Artificial Life for Social and Environmental Good

CALL FOR EXTENDED ABSTRACT SUBMISSIONS OPENING SOON

The field of Artificial Life, along with our community, is uniquely positioned to engage with pressing societal and environmental problems. Many of these are one-shot wicked problems, where the quality of “life” is intrinsically linked to the quality of society and the environment. Addressing these problems necessitates interactionist perspectives to “quality” that place equity, sustainability, and the reality of socio-economical-political contexts at the heart of research. ALife research allows us to move beyond the “myth of the technological fix”: to conceive, understand, contextualise, and interact with eco-socio-technical systems in new ways and to integrate issues of ethics and power that underpin all of these.

Our workshop provides a space for the ALife community to engage explicitly with such complexities and to explore how ALife-based perspectives can enable or catalyse environmental and social solutions to environmental and social problems. Coupled with our special session (ALIFE And Society), we will discuss how Artificial Life research can benefit both human society and enhance the life of all organisms on the planet, how our research can make direct, concrete contributions towards the sustainability of Earth’s natural ecosystems, how it can enhance human well-being, raise those living in hardship, and help people to shed disadvantage or difficulty. In short, we want to find ways that Artificial Life can drive or be applied purposefully for social and environmental good.

Following on from the success of previous years, we propose a program consisting of short contributions (extended abstracts), invited speaker(s) and a roundtable discussion on the topics above. Our call for extended abstracts will open in July 2025.

Organisers:
Alan Dorin (Monash University) - alan.dorin@monash.edu

Imy Khan (Independent) - imy@imytk.co.uk 

Alex Penn (University of Sussex) Alexandra.Penn@sussex.ac.uk  

Peter Lewis (Ontario Tech University) - peter.lewis@ontariotechu.ca