The ISAL student group is an international and interdisciplinary collection of students and post-docs interested in artificial life. We chat, share resources, and coordinate online, meeting up when we can at conferences. Our main activities include discussing ALife articles in a structured way, discussing anything ALife related in a non-structured way, aggregating post-doc listings, and collectively stressing about our theses.
Exploring hypotheticals of real and artificial life
The ISAL student group is starting a discussion series where we’ll take different crazy hypotheticals and explore them seriously. Discussion will happen informally in a dedicated Slack channel for one month following the question posting, and then will be edited by the board for brevity and formatting. The formatted discussions will be posted on the ISAL student group website and potentially in the ISAL journal. Example questions include:
While we’re not looking to answer these questions by any means, approaching them from an artificial life mindset could be both an enjoyable exercise for us and a good way for others to understand our field a bit. A similar series is XKCD’s “What if”, although this usually approaches questions with physics. An example of the Slack chat format is the political website 538’s chat series.
A bi-weekly (usually) meeting to discuss different artificial life articles from across the field. Sign ups for the meeting time are currently underway in Slack.
We will be awarding a student paper award as part of the 2018 ISAL awards. Any published works by student members can be considered for nomination. Further details of the voting process and timeline will be posted in Slack.
Follow us on twitter or email the Communications Chair Dennis to get a Slack invite.
We plan on hosting a number of events at ALIFE 2018. Check here or our twitter for updates.
We hosted events at ECAL 2017.
To give students a chance to interact with faculty doing research they find interesting in a low pressure setting, we organized lunch-time networking. Students were matched with seniors in the field in groups of 2-3 per senior.
We went out for dinner and drinks as a group one night during ECAL.
We held the first in-person general meeting of the ISAL Student Group during a Friday session of ECAL. Beyond discussing the group and board nominations, students gave 5 minute flash talks on a variety of topic.
This site is currently hosted by github.io. It is looking for a loving parent to nurture it along its path to a real website.