[agents] LIFELIKFE CFP 2020

[Thomas Prantl]

Dear Colleagues,

We apologize if you received multiple CFPs for the Workshop on  
Lifelike Computing Systems 2020 (LIFELIKE 2020).



** CALL FOR PAPERS **

Lifelike Computing Systems Workshop -- LIFELIKE 2020

to be held electronic-only as part of
ALIFE 2020 virtual conference (2020.alife.org)
from 13th to 18th July, 2020

** Aims and Scope **

Complexity in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is still  
increasing, driven by the growing number of devices with vast amounts  
of computational resources. As a result, the central administration of  
present and future systems becomes impossible for human operators.  
Based on that insight and in order to tackle this development, modern  
systems necessitate capabilities allowing them to successfully act and  
survive in such complex real-world environments – they are supposed to  
be ‘lifelike’. Inspired by organic systems, our future socio-technical  
and cyber-physical systems also need to exhibit such characterizing  
self-x properties. Research initiatives such as Organic Computing,  
Autonomic Computing as well as Self-aware Computing all share the  
common goal of understanding and engineering technical systems capable  
of dealing with uncertainty due to continually changing and highly  
dynamic environments. In order to achieve the desired degree of system  
robustness and flexibility, the envisaged computing systems are:
(1) Increasingly decentralized into large self-organizing collectives  
of (semi-)autonomous agents.
(2) Equipped with sensors and actuators to perceive and modify their  
productive environment.
(3) Deployed with machine learning, planning and optimization  
algorithms from the broad domain of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to  
render these (sub-)systems autonomously self-learning.

LIFELIKE intends to provide a forum for discussing the implications  
and new insights from adopting Artificial Life principles to technical  
computing systems acting in real-world environments. Additionally, we  
explicitly emphasize the aspects of interpretability and  
explainability of the involved algorithms in order to provide a basis  
for system transparency already at the core of its mechanisms. Besides  
this self-explanatory property, further key ingredients to reach a  
specific level of intelligence are self-awareness and the resulting  
ongoing pursuit for continual self-improvement by means of learning  
and optimization. The resulting, particular tension between increasing  
system viability through adopting lifelike characteristics, while at  
the same time ensuring an appropriate degree of system explainability,  
validation and compliance to exploration boundaries, constitutes the  
main motivation and unique topic of this workshop.

Topics of interest of LIFELIKE include, but are not limited to:
* Self-organization, i.e., adoption of organic system principles  
concerning bottom-up evolution of system structures, holarchies,  
trusted communities or socio-technical design concepts.
* Self-explainability, i.e., deriving new metrics for quantification,  
system validation, guaranteeing, understanding & trust as well as  
proper ways for visualization via context-aware and transient  
interfaces.
* Self-improvement, i.e., continual behavior optimization at runtime  
through mechanisms such as automated algorithm configuration &  
selection or evolutionary intelligence as a mechanism to change.
* Self-awareness, i.e., establishing autonomous learning behaviour in  
technical systems by means of techniques such as active learning,  
transfer learning, online concept drift and novelty detection,  
efficient reinforcement learning from feedback, or model  
self-reflection.

** Submission Guidelines **

Submission deadline: May 31, 2020
Decision notification: June 17, 2020
Camera-ready deadline: June 28, 2020

Furthermore, submissions must
- conform to the ALIFE submission instructions.
- not exceed 4 pages (short / position papers) or 8 pages (full  
papers), excluding references.
- be submitted via EasyChair submission system  
(https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lifelikecs2020).


** Workshop Organization **

Anthony Stein, University of Hohenheim, Germany
Sven Tomforde, Christian-Albrechts Universität zu Kiel, Germany
Jean Botev, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Peter Lewis, Aston University, United Kingdom

More information at https://lifelikecs.organic-computing.de/
Follow us on Twitter @lifelikecs