Special Session

Alife’s Co-adventures with Human

at ALIFE 2025
6-10 October 2025 in Kyoto, Japan

About session

This special session aims to explore artificial systems that can co-adventure with humans. Artificial systems that can co-adventure with humans are novel artificial systems that overcome the challenges when applying artificial intelligence and robots, which have emphasized intelligence and productivity improvements, to society. Conventional artificial intelligence and robots mainly assume a one-sided relationship in which humans give orders and artificial systems follow. This relationship implies that the artificial systems cannot act without orders from humans, and they remain as lifeless entities that lack autonomy. Accordingly, the application of artificial systems is limited to automation in closed environments such as factories. To expand the application of artificial systems to open environments such as daily life spaces, however, it is difficult to define environmental information and give orders in advance because various unexpected events can occur.

To solve these problems, we have an opportunity to discuss how to update the relationship between computer intelligence and humans, and how to make AI ethics, which humans have conventionally defined one-sidedly, something that arises from this relationship. Furthermore, by predicting the social changes that will arise from this new relationship, connections to industry will also be considered.

We hope to contribute to the expansion of the Alife community through discussions involving not only computer science experts, but also experts from various fields such as philosophy, psychology, ethics and law. This special session calls for such a wide range of research to address these issues and provide an opportunity for discussion.

Call for papers

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• – Social Interaction between Humans and Artificial Systems
  　Emotion, Empathy, Cooperation and Collaboration, Theory of mind, Autopoiesis
• – Neuroscience
  　Free energy principle/Active inference, Predictive coding, Bayesian brain hypothesis
• – AI ethics
  　Values, Freedom and Responsibility, Trust, Norms
• – Self and Embodiment
  　Development, Self-differentiation, Enactivism, Sensorimotor contingency

Important dates

Submission Deadline: May 4, 2025

Paper submissions

The submission instructions and submission link are available here and select the special session, “Alife’s Co-adventures with Human”.

Please note that contributions to our special session have to be submitted through the main conference’s submission system.

Organizers

• – Kanako Esaki (Hitachi, Ltd.)
  　Email: kanako.esaki.oa[at]hitachi.com
• – Ryosuke Igarashi (Kyoto University)
  　Email: igarashi.ryousuke.7p[at]kyoto-u.ac.jp
• – Tadayuki Matsumura (Hitachi, Ltd.)
  　Email: tadayuki.matsumura.bh[at]hitachi.com
• – Yang Shao (Hitachi, Ltd.)
  　Email: yang.shao.kn[at]hitachi.com
• – Hiroyuki Mizuno (Hitachi, Ltd.)
  　Email: hiroyuki.mizuno.vp[at]hitachi.com

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