PURPOSE

The European Center of Living Technology (ECLT) will hold its first international conference on living technology. Living technology is broadly construed to be development of techniques, methods, and implementations that manifest essential qualities of life in a significant way.  These qualities include self-maintainence, self-reproduction, self-repair,robustness, and evolvability that enables ongoing innovation.  The ECLT includes a broad range of interdisciplinary scientific activity as examples of living technology, and the program of the current conference is designed to reflect this breadth. The ECLT believes that fundamental progress in understanding living systems, both natural and artificial, is needed to enable future engineering of complex systems that have the potential of life.

PROGRAM

Friday 25th May
Aula Magna Ca’ Dolfin

9:00-9:30  Introduction
N. Packard: Living Technology
SESSION I: Protocells / Synthetic Biology
Session Chair: F. KEPES
9:30-10:15   S. Rasmussen
Living technology based on self-replicating
materials  
10:15-11:00  L. Luisi
Chemical synthetic biology approaches to the
biogenesis of macromolecules and early cells  
11:00-11:30  Coffee Break
11:30-12:15  G. Von Kiedrowski
Systems chemistry: from chemical self-
replication to virus-shaped biomimetic artefacts
12:15-13:00  J McCaskill
Complementation Systems for Genetic Self-
assembly
13:00-14:30 Lunch

SESSION II: Computation, the internet, and
the world wide web  
Session Chair: P. BOURGINE
14:30- 15:15   S. Kirkpatrick
Dynamical Geography of the Internet
15:15- 16:00   O. Babaoglu
Techniques for Decentralized, Self-Organizing
and Robust Solutions in Dynamic Information
Networks
16:00-16:30 Coffee Break
16:30- 17:15   S. Nolfi
Behaviour as a Complex Adaptive System:
Insights from Evolutionary Robotics Experiments  
17:15- 18:00   C. Priami
Computational Modeling in Biology
18:15 Aperitivo at Ca’ Minich



Saturday 26th May
Aula Magna Ca’ Dolfin

SESSION III: Theoretical Perspectives  
Session Chair: R. BOZIO
9:00-9:45    P. Hogeweg
Evolutionary Information Accumulation:
speciation, regulation and/or evolvability  
9:45-10:30   S. Jain
Large scale biochemical networks and systems
biology  
10:30-11:00 Coffee Break
11:00-11:45   W. Fontana
Rules rule: Modeling and analyzing
combinatorially complex biological pathways
11:45-12:30  M. Bedau
The creative evolution of technology
12:30-14:00 Lunch

SESSION IV: Social networks and
communication  
Session Chair: D. PUMAIN
14:00- 14:45 D. Lane
Darwinism and Sociocultural Change:  From
Population to Organization Thinking   
14:45-15:30  S. Van der Leeuw
The role of cognition and communication in the
emergence of social organization  
15:30-16:00 Coffee Break
16:00-16:45  L. Steels
Artificial Language Evolution with Humanoid
Robots
16:45- 17:30  D. Parisi
Communicating Artefacts
17:30 Conference closing