You are invited to submit papers to the upcoming European Conference on Artificial Life. Please forward this call responsibly.

NEWS
- Keynote speakers to be announced soon!
- ECAL2009 goes online and open-access!
- ALIFE XI themes will be announced!

See here for new information.

IMPORTANT DATES

OVERVIEW
Artificial Life is an interdisciplinary enterprise investigating the fundamental properties of living systems through simulating and synthesizing biological entities and processes in artificial media. ECAL, the European Conference on Artificial Life, is a biannual meeting complementing the mostly US-based “ALife” conference series.

Over the past two decades, some of the highly speculative ideas that were discussed at the field's inception have matured to the extent that new conferences and journals devoted to them are being established: synthesising artificial cells, simulating massive biological networks, exploiting biological substrates for computation and control, and deploying bio-inspired engineering are now cutting-edge practice. In the same period, biological knowledge grew at an unprecedented rate, giving rise to entire new disciplines, such as systems biology, and witnessed the rapid advancement of modelling and quantitative methods throughout the field.  ECAL209 endeavours to bring together experts of computational and other ALife methods with more “conventional” mathematical modellers, reflecting on the fact that boundaries become rapidly blurred.

ECAL2009 will be held in Budapest, Hungary, in the magnificent historical building of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

The ECAL2009 conference provides an opportunity for those working across these topics to get together and exchange ideas and results.  To this end, the conference will present a selection of the best current work in the field, highlight new directions for investigation, and present high-profile keynote speakers.

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
•    Development, differentiation, and regulation; generative representations
•    Synthetic biology and wet artificial life
•    Self-organizing technology, self-* computing and computational ecosystems
•    Unconventional and biologically inspired computing
•    Bio-inspired robots and embodied cognition, autonomous agents, evolutionary robotics
•    Collective behavior, communication, cooperation
•    Artificial consciousness; the relationship between life and mind
•    Philosophical, ethical, and cultural implications
•    Mathematical and philosophical foundations of Alife, new and creative syntheses
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.

PAPER/ABSTRACT FORMAT
There are two options for submission: either full paper format or abstract format.  Full papers have an 8 page maximum length, while abstracts are limited to 500 words.  Every submission will be subject to full peer review.  All accepted submissions will be allocated an oral presentation slot with no distinction being made between the two submission formats.  All formatting guidelines (including word and latex style files) and submission instructions are available on the conference submission page.

PUBLICATION
ECAL 2009 accepted full papers will be published with Springer LNCS (Lecture Notes in Computer Science). For author instructions see the submission page.

ORGANIZATION
George Kampis, Eörs Szathmáry (chairs), Chrisantha Fernando, Márk Jelasity, Ferenc Jordán, András Lőrincz, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

CONTACT
For further information about the conference program, travel, accommodation, and local arrangements, please see the rest of this website, www.ecal2009.org after March30.  For questions about the submission and reviewing process, please email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .  For all other questions, contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .