The Past, Present, and Future of Artificial Life

For millennia people have wondered what makes the living different from the non-living. Beginning in the mid-1980s, artificial life has studied living systems using a synthetic approach: build life in order to understand it better, be it by means of software, hardware, or wetware. This review provides a summary of the advances that led to the development of artificial life, its current research topics, and open problems and opportunities. We classify artificial life research into fourteen themes: origins of life, autonomy, self-organization, adaptation (including evolution, development, and learning), ecology, artificial societies, behavior, computational biology, artificial chemistries, information, living technology, art, and philosophy. Being interdisciplinary, artificial life seems to be losing its boundaries and merging with other fields

Computing the Future: Digital encounters in art and science when da Vinci meets Turing

Computing the future, as life and research moves to the Internet, we are engaged increasingly in digital encounters from present to past and into the future with real people, events and documents. This paper focuses on the newly born-digital relationship between Alan Turing, father of computer science, and Leonardo da Vinci, master of Renaissance art and science – both revered as visionary geniuses, prophets of the future. Given the continued growth of digitised materials that are daily entering global consciousness, it is only relatively recently that both da Vinci’s notebooks and paintings, and Turing’s archive, are online and searchable. Thus we are able for the first time to relatively easily juxtapose and compare their work, and see that they have much in common in terms of what it means to human in science, art and the natural world, from da Vinci’s in-depth studies of the mechanisms of the human body, mind, and soul, foundational to his art, and to Turing’s discoveries in Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and morphogenesis. Considering their points of concurrence in the digital world brings into focus our global network of digital places and spaces, where science, art, and nature, including real and artificial life, become unbounded

Bioregenerative algal architectures

Contemporary biospheres will be needed in terms of life support in the face of climatic consequences of the Anthropocene and to sustain future space travel. For life to flourish on Earth and beyond, key elements are required — including carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorous — which need to regenerate through physiochemical alliances and symbioses with other life forms. Bioregenerative systems are defined as artificial ecosystems, which are made up of intra-relationalities with various species including higher plants, microorganisms, and animals. In this paper, bioregenerative architectural habitats are considered a solution for a planet that faces substantial ecological damage and for the likelihood of multiplanetary inhabitation in future. Mutually beneficial systems incorporating working with microalgae in conjunction with bioreactor technologies could constitute a means of survival on a damaged planet or to help start multiplanetary colonies. This paper illustrates the potential of a non-anthropocentric, bioregenerative life support strategy working with various microalgae species. Past- and present-related bioregenerative systems are reviewed and future applications of microalgae enhancing a sympoietic alignment (collectively producing systems) of the human and nonhuman with microorganisms are considered. Future alliances with microalgae, Chlorella vulgaris, are proposed to work within bioregenerative systems on Earth and in space. This paper clarifies how the combination of technology, speculative architectural design and microalgae can enhance carbon dioxide mitigation, furthering gaseous exchange for life support, enabling human and nonhuman species to flourish in harsher environments on Earth and beyond low Earth orbit

Revisiting the Technology Challenges and Proposing Enhancements in Ambient Assisted Living for the Elderly

Several social and technical trends support the elderly’s desire to live independently in their preferred environment, despite their increasing medical needs, and enhance their quality of life at home. Ambient-assisted living (AAL) has the capabilities to support the elderly and to decrease their dependency on formal or informal caregivers. We provide a review of the technological challenges that were identified as inhibiting factors in the past decade and then present recent technological advances, e.g., cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things. We also fill the gap in the current literature in regard to specific AAL solutions and propose fourth-generation AAL technology design. We find that most informal caregivers are family members who are medically untrained and that the use of advanced analytical processes on AAL-generated data could significantly increase symptom identification. We also present the implications and remaining challenges along with recommendations for future research

Cybersecurity: Past, Present and Future

The digital transformation has created a new digital space known as cyberspace. This new cyberspace has improved the workings of businesses, organizations, governments, society as a whole, and day to day life of an individual. With these improvements come new challenges, and one of the main challenges is security. The security of the new cyberspace is called cybersecurity. Cyberspace has created new technologies and environments such as cloud computing, smart devices, IoTs, and several others. To keep pace with these advancements in cyber technologies there is a need to expand research and develop new cybersecurity methods and tools to secure these domains and environments. This book is an effort to introduce the reader to the field of cybersecurity, highlight current issues and challenges, and provide future directions to mitigate or resolve them. The main specializations of cybersecurity covered in this book are software security, hardware security, the evolution of malware, biometrics, cyber intelligence, and cyber forensics. We must learn from the past, evolve our present and improve the future. Based on this objective, the book covers the past, present, and future of these main specializations of cybersecurity. The book also examines the upcoming areas of research in cyber intelligence, such as hybrid augmented and explainable artificial intelligence (AI). Human and AI collaboration can significantly increase the performance of a cybersecurity system. Interpreting and explaining machine learning models, i.e., explainable AI is an emerging field of study and has a lot of potentials to improve the role of AI in cybersecurity.Comment: Author's copy of the book published under ISBN: 978-620-4-74421-

Use of GIS and RS Combined with Artificial Intelligence Plate for Detecting and Analyzing of Aquatic Heavy Metals Threats for Environmental Sustainability of Green Ports

With the technological development globally, Geographic Information System and Remote Sensing (GIS) & RS has been used and reformed in providing reliable and useful data in the field of environmental studies advancement. There has been needed for GIS and RS in terms of biological and chemical elements in the aquatic environments to assess the concentration of trace metals in the tissue of aquatic species around the world. However, there is still inadequate information and exploration on the subject matter which calls for the use of artificial intelligence plates in acquiring data. There is a need for the use of the invented plate in green port sustainability in order to save time, money, life, less labour and availability of more multiple accurate data information that will have improved sustainability. The primary aim of this concept paper focused on using GIS & RS combined with artificial intelligence plate in Green port environmental sustainability to monitor, acquire data and identify biological and chemical elements data online for analysis. This aim was achieved by the application of qualitative research, that is synthetic literature review. Through the review, we are able to find out that artificial intelligence plates will be useful. Therefore, it requests for innovation of an artificial intelligent plate that will detect, analyze and recommend the concentration of heavy metals and other anthropogenic elements in the water bodies and species tissues without necessarily involving laboratory processes. In conclusion, to provide a theory from fusing past and present circumstances in order to forecast the future for coastal areas, GIS & RS applications and artificial intelligence plates were suggested. This review gives instances of GIS applications' used in the stages of assessment, conservation, maintenance, sustainability, and protection of the environment of marine areas. This study suggests the use of a digital plate that can be used with GIS & RS in monitoring, spatiotemporal distribution and identifying the concentration of biological and chemical elements in the environmental sustainability of port institutions and industrial organizations

10th International Conference

The International Symposium on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence 2013 (DCAI 2013) is a forum in which applications of innovative techniques for solving complex problems are presented. Artificial intelligence is changing our society. Its application in distributed environments, such as the internet, electronic commerce, environment monitoring, mobile communications, wireless devices, distributed computing, to mention only a few, is continuously increasing, becoming an element of high added value with social and economic potential, in industry, quality of life, and research. This conference is a stimulating and productive forum where the scientific community can work towards future cooperation in Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence areas. These technologies are changing constantly as a result of the large research and technical effort being undertaken in both universities and businesses. The exchange of ideas between scientists and technicians from both the academic and industry sector is essential to facilitate the development of systems that can meet the ever increasing demands of today's society. This edition of DCAI brings together past experience, current work, and promising future trends associated with distributed computing, artificial intelligence and their application in order to provide efficient solutions to real problems. This symposium is organized by the Bioinformatics, Intelligent System and Educational Technology Research Group (http://bisite.usal.es/) of the University of Salamanca. The present edition was held in Salamanca, Spain, from 22nd to 24th May 2013

Measuring autonomy and emergence via Granger causality

Concepts of emergence and autonomy are central to artificial life and related cognitive and behavioral sciences. However, quantitative and easy-to-apply measures of these phenomena are mostly lacking. Here, I describe quantitative and practicable measures for both autonomy and emergence, based on the framework of multivariate autoregression and specifically Granger causality. G-autonomy measures the extent to which the knowing the past of a variable helps predict its future, as compared to predictions based on past states of external (environmental) variables. G-emergence measures the extent to which a process is both dependent upon and autonomous from its underlying causal factors. These measures are validated by application to agent-based models of predation (for autonomy) and flocking (for emergence). In the former, evolutionary adaptation enhances autonomy; the latter model illustrates not only emergence but also downward causation. I end with a discussion of relations among autonomy, emergence, and consciousness

The meaning of life in a developing universe

The evolution of life on Earth has produced an organism that is beginning to model and understand its own evolution and the possible future evolution of life in the universe. These models and associated evidence show that evolution on Earth has a trajectory. The scale over which living processes are organized cooperatively has increased progressively, as has its evolvability. Recent theoretical advances raise the possibility that this trajectory is itself part of a wider developmental process. According to these theories, the developmental process has been shaped by a larger evolutionary process that involves the reproduction of universes. This evolutionary process has tuned the key parameters of the universe to increase the likelihood that life will emerge and develop to produce outcomes that are successful in the larger process (e.g. a key outcome may be to produce life and intelligence that intentionally reproduces the universe and tunes the parameters of ‘offspring’ universes). Theory suggests that when life emerges on a planet, it moves along this trajectory of its own accord. However, at a particular point evolution will continue to advance only if organisms emerge that decide to advance the evolutionary process intentionally. The organisms must be prepared to make this commitment even though the ultimate nature and destination of the process is uncertain, and may forever remain unknown. Organisms that complete this transition to intentional evolution will drive the further development of life and intelligence in the universe. Humanity’s increasing understanding of the evolution of life in the universe is rapidly bringing it to the threshold of this major evolutionary transition