The International Conference on Artificial Life, or ALife Conference, often stylized as “ALIFE[year]”, is a yearly academic conference bringing researchers of Artificial Life together to present and discuss their research.
History
The first ALife Conference happened from September 21st, 1987 to September 25th, 1987 in Los Alamos (New Mexico, United States of America)1 under the name “An Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems.” In 1991, the conference was split between the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL)2 and the US-based International Conference on Artificial Life. The conference was organised yearly, alternatively in Europe and in the US. After 14 editions of ECAL, the two conferences fused again under the name “The International Conference on Artificial Life.”
Structure
The conference is organised in a different country every year, and typically lasts 5 days and includes parallel “main track” sessions, special sessions, workshops, poster sessions, keynotes, pannel discussions, an awards ceremony, and various events such as art competitions, excursions, and banquets. The number of attendees varies from a hundred to several hundreds. Papers presented at the conference are later published in the conference proceedings.
- The ISAL website, https://alife.org/conference/alife-1/
- Computer Science Bibliography, https://dblp.org/db/conf/ecal/index.html