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 ways to integrate, extend and possibly improve them. More specifically we refer to: 1) the formalisation of the necessary properties for the definition of life, 2) the implementation 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 extend them through:

• a unified formal language to describe and model living, as well as artificial and cognitive systems, e.g. control theory, Bayesian inference, dynamical systems 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 methodology welcomes contributions from the fields of human-agent interaction, animal-computer interaction, virtual / augmented reality systems, etc.

This special session aims to invite contributions from the fields of psychology, computational neuroscience, HCI, theoretical biology, artificial intelligence, robotics and cognitive science to discuss current research on the formalisation, combination and interaction of artificial/living/cognitive systems from theoretical, modelling and implementational perspectives. 

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
• Artificial perception

• 1st May 2020 – Paper submission deadline
• TBC – Paper acceptance notification
• TBC – Camera-ready version
• 13th-18th 2020 – Artificial Life virtual conference (ALife)

• Manuel Baltieri, RIKEN Centre for Brain Science, Saitama, Japan
• Keisuke Suzuki, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
• Hiryuki IIzuka, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
• Olaf Witkowski, Cross Labs, Tokyo, Japan
• Lana Sinapayen, Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Tokyo, Japan