The First Australian Conference on Artificial Life, (ACAL03), will be held in Canberra, 6-7 December 2003. ACAL will precede the Congress on Evolutionary Computations CEC03 which will also be held in Canberra, 2003 and CIRAS in Singapore, 2003. ACAL is associated with DICTA2003.

The program is now available

A selection of the best papers at the conference will be published as a special issue of the Artificial Life journal, MIT Press. Papers to be submitted to the special issue are expected to be substantially revised.

"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,