oliver.obst.eu

We are organising a special session “Information Processing, Inference and Learning” at the Fifth Australian Conference on Artificial Life (ACAL11).

Organisers: Oliver Obst, Mikhail Prokopenko (CSIRO ICT Centre)

Keynote speaker (tentative): Prof. Martin Riedmiller, Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg, Germany

Learning is one of the most important capabilities of living systems, and processes involved in inference and learning are ingrained in many levels of organisation scale, e.g., from single neurons to organisations or societies. Much of the information processing involved in these processes is consequently distributed, and relies on local interactions among individual entities. On the other hand, many successful approaches from machine learning require some centralised processing, while in living systems no such requirement exists.

In this special session, we are looking for contributions that will address issues that involve information processing, inference, and learning, with a perspective on their application to Alife scenarios. These include for example methods to help characterising relevant information, self-organised encoding of information, decentralised approaches to learning, and inference mechanisms. Possible topics include, but are not limited to,

• information theoretic methods for analysing/describing Alife scenarios
• interactions between genetic evolution, and individual learning
• self-organised information processing
• intrinsically motivated learning
• guided self-organisation

To submit papers to this special session, please use the ACAL 2011 submission system and use Information Processing, Inference and / or Learning as a keyword.

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The Third International Workshop on Guided Self-Organisation (GSO-2010) will be held at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, USA, 4-6 September 2010.

The workshop is comprised of a group of researchers with diverse yet related interests, overlapping in the area of self-organizing systems and methods for characterizing those systems in ways that may ultimately allow them to be guided toward prespecified goals. Information theory and graph theory are core to many of these methods; quantifying complexity and its sources a common theme.

If interested in participating, send an extended abstract to the email addresses on the workshop web site.  Selected works from the workshop will likely be published in a special journal issue (as has been the case in the past).  More information on the GSO-2010 web site.

guided self-organisation, workshop, artificial life, ai

Artificial life investigates the fundamental properties of living systems through simulating and synthesizing biological entities and processes in artificial media. Papers are welcome in all areas of the field, including Synthesis and origin of life, self-organization, self-replication, artificial chemistries, Evolution and adaptation, evolutionary dynamics, evolutionary games, coevolution, major evolutionary transitions, levels of selection, ecosystems, Unconventional and biologically inspired computing, Bio-inspired robots and embodied cognition, autonomous agents, evolutionary robotics, information in Complex Systems and Artificial Life, … .
All 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 at previous meetings.

Several artificial life themes have been proposed as live research topics around which conference sessions may organise. See here for details.

The conference will be held in Winchester, paper submission is 29 February, conference date is 5-8 August, 2008.

The objective of this interdisciplinary conference is to bring together researchers in computer science, artificial intelligence, alife, control, robotics, neurosciences, ethology, evolutionary biology, and related fields so as to further our understanding of the behaviors and underlying mechanisms that allow natural and artificial animals to adapt and survive in uncertain environments. The conference will focus on experiments with well-defined models — robot models, computer simulation models, mathematical models — designed to help characterize and compare various organizational principles or architectures underlying adaptive behavior in real animals and in synthetic agents, the animats. SAB’08 is in Osaka, July 7-12, 2008. Paper submission deadline is January 14th, workshop proposals are due to February 1st. For details, see the SAB’08 webpage.