Workshop at ALife XV

Time: 16:00 on Tuesday July 5th, 2016

Location: Contoy Room

Often, research done by scientists in one field can take a long time to percolate to scientists in another field. This is especially true in Biology and Computer Science, even with closely related sub-fields such as evolutionary computation and evolutionary biology. Such delays can substantially slow down scientific discovery, leading to the premium that many funding agencies have placed on research that cuts across disciplines. The field of Artificial Life is populated by such interdisciplinary scientists, who are well-positioned to improve this situation by surveying research from the constituent communities and synthesizing it into a coherent whole, including evolutionary biology, ecology, animal behavior, molecular biology, evolutionary computation, robotics, philosophy, and many other areas of biology and computer science. The goal of this workshop is to bring about such syntheses by organizing attendees into longer-term working groups to write cross-disciplinary reviews on subjects related to Artificial Life. To this end, we have accepted 8 proposals for such reviews. The proposers of each review will give a brief talk about their topic, why it merits such a review, and their preliminary vision for what their review should include. Audience members will be encouraged (but not obligated!) to join working groups for any reviews they are interested in contributing to.

Schedule

Time	Topic	Authors	Gitter Room
16:00	Intro	Charles Ofria and Emily Dolson	discuss
16:15	Diversity in Biological and Computational Populations	Emily Dolson and Charles Ofria	discuss
16:30	Fitness	Michael Wiser	discuss
16:45	Open-Ended Evolution	Tim Taylor, Mark Bedau, and Alastair Channon	discuss
17:00	Synthesizing Concepts in self-modification	Simon Hickinbotham and Susan Stepney	discuss
17:15	Comprehensive Review of Plasticity	Leigh Sheneman and Arend Hintze	discuss
17:30	Modularity and its Origins	Jessica Lowell	discuss
17:45	Recombination in Biology and Computer Science	Dusan Misevic	discuss
18:00	Applied Co-Evolution	Luis Zaman	discuss
18:15	Concluding Discussion		discuss

Everyone who is interested in contributing to the review series is invited to join us for lunch on Wednesday to informally discuss these ideas further. Location TBD.

Contribution Guidelines

A draft of the guidelines for contributions to this review series is available here. Timelines for completing the papers, as well as other modifications to these guidelines, will be discussed at the workshop.

Collaboration Tools

• Gitter - To facilitate group discussion of the review series, we’ll be using gitter. We chose gitter because it allows anyone who is interested in participating to easily join in, and provides e-mail notification of new messages so everyone stays up-to-date. Note that all discussion on gitter is public.

• Overleaf - We will be collaboratively writing these reviews on Overleaf. Overleaf allows for collaborative editing of papers. Under the hood, they are stored as LaTeX files in a git repository. Conveniently, Overleaf provides a word-processor like rich text interface for editing documents without needing to touch the LaTeX or git if you don’t want to. If you’re a fan of git, Overleaf also allows contributors to clone the git repository associated with a paper, make edits locally, and then merge them when desired. Read-only links to all documents will posted on the associated gitter channel. To make contributions to overleaf documents, you will need to request the edit link for that document. To make determining authorship easier, we ask that anyone contributing via the overleaf web interface make an account on Overleaf and make sure to be signed in when making edits (this ensures that your name will show up in the history).

• Citation Managers - Keeping track of references will be really important for these projects. Overleaf integrates well with CiteULike group libraries. So we have set up CiteULike libraries for each review and connected them to the corresponding Overleaf documents. To add to them, you will need to make a CiteULike account and join the appropriate groups. Please add references to papers by adding them to CiteULike and then refreshing the bibliography on Overleaf. This will help us avoid duplicate bibtex entries and other issues with citation curation.

For more information, e-mail the organizers.