Description

The Emerging Researchers in Artificial Life (ERA) is the official student, post-doc, and junior researcher group for the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL). The purpose of the ISAL student group is to provide opportunities for students and post-docs interested in artificial life to interact with each other, develop professionally, and contribute to the broader artificial life community.

This workshop will be held as part of the (virtual) 2021 Conference on Artificial Life. The goal of this workshop is to provide a venue for junior researchers to meet, share their work, and network.

Schedule

General information about the ERA (15-20 minutes)
- We will begin with a brief informational discussion about ERA, including an introduction by the current elected chairs, an overview on how to get involved in the group, discussions of events and activities junior researchers would like to see organized by the group, and a request for nominations for 2021-2022 ERA chairs.
- Additionally, we will announce any upcoming ERA-organized social events planned during the conference.
Invited talk by the 2021 Outstanding Student Paper Award recipient (30 minutes)
- We will host an research talk from the recipient of the 2021 Outstanding Student Paper award.
Research lightning talks (30-40 minutes)
- To give junior ALife researchers a minimal-barrier-to-entry venue to share their research with peers, we are offering sign-ups to give lightning talks on research at any stage of development, ranging from rough ideas for future projects to already published work.
- Sign up for a lightning talk slot below
Academic karaoke (30-40 minutes)
- Academic karaoke is an entertaining improvisational social activity where participants present a series of ALife-themes slides that they have never seen before! The presenter’s goal is to give an improvisational talk on-the-fly. Last year’s academic karaoke featured participants making unexpected connections across ALife’s many disciplines, as well as much laughter.
- Sign up for academic karaoke below

Sign up for a lightning talk slot and/or to participate in academic karaoke by emailing us at abrahamjleite@gmail.com

You do not need to commit to a topic for your lightning talk in order to sign up for a speaking slot. We don’t need to know your topic until you present! If you do know what you’d like to talk about, however, we’ll post the topic/description here.

We should have time for roughly 10 speaking slots split between lightning talks and academic karaoke (allocation depending on interest). Sign-ups are first-come, first-serve, so feel free to sign up as early as you’d like! We will be accepting sign-ups up until the time of the workshop or until all slots have been filled.

If you have any questions feel free to email us (or, file an issue on GitHub if that’s your jam).

Lightning talks

Time Slot	Speaker	Topic	Contact
1	Aymeric Vié	Population network structure impacts genetic algorithm optimisation performance	vie@maths.ox.ac.uk
2	Thomas Chen	Human posture recognition enabled by computer vision	thomaschen7@acm.org
3	Federico Pigozzi	Modularity for voxel-based soft robots	pigozzife@gmail.com
4	Kevin Frans	TBD	kvfrans@mit.edu
5	Austin Marcus	Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of Behavior and ALife	bwvxnt@gmail.com
6	You!	TBD	TBD

Academic Karaoke

Time Slot	Speaker
1	Acacia Ackles
2	Kevin Frans
3	Aakriti Hariprakash
4	You!

Important Dates

ALife conference: July 19-23, 2021
- Register here: https://www.robot100.cz/registration
Workshop: July 20th, 2021
- 3PM CET (9AM EDT)

Organizers

Abe Leite
Josheta Srinivasa
Kira Breithaupt
Austin J. Ferguson
Alexander Lalejini