ALifeVIII: Plenary Speakers

ALife VIII Proceedings ALife VIII Workshops Proceedings Call for Papers Topics Open Problems Instructions for Authors Paper Submission Critical Dates Exchange Rates Registration Programme Plenary Speakers Abstracts Oral Guidelines Poster Guidelines Workshops/Tutorials Social Programme Accomodation Sydney Buses and Ferries Venue Staying in touch Contact Information Organising Committee Programme Committee Artificial Life Links AI02 affiliated conference Restricted area Organizer's Corner Collar Admin

Rodney Brooks is a native of Adelaide, Australia. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford in 1981, held post-docs at CMU and MIT, and was on the faculty at Stanford before joining the MIT faculty in 1984. He is director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. He is also chairman and chief technical officer of iRobot Corporation. His research has included the development of the behavior-based methodology for mobile robots, and more recently humanoid robots that emulate human level performance. His current projects are centered around building living machines. Keynote title: Living Machines Artificial Life is often viewed in purely computational terms. Many of our experiments are done inside computers. Sometimes we use simple robots to validate evolutionary strategies or swarm dynamic analyses. We know from experiments with simple robots that the embodiment of the robots, their motor behaviors and their sensor placements and performances, is critical to their behavior in the real world. So we know that non-computational elements are important. But, what if we move beyond our computation-centric view of artificial life and ask what it would take to build a truly living machine? What are the issues that we must face, and what will we learn that is relevant even in computational artificial life? Living machines might require metabolism, both for energy and to produce their own physical form, energy self-sufficiency, morphogenesis, self-repair, self-reproduction, adaptability to non-rigid dynamics, self-organizing computation, and more. This talk will outline the state of the art and faltering steps towards meeting all these challenges in building living machines. Charley Lineweaver is a cosmologist based at UNSW, researching the Cosmic Microwave Background. He also runs a course at UNSW called Are We Alone?, which debates the scientific and philosophical issues in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). These issues have much in common with Artificial Life, which likewise is concerned with life-as-it-might-be. Butler Hine will present "Bioinspired engineering of space exploration systems for NASA and DoD: From bees to BEES" by Sarita Thakoor, Javaan Chahl, M. V. Srinivasan, L. Young, F. Werblin, Butler Hine, and Steven Zornetzer. Steen Rasmussen will present "Collective intelligence of the Artificial Life community: Successes, failures, and the future" by Steen Rasmussen, Michael Raven, Gordon N. Keating, Mark Bedau. This paper documents the survey results collected at ALife VII.