Connectionists: [meetings] DEADLINE 1st May, CfP - Special session - Hybrid Life III, ALife 2020

[Manuel Baltieri]

*** UPDATES in relation to COVID-19 (Coronavirus) ***


********** Call for Papers - NEW Deadline 1st May **********

Special session - Hybrid Life III: Approaches to integrate biological, artificial and cognitive systems

https://sites.google.com/view/hybrid-life-iii/ <https://sites.google.com/view/hybrid-life-iii/>


2020 Artificial Life conference (ALife)
Virtual conference 13-18th July 2020 - http://2020.alife.org/ <http://2020.alife.org/>
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DESCRIPTION:
The main focus of ALife research is the study of natural systems with the goal of understanding what life is. More concretely, ALife defines ways to investigate processes that contribute to the formation and proliferation of living organisms. In this session we focus on three common approaches used to tackle this investigation, proposing ways to integrate, extend and possibly improve them. More specifically we refer to: 1) the formalisation of the necessary properties for the definition of life, 2) the implementation of artificial agents, and 3) the study of the relation between life and cognition.

For this special session we propose to start from these well-established Alife methodologies, and extend them through:

a unified formal language to describe and model living, as well as artificial and cognitive systems, e.g. control theory, Bayesian inference, dynamical systems theory, etc.
the exploration of biological creatures enhanced by artificial systems (or artificial systems augmented with organic parts) in order to investigate the boundaries between living and nonliving organisms. This includes work from bio-inspired robotics, human augmentation, synthetic biology, etc.
the evaluation of coupled biological-artificial systems that could shed light on the importance of interactions among systems for the study of living and cognitive organisms. This methodology welcomes contributions from the fields of human-agent interaction, animal-computer interaction, virtual / augmented reality systems, etc.
This special session aims to invite contributions from the fields of psychology, computational neuroscience, HCI, theoretical biology, artificial intelligence, robotics and cognitive science to discuss current research on the formalisation, combination and interaction of artificial/living/cognitive systems from theoretical, modelling and implementational perspectives. 



Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

Mathematical frameworks for life and cognition (e.g. dynamical systems theory, stochastic optimal control, Bayesian inference, etc.)
Cognitive robotics
Autopoiesis
Life-mind continuity thesis
Systems biology
Origins-of-life theories with relationships to artificial and cognitive systems
Animal-robot interaction
Bio-inspired robotics
Bio-integrated robotics
Human-machine interaction
Augmented cognition
Sensory substitution
Interactive evolutionary computation
Artificial perception



Important Dates
1st May 2020 – Paper submission deadline
TBC – Paper acceptance notification
TBC – Camera-ready version
13th-18th 2020 – Artificial Life virtual conference (ALife)

Paper Submission
Papers and abstracts submitted to this special sessions will be reviewed by a selected group of experts from the ALife community as well as from other areas key to our proposal, specifically chosen for this review process. If you are submitting to a special session you will be given the opportunity to select it during the submission process. Submissions to special sessions follow the same format, instructions and deadlines of regular ALife papers.

Organizers

Manuel Baltieri, RIKEN Centre for Brain Science, Saitama, Japan
Keisuke Suzuki, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
Hiryuki IIzuka, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
Olaf Witkowski, Cross Labs, Tokyo, Japan
Lana Sinapayen, Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Tokyo, Japan

Contacts
For questions, enquiries and more information please check our website https://sites.google.com/view/hybrid-life-iii/ <https://sites.google.com/view/hybrid-life-iii/> or get in touch with manuel.baltieri [at] riken.jp <http://riken.jp/>.


All the best,


--
Manuel Baltieri
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Lab. for Neural Computation and Adaptation
RIKEN CBS, Saitama, Japan

www.manuelbaltieri.com <https://manuelbaltieri.com/>
Twitter: @manuelbaltieri
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