Call for Papers

Join us by submitting a paper, and present at our Special Session, accepted at the Artificial Life Conference 2023 in Sapporo, Japan.

Important Dates

February 15, 2023 – Preliminary Abstract submission deadline (recommended, via email to olaf@crosslabs.org)

March 3, 2023 [Extended] March 13, 2023 – Paper submission deadline (mandatory, via EasyChair.org)

April 28, 2023 – Notification of acceptance

[TBC] – Early bird conference registration deadline

May 1, 2023 – Conference registration deadline

[TBC] – Paper camera-ready version

July 24-28, 2023 – Artificial Life Conference in Sapporo (Hybrid)

Organizers

Yuko Ishihara, Ritsumeikan University, Osaka, Japan

Olaf Witkowski, Cross Labs, Kyoto, Japan

Keywords

Games, playful systems, open-endedness, creativity, diversity, gaming tourism, emergent rules, open games, emergence of language, framework isolation, make-believe, hypnosis, models of play, interdisciplinarity, medium and form, autopoiesis, play metaphor, ethics of play, games of truth.

Call for Papers for Vita Ludens: Playfulness in Living Systems, A Special Session at ALIFE 2023 in Sapporo

We are excited to invite you to submit your work to our Special Session on the theme of Playfulness in Living Systems, at the ALIFE 2023 conference, which will be held in Sapporo (Japan) on 24-28 July, 2023.

Full title of the session:
Vita Ludens: Playfulness in Living Systems
A Special Session at ALIFE 2023: The 2023 Conference on Artificial Life in Sapporo (Japan), on July 24-28, 2023.

Submission length: Up to 2 pages for extended abstracts, and up to 8 pages for full papers
Special Session URL: https://playfulalife.wordpress.com/
Conference website URL for submission procedure details: https://sites.google.com/view/alife-2023/calls/call-for-papers-extended-abstracts

About the Session

Artificial Life studies the nature of the living state, by modeling and synthesizing living systems. Such living systems have been studied under many properties. One property of special interest is the playfulness of the system. The research in playfulness comprises numerous key angles, including the study of incompetent agents, open games or games with emergent rules, uncertainty as an openness to surprise, isolated designs, all relevant to the study of both natural and artificial agents, including various focuses on human behavior, animal behavior, but also importantly parallels with AI, robots, and life-like simulations. The topic of playfulness naturally connects with the topics of creativity, emergence, open-endedness, diversity, and control of homeostatic stress, autopoietic theory, all bearing strong connections with the field of Artificial Life. Additionally, playfulness may also take some particular meaning in the playful attitude of researchers in the field, with respect to their topic of research: perhaps only with a distance brought by a playful study of the living state, may scholars make sense of the nature and mechanisms of its phenomena.

This special session aims to catalyze rich connections between the fields of Artificial Life and the study of playfulness. Our purpose in holding this session is to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scientists, philosophers, and experts in relevant domains around the topic of play, for a conductive round-table discussion and sharing a mix of recent works and original submissions at the conference. We are planning a half-day session, organized around sharing works on the topic followed by an open discussion. The session will involve an invited keynote and a few panelists.

Useful References

Huizinga, J. (2014). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Routledge.
Burghardt, G. M. (2005). The genesis of animal play: Testing the limits. MIT press.
Eberle, S. G. (2014). The elements of play: Toward a philosophy and a definition of play. American Journal of Play, 6(2), 214-233.

Suggested Topics (Non-exhaustive list)

Animal-robot interaction
Artificial and augmented cognition
Autopoiesis
Cognitive robotics
Conditions for open-endedness
Creativity
Diversity
Emergence/evolution of culture and language
Emergent rules
Ethics of play
Evolutionary models of play
Exploration-exploitation continuum
Framework isolation
Games of truth
Game psychology
Human-machine play and self-play
Hypnosis studies
Interdisciplinarity
Make-believe
Mathematical frameworks of play
Medium and form
Models of play
Open-ended dynamics in games
Play metaphor
Playful systems
Tabula rasa
Tourism is gaming
Zero-player games
Etc.

Important Dates

February 15, 2023 – Abstract submission deadline (recommended, via email to olaf@crosslabs.org)
March 3, 2023 [Extended] March 13, 2023 – Paper submission deadline (mandatory, via EasyChair.org)
April 28, 2023 – Notification of acceptance
[TBC] – Early bird registration deadline
May 1, 2023- Registration deadline
[TBC] – Camera-ready version
July 24-28, 2023 – Artificial Life in Sapporo (Hybrid)

Paper Submission

Papers and abstracts submitted to this special sessions will be reviewed by a selected group of experts from the ALife community and other key areas specifically chosen for this review process. In case you are submitting to a special session, you will be given the chance to select it during the submission process. Please don’t forget to check the corresponding option at the time of submission. Papers submitted to special sessions follow the same format, instructions and deadlines of regular ALife papers. At least one author of every accepted paper will need to register to the conference. The conference will be hybrid and will provide all necessary infrastructure for video presentations and virtual participation. Detailed instructions for submission are available on the conference webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/alife-2023/calls/call-for-papers-extended-abstracts

Co-organizers

Yuko Ishihara (Associate Professor, Ritsumeikan University, Japan) is an associate professor at Ritsumeikan University. She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Copenhagen in 2017 with a dissertation titled, “Transcendental Philosophy and its Transformations: Heidegger and Nishida’s critical engagements with transcendental philosophy in the late 1920s.” From April 2017 to March 2018, she was a postdoctoral research fellow, and the first philosopher to be employed, at the Earth-Life Science Institute in Tokyo Institute of Technology where she explored avenues in which phenomenology and modern Japanese philosophy could provide insights into the origins of life research. She was also a visiting scholar from February 2017 to March 2019 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, at the Program in Interdisciplinary Studies. Her research interest lies in the intersection of modern Japanese philosophy (Kyoto School tradition in particular) and phenomenology. Recently, she has been interested in understanding the significance of play and playfulness for human beings. In her recent book project, she reinterprets the phenomenological epoché (suspension of judgment) by taking it out of its limited context as it was introduced by Edmund Husserl and giving it a more practical spin by presenting it as a way to ‘play with reality’ in the sense of becoming co-players with reality, exploring new dimensions of freedom, openness and playfulness.

Olaf Witkowski (Director of Research, Cross Labs • Lecturer, University of Tokyo) olaf@crosslabs.org is the director of research and founding member at Cross Labs, an AI research institute in Kyoto, leading fundamental research in AI and Artificial Life. He is also an executive officer at Cross Compass Ltd., a lecturer in information sciences at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of the University of Tokyo, a research scientist at the Earth-Life Science Institute of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and a regular visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has co-founded various ventures in science and technology on three continents, including YHouse Inc.—a nonprofit transdisciplinary research institute in New York, focused on awareness, artificial intelligence and complex systems—and the Center for the Study of Apparent Selves—a new institute in Kathmandu studying Buddhist philosophy and AI ethics. He received his PhD in neuroevolution learning and collective intelligence under Takashi Ikegami, from the Computer Science Department of the University of Tokyo. He is currently the vice president of the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL), and helped co-found ALife Japan in 2021. He is also part of a new project on human flourishing, focused on the study of the current and future concepts of self in biology, AI, philosophy, and other disciplines studying the mind.

About the ALIFE 2023 Conference

The special session will be run within the context of the international conference ALIFE 2023, at which it was selected to be held, with a theme this year of “Ghosts in the Machine”. The conference will be run in a hybrid fashion, providing the necessary infrastructure for video presentations and virtual participation. Artificial life seeks to unravel the mysteries of life and mind, to naturalise the “ghosts in the machine”. What is life? What is the mind? Are these two concepts related? These ghosts are however elusive, and difficult to identify or even just define at times. To try and learn more about the mind, research in artificial life and other related fields has more recently focused on studies of complexity, emergence, agency, autonomy, or information theory. As a results, this has led to major advancements in robotics, synthetic biology and artificial intelligence, among others. The main research programs in these areas however seem to be simply forgetting about the mind, rather than trying to explain it.

At the same time, with the advent of new technologies such as brain-machine interface, cyborgization, virtual/augmented reality and the metaverse, the boundaries between agents/living organisms and their environment have began fluctuating. Minds are no longer in our (living organism) shells, expanding beyond current spatial boundaries and into a new form of the “extended mind” hypothesis. At ALIFE 2023, we will bring back the focus to studies of the mind, facing the challenges and embracing the opportunities that come with studies of an often neglected but ever so important concept in both artificial life research and our daily lives.

Further informations including details of other sessions are available on the conference website: https://sites.google.com/view/alife-2023

Contact us

For questions, enquiries and more information please refer to the special session website or contact the organizers via email.