Artificial Life Group

Artificial Life, agent-based modeling, complex systems, biocomplexity, ontogenetics, network topology and dynamics, and related disciplines play a strong part in the research directions and interests of many faculty members at Indiana University. Research in these areas is taking place in the School of Informatics, the Cognitive Science Program, the Physics department, and other academic units. The ALife@IU page lists some of the faculty involved in this discipline, with links to their home pages and projects.

Within CNetS one of the active project is Polyworld, where we evolve minimal models of intelligent, adaptive behavior by artificial agents in a computational ecology. Information-theoretic measures of complexity are used to assess the dynamics of the agents’ artificial neural network “brains”.

Larry Yaeger (PI)

Luis Rocha

Sandro Flammini

Olaf Sporns

New book with the latest advances in Artificial Life. This book, co-edited by Prof. Luis M. Rocha, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Artificial Life, ECAL 2007, held in Lisbon, Portugal, September 2007. The 125 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected. The papers are organized in topical sections on conceptual articles, morphogenesis and development, robotics and autonomous agents, evolutionary computation and theory, cellular automata, models of biological systems and their applications, ant colony and swarm systems, evolution of communication, simulation of social interactions, self-replication, artificial chemistry, and posters. More information from the publisher’s site. Also related is a similar MIT Press volume co-edited by several members of the Complex Systems Group containing the proceedings of the Artificial Life X conference.

Biologists long have focused their microscopes and attention on how the natural world works. Artificial life, in turn, uses complex computing techniques to better understand, visualize and even mimic life’s processes. Now comes an approach that combines science and engineering in order to design and construct novel biological parts, devices and biological systems for useful purposes. It’s called synthetic biology, and it will be one of the focuses of discussion at the June 3-7 10th International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems conference, better known as Artificial Life X. More…