Artificial Life is an interdisciplinary undertaking that investigates the fundamental properties of living systems through the simulation
and synthesis of biological entities and processes. It also attempts to design and build systems that display properties of organisms, or
societies of organisms, out of abiotic or virtual parts. ECAL, the European Conference on Artificial Life, is a biennial event that alternates
with the US-based Alife conference series.
A new body of disciplines
Over the past two decades, biological knowledge has grown at an unprecedented rate, giving rise to new disciplines such as systems
biology - testimony of the striking progress of modeling and quantitative methods across the field. During the same period, highly speculative
ideas have matured, and entire conferences and journals are now devoted to them. Synthesizing artificial cells, simulating large-scale biological
networks, storing and making intelligent use of an exponentially growing amount of data (e.g., microarrays), exploiting biological substrates for
computation and control, and deploying bio-inspired engineering are all cutting-edge topics today.
Life itself
ECAL 2013 will leverage the remarkable development of biological modeling and extend the topics of Artificial Life to the fundamental
properties of living organisms: their multiscale pattern-forming morphodynamics, their autopoiesis, robustness, capacity to self-repair, cognitive
capacities, and co-adaptation at all levels, including ecological ones. ECAL 2013 will bring together a large interdisciplinary community of
biologists, computer scientists, physicists, and mathematicians. It will invite them to reflect on how traditional boundaries between disciplines
have become blurred, and to revisit in depth what constitutes "life".
Topics
Papers are welcome in all areas of Artificial Life, including, but not limited to:
- Artificial Chemistries
- Artificial Immune Systems
- Artificial Organisms
- Artificial Organs
- Biological & Chemical Information Processing and Production
- Biologically Inspired Robotics
- Biosemiotics
- (Chemical) Self-Assembly & Complexity
- Complex Networks
- Complex Systems
- Computational Biology
- Emergent Engineering
- Evolutionary & Learning Dynamics
- Minimal (Bottom up) Synthetic Cells
- Minimal Cognition & Physical Intelligence
- Mixed Living (Technology) Systems
- Modular Robotics
- Morphogenesis, Generative & Developmental Systems
- Multilevel Ecologies
- Organizations & Collective Intelligence
- Origins of Life
- Philosophy of Artificial Life & Living Technology
- Protocellular Energetics & Metabolic Networks
- Robotic Energy Autonomy
- Robotic Self-Assembly
- Socio-Technical Systems
- Swarm Intelligence
- Syntetic Biology
- Systems Biology
- Theoretical & Computational Frameworks
- Top-Down Artificial Cells
Authors are encouraged to explain how their work sheds light on the fundamental properties of living systems and makes progress on the important open
questions identified during previous meetings.