Special Issue of: International Journal of Computational Intelligence and Applications

The Inaugural workshop on Artificial Life, (IAL'01), will be held in conjunction with the Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in December 2001.

Usually, the term "Artificial Life" (Alife) is used to delineate systems that exhibit some properties of life. Research in Alife ranges from analysing and understanding life and nature - at least as we may believe it is - to modelling biological systems or solving biological problems. Alife is a large interdisciplinary research area covering research from computer science, biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, sociology, and psychology.

Research in Alife can be generically classified into three main areas:

• Biological behaviour as a metaphor for computational models; such as Ant Algorithms, Ant Colony Optimization, Marriage in Honey-Bees Optimization, Immune Systems, Neural Networks, Evolutionary Algorithms, DNA computing, etc.
• Computational models that reproduce/duplicate a biological behaviour; such as Swarm Intelligence, Simulation, Cellular Automaton
• Computational models to solve biological problems; such as Bio-informatics

The aim of this workshop is to get together computer scientists, biologists, chemists, engineers, geneticists, physicists, and others, to gain more understanding of the mystery hidden in life and to expose researchers to the recent advances in this fast developing area.

Topics of interest include, but not limited to,