Hybrid Life

Hybrid Life V at ALife 2022

@HybridALife

"Hybrid Life V: Approaches to integrate biological, artificial and cognitive systems" is a special session for the ALIFE2022 conference that will take place online, July 18 - 22, 2022. This session aims to cover traditional artificial life areas as well as new directions and ideas to connect artificial life to other research fields.

Our goal is twofold, on the one hand to propose the application of artificial life methodologies to less traditional ALife areas, such as psychology, neuroscience and control engineering. On the other hand, we also work towards extending the list of standard Alife research areas to include topics from these disciplines. We thus welcome submissions from classical artificial life areas as well as less traditional areas that however share research questions related to the understanding of life and cognition.

Special sessions accept submissions through the main conference submission system. 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.


Accepted submissions will be published as part of the main conference proceedings.


Call for papers

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 new and hybrid ways to integrate, extend and improve them. Traditionally, ALife has focused on areas including: 1) the formalisation of properties necessary for the definition of life, 2) the implementation and analysis 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 to create hybrid approaches that extend them through:

  • the search for a unifying framework that spans across (models of) living, artificial and cognitive systems, overcoming the limitations of approaches focusing only on one type of systems; this area may include life-mind-continuity thesis, systems biology, theories of agency based on Bayesian inference, dynamical systems, information 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 approach welcomes contributions from the fields of human-agent interaction, animal-computer interaction, virtual / augmented reality systems, etc.

The session focuses on hybrid methods, theoretical contributions that can shed new light on concepts common across artificial/ living/ cognitive systems (e.g., agency, goal-directed behaviour, self-organisation, adaptation and self-maintenance), and hybrid systems, where robotics and biology are combined to study areas in the cognitive domain.


This special session aims to invite contributions from the fields of psychology, computational neuroscience, human-computer interaction (HCI), theoretical biology, artificial intelligence, robotics and cognitive science. 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


Submissions

Please follow the instructions provided at https://www.2022.alife.org/open-calls