ISAL is electing six new members to its board of directors, to replace the current directors whose terms are expiring. 13 society members are standing for election, as listed below. Follow the links for each candidate’s election statement.
All society members will shortly be contacted with further information regarding the election date and voting procedure.
Hiroki Sayama
Background
I am a Full Professor in the Department of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering at Binghamton University, State University of New York, USA, where I also serve as the Graduate Program Director of the Systems Science program and the Director of the Center for Collective Dynamics of Complex Systems (CoCo). My academic journey started in ALife; I began working on ALife models implementing artificial death in virtual ecosystem simulations for my B.Sc/M.Sc. theses (presented at ALIFE V in Kyoto), and then I developed the very first evolvable variant of Langton’s self-reproducing loops (evoloops) for my D.Sc. dissertation (earlier version was presented at ALIFE VI in Los Angeles). While my research portfolio has since expanded widely to cover complex systems, network science, computational social science and other fields, I always consider the ALife community as my “home”, and therefore, it is quite an honor for me to be nominated for the ISAL Board.
Statement of Goals
I believe ISAL should dynamically adapt and evolve as related fields and technologies advance. To promote such dynamism, it is important to keep fresh bloods and views coming in and playing key roles in determining the Society’s directions. Therefore, I will not push forward my personal views or priorities, but rather, I will make it my meta-priority to make it easier for junior researchers to voice and influence the Society’s directions. Furthermore, I will serve as a channel for the Society to reach out to other academic/scientific/professional communities, including (but not limited to): complex systems, statistical physics, network science, computational social science, engineering, data science, management science, organizational science, education science, etc. Basically, my goals are to offer my background, experience, knowledge, perspective and professional connections to ISAL as available resources so that the next generation of ALifers can make use of them to be more successful.
Yaochu Jin
Background
I was active in the Artificial Life research ten years ago when I worked on brain-body co-evolution using evolutionary developmental systems at Honda Research. After I moved Surrey, my research focus has been shifted to evolutionary optimization for engineering design and computational modeling of neural plasticity. Most recently, I was awarded the Humboldt Professorship for AI and will move to Germany. There, I’ll again have the opportunity working on artificial life, since I am very much interested in studying evolutionary developmental systems and how they have contributed to the emergence of life and human intelligence. I believe understanding life and human intelligence is indispensable for pushing AI beyond its boundaries.
Statement of Goals
If I am elected, I will focus on the following:
- Increase the visibility of the artificial life research community as a part of the AI research. This is important not only for the further growth of Alife itself, but also for the further development of AI. To this end, I am going to organise workshops or special sessions at conferences in AI, CIS and robotics. In addition special issues will also be organised in relevant journals;
- Attract younger researchers to the research area of Alife. This will be achieved by organising summer schools, university courses and publishing books related to Alife.
- Promote the Alife research activities in particular regions such as India, China, and South America.
Alastair Channon
Background
I am a Reader and head of the Evolutionary Systems Research Group at Keele University, UK. Since the early 1990s, I have been excited about life-as-it-could-be and open-ended evolution, both for generalizing our understanding of evolution and for the potential of open-ended processes to generate artificial intelligence. I have published in many ALife and related conference proceedings, and in journals including Artificial Life, Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, Nature Communications and PLOS Biology. My neuroevolutionary system Geb was the first ALife system to be classified as exhibiting open-ended evolutionary dynamics according to Bedau and Packardʼs evolutionary activity measures. I co-organized, with Mark Bedau, Tim Taylor, Norman Packard and others, the four workshops on open-ended evolution at ECAL 2015, ALife XV, ALIFE 2018 and ALIFE 2021.
Statement of Goals
- Encourage a return to primarily in-person ALIFE conferences, preferably at inspiring locations with good local venues for people to mix, meet and discuss ALife in informal settings after each conference day.
- Encourage opportunities (for example “research sandpits”) for exploring potential pairings and teams at and between the ALIFE conferences, in relation to working together on challenges, grant applications and other collaborative activities.
- Explore how the society and the community can better take advantage of the extraordinary growth of activity and investment in artificial intelligence, and the growing recognition of the importance of unsupervised, developmental, evolutionary and open-ended approaches to future progress in AI.
Peter J. Bentley
Background
I started as a geeky kid obsessed with building robots that acted like living creatures, and programming simulations of life – evolving, growing, flocking systems. In 1990 I recall seeing a Horizon documentary “Signs of Life” where researchers such as Chris Langton showed their ALife work – it was a revelation. I became fascinated by evolution and how it could generate novel morphology, and completed my PhD in 1996 demonstrating one of the first examples of creative evolutionary design. Today I’m an Honorary Professor at UCL where I’ve led a research group on Digital Biology since 1997. I’ve taken 20+ PhDs to completion and together we’ve explored evo-devo, swarming, neural, social, eco- and artificial immune systems, novel bio-inspired computing, and lots of other things! I’ve helped numerous startups (including Within Technologies started by my students, subsequently acquired by Autodesk, where I am now a Visiting Professor). I’m also a popular science author.
Statement of Goals
If elected I would hope to assist in the following areas:
- Encourage high-quality ALife scientific investigations, leading to high-impact research, to build the reputation of the field.
- Improve engagement and interaction with hugely successful fields such as ML in order to learn lessons (both in terms of knowledge and popularity).
- Improve interaction with industry (Autodesk Research, Google DeepMind, Facebook, etc all have highly relevant and well-funded research groups, which we have easy access to).
- Establish Artificial Life more widely as one of the most profound, inclusive, and inspiring fields to work within, with an aim to increase citations of ALife papers significantly, improve public awareness of the research, and encourage new ALife funding in academia and industry.
Acacia Ackles
Background
I’m a fourth year PhD Candidate at Michigan State University (East Lansing, Michigan, USA) with Dr. Emily Dolson. My research interests are in developing new methods and visualizations for understanding and untangling genomic complexity; however, my main focus lies in evidence-based and justice-oriented practices for teaching college science. I’m interested in integrating artificial life and digital evolution into future interdisciplinary college teaching. In ISAL specifically, I have been active in ERA, the student and postdoc ISAL group, and was general chair from 2019-2020. In 2020-2021 I have been serving as the vice chair for the ISAL Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee.
Statement of Goals
ISAL has made multiple strides towards a more inclusive community over the time I have been a member. I look forward to continuing this process with:
- Conference/journal fee waivers/reductions for ISAL members with fewer resources. This could include researchers from economically exploited nations, independent researchers, undergraduate students, and others.
- Increased accessibility at ALife. Examples include: availability of sign language interpreters; captioning for pre-recorded talks; designated ‘quiet areas’ in person; breaktime from screens online; wheelchair-accessible conference venues and social events.
- An “early career” keynote. ALife has multiple keynotes, but rarely by people from historically excluded groups, because such exclusion means those groups are less likely to be deemed “notable enough” for a keynote speaker. However, the modern landscape of ALife is changing and expanding rapidly. I propose an Early Career Keynote, for any early career researcher with an engaging talk of broad interest to the community.
Christoph Adami
Background
I am a theoretical physicist by training, but have been active in the filed of Artificial Life since 1993. I first worked on Tom Ray’s tierra system, and then designed and supervised the implementation of the Avida system. I wrote the textbook “Introduction to Artificial Life”, and my new textbook on the evolution of biocomplexity will come out next year. My lab works on the application of information-theoretic principles to the evolution of intelligence and cooperation.
Statement of Goals
My aim is to make ISAL stronger, more diverse, and more recognized across fields. When I started, Artificial Life was considered “fringe” by many. What does it take to make the field more “mainstream”, as, for example, AI? Perhaps stronger ties to the Evolutionary Computational (EC) folks, who are themselves engaged in shaping EC to be more “mainstream”? One possible avenue is to create toolkits that are easy to use (think scikit-learn in ML). EC is considering this in their field. What would the equivalent be for Alife?
Tim Taylor
Background
I have been an active member of the Artificial Life community since the mid-1990s, with particular interests in self-replication and open-ended evolution. I have many publications on these topics in the Artificial Life journal, ALIFE and ECAL conference proceedings, and other outlets. I wrote (with Alan Dorin) the book Rise of the Self-Replicators, published by Springer in 2020, and gave a keynote talk about this at ALIFE 2021. I have co-organised various workshops at ALIFE and ECAL conferences, most recently on Open Ended Evolution (OEE1 – OEE4). I was awarded the ISAL Award for Exceptional Service in 2014 for my work in modernising the alife.org website and social media presence. I have been an appointed member of the ISAL board since 2012, and an elected member since 2017.
Statement of Goals
In recent years I have mostly been involved with the nuts and bolts of keeping the society running, such as taking responsibility for managing a new alife.org email system and DNS configuration system. I also run the @alifeofficial twitter account (now with some help). Having been on the board for 10 years now, I also bring some institutional memory to the board meetings. I am really excited to see lots of new names on the candidate list, and hope to get the opportunity to work with a new and expanded board to continue to grow and improve the society.
Chrystopher Nehaniv
Background
I am a mathematician, computer science and complex systems researcher with long involvement in Artificial Life teaching and research, including organizing special issues of journals on AL topics, workshops special sessions, conferences including IEEE Artificial Life, a series of evolvability meetings. I’ve also designed and taught university and graduate research level courses in Artificial Life in Japan, the U.K. and Canada since the 1990s up to present day.
Statement of Goals
I’d like to raise awareness of Artificial Life as more encompassing and more fundamental to Science than Artificial Intelligence. The viewpoint of Artificial Life would benefit researchers in areas of engineering, AI robotics, sciences, as well as linking to art, music, philosophy and creative expression. Further strengthening and building networks linking AL researchers and developing AL expertise in this broader context, embedding Artificial Life in core science would be my goal as an ISAL board member.
Tom Froese
Background
I attended artificial life conference in 2007 and have been more or less regularly attending the conferences since then, occasionally organizing satellite workshops, co-charing the ALIFE conference in Cancun, and recently getting my students involved in the community.
Statement of Goals
As the Editor-in-Chief of Adaptive Behavior I would like to consider the possibilities of potentially of strengthening ties between ISAB and ISAL. ISAB has faced similar challenges to ISAL, especially regarding the blooming of various other societies and conferences for more specialized topics that used to be part of the more general community. ISAB is smaller than ISAL, so perhaps it could be incorporated as special interest group of some sort.
Lisa Soros
Background
I am currently a postdoc at Cross Labs (crosslabs.org) after graduating from the Evolutionary Complexity Research Group at the University of Central Florida, teaching for a few years at a teaching college, and then getting back into research as a postdoc at the NYU Game Innovation Lab. I have served as the ISAL Secretary for the past 4 years and am running for re-election. I was also the Program Committee Chair for the 2020 ALife conference and was the Proceedings Chair for the 2021 conference. My research focuses on open-endedness and open-ended evolution and generative systems in virtual worlds.
Statement of Goals
I would like to continue my duties as Secretary, which involves managing the mailing lists/announcements, scheduling meetings, holding elections, and various other tasks. In the bigger picture, though, I would like to bring my experience in many community roles (particularly with respect to our conference and external events in the games community) to help make future conference organization efforts as streamlined and stress-free as possible while being mindful and intentional about accessibility and inclusion. I’m also excited about creating virtual social spaces for the community to meet outside of regular conferences.
Jitka Čejková
Background
I work as an Assistant Professor at University of Chemistry and Technology Prague. (My Habilitation thesis in 2020 was titled “Chemical engineering contribution to artificial life research”). Besides the wet-artificial-life-oriented research and teaching, I am actively involved into the science communication. My research focuses on the idea to use droplets as liquid robots (paper of the same name was awarded by ISAL as Outstanding Paper of 2017 in the field of Artificial Life). I regularly attend artificial life conferences, I was a general conference chair of the virtual ALIFE 2021 conference, I organized a workshop “Chemistry and artificial life forms” in Newcastle in 2019 and several other alife related events. In the occasion of of the word “robot” centenary that comes from Czech Čapek’s play R.U.R. I edited a book “Robot 100” (100 people contributed to this book and around half of them were Alifers).
Statement of Goals
I would like to keep the artificial life community as great as it is. (Anyway there is always the space for some improvements). I would like to help the community by activities as follow: I will establish a mentoring program where the experienced alifers will support their younger colleagues and especially students interested in artificial life remotely. I will continue to promote artificial life field at non-ISAL conferences and invite other researchers to our community. I will use my communication skills to introduce the artificial life research also for non-experts (by using social and other media). I will look for financial support (sponsors, grant proposals) that enables more intensive networking (organizing local meetings, summers schools, short term scientific missions). The priority will be to co-locate conferences and meetings, organizing workshops at non-ISAL conferences. Alife community is like my family and I would like to be more active in organizing virtual, in person and hybrid events for them and support the networking.
James Borg
Background
Hi, my name is James Borg, I am a Lecturer in Evolutionary Systems in the School of Computing and Mathematics at Keele University, UK. My research is primarily focussed on social learning and cultural evolution, but I have also interests in open-ended evolution, alife and society, and modelling human (and animal) behaviour.
I have been a member of ISAL and regular attendee of the ALife conferences for over a decade having attended my first ALife in 2010. I have also acted as a member of the conference programme committee since 2017. Alongside ALife and ECAL I have also attended EVOSTAR, SAB and the Cultural Evolution Society conference. Many of you will know me as one of the organisers of the SLaCE workshops which have become a regular feature of ALife. For me the best part of ALife conferences are the vibrant and interdisciplinary workshops.
Statement of Goals
My objectives are:
- Better promote and fund workshops.
- Seek a large charity funded grant for ISAL to enable us to distribute smaller focussed grants to promote core ALife research and enable us to fund greater access to ALife.
- Develop free higher education resources. The ALife community is spread thinly with very few institutions having a large enough group to develop and sustain ALife programmes. As a society we do have those resources – if each of us produced a small amount of content on our specialist areas we could create content which could be used to support the teaching of ALife across the world, and inspire more students to join our community.
Clifford Bohm
Background
I am a Ph.D. student at Michigan State University. After a “lifetime” in the wild, I came to academia, so I tend to be able to bring different perspectives. I am interested generally in the theory of evolution and specifically in behavior resulting from the neuroevolution of digital brains. I am very intrigued by the evolution of basic forms of cognition and I believe it is crucial to consider the field broadly. To this end, I developed the MABE framework, a modular tool for digital evolution research. MABE allows users to construct experiments by combining components and has been designed to simplify direct comparisons between components (e.g. test different brain types such as CGP, ANN and, Markov while keeping the environment, selection methods, and genomics locked).
Statement of Goals
Communication and collaboration – I would work towards encouraging communication and collaboration between our members and between our members and those outside of our membership working in related fields.
I am also keenly interested in art and maker communities. To this end, I would promote the artistic side of ALIFE. This would include encouraging participation from artists in helping to explore what ALIFE is as well as encouraging researchers to see the art in their work to use artistic expression to challenge others to question what we mean by “Life”.