Last year, we organised ALIFE 2022 – the Conference on Artificial Life. It was the second fully virtual ALIFE conference bringing together nearly 400 leading researchers and practitioners from across the world working on problems related to simulating and synthesizing complex phenomena in computation, chemistry, biology, artificial intelligence, robotics, philosophy, and cognitive science.
The theme of ALIFE 2021 conference was ”Robots: The century past and the century ahead”, because we celebrated the centenary of Čapek's R.U.R. and the worldwide-used word “robot”, which comes from this play. The conference was originally scheduled to be held in Prague, the city where the play had its official world premiere in 1921. However, because of the covid-19 pandemic and its repercussions, ALIFE 2021 conference was virtual.
The organisation was led by the University of Chemistry and Technology Prague and supported by artificial intelligence research and development company GoodAI. GoodAI sees many fruitful intersections between AI and Artificial Life and has a history of collaboration with the community and the ALIFE conference participants.
The ALIFE conferences are the major meetings of the artificial life research community since 1987. These scientific gatherings are supported by the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL), which awards prizes in several categories each year.
In 2021, Takashi Ikegami, from the University of Tokyo, took home the Lifetime Achievement Award, for his sustained contribution to the Artificial Life community through an excellent body of diverse work of foundational contributions. Last year he gave his award talk “Artificial Life Larger than Biological Life” only virtually. It is our pleasure to host Takashi Ikegami at the University of Chemistry and Technology Prague in person. We would like to invite you to his public lecture entitled "Beyond AI: It's Time to Think about Artificial Life" in the lecture hall AI on Monday, 27 June, 2022 at 11 am.
Btw. Takashi is one of the authors who contributed to my book Robot 100: Sto rozumů.