goal of the workshop is to review progress on the open problems and re-evaluate what are the key open problems in the artificial life community today.

Science: Nuts and bolts | Some sessions in the conference will be devoted to detailed discussion of specific subjects. We envision a variety of smaller forums, which will address such topics as the chemistry of assembling protocells, the energetics and mechanical implementation of robots, or software and social issues for collective intelligence platforms. In addition, a poster session will give the opportunity to discuss selected work peer-to-peer. In this manner, we hope the conference can increase both the depth and breath of the scientific work presented.