- Artificial Life Special Issue -
- Call for Submissions - Picture This: The State of The Art in Visualizing Complex Adaptive Systems ========================================================================== Guest Editors: Jon Bird, University of Sussex, UK; [hidden email] Seth Bullock, University of Leeds, UK; [hidden email] Tom Smith, University of Sussex, UK; [hidden email] Editor-in-Chief: Mark Bedau, Reed College, US; [hidden email] Submission Deadline: 18 July 2003 URL: http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/toms/Visualization/ Outline ------- Complex adaptive systems (by which we mean to include organisms and organizations as well as algorithms, agents and robots) are high-dimensional, time-varying systems that exhibit complex and often counterintuitive dynamics across a variety of time-scales and at many different levels of organization. Finding efficient and intuitive ways to visualize the behaviour of these systems is a challenge faced by researchers working in artificial life, evolutionary computation, AI, cybernetics, robotics, and many areas of biology. Without effective visualization, even simple systems may be extremely difficult to understand. Moreover, the multi-disciplinary nature of the study of complex adaptive systems demands intuitive, in addition to formal, means of communication. Surprisingly, until recently there has been relatively little explicit, peer-reviewed visualization research within artificial life. While many researchers have explored a range of standard methods, and some have developed novel visualization techniques with which to display the behaviour of particular systems, there is very little systematic record of these explorations available to the community as a whole. ALife visualization research has remained largely informal and has not been disseminated very widely. Overall, this has contributed to a reliance on a small number of rather simplistic techniques - visualizations that by their nature disguise much of the system complexity that interests ALife researchers. The Artificial Life journal solicits high quality contributions to a special issue devoted to these topics. In this special issue, we intend to provide a forum within which research on the visualization of complex adaptive systems can be presented and progressed. We are particularly interested in gathering together a wide range of visualization expertise in one easily accessible resource. To this end, papers should describe outstanding research exploring visualization issues as they pertain to any aspect of complex adaptive systems, whether software, hardware, wetware, or some other category. Papers exploring or assessing the effectiveness and usability of visualization are particularly welcome, as are very short "visualization gem" papers briefly encapsulating relevant visualization techniques that deserve to be "archived" in the journal (see below). Finally, the editors would welcome pointers to existing relevant visualization work that may have been overlooked by the community. We look forward to your contributions. Topics include, but are not limited to: * Theoretical Issues - Identifying the goals and challenges facing artificial life visualization research - What can we learn from existing visualization & human-computer interaction theory? - What kinds of visualization are we looking for? * Practical Issues - Understanding the different roles of artificial life visualization - Understanding the constraints imposed by different media - Understanding the needs of different audiences - Understanding the challenges raised by different target systems * Exemplars - Accounts of successes and failures, and what we can learn from them - Arguments for or against particular approaches * Visualization Gems (see below) - Brief accounts of visualization techniques with high utility for artificial life Submissions ----------- Authors intending to submit papers are encouraged to contact the Guest Editors as soon as possible to discuss paper ideas and suitability for this special issue. This is particularly important for authors intending to submit a visualization gem. Submission of manuscripts should be made via anonymous ftp. For details, please consult http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/toms/Visualization/ Significant dates: Submissions deadline - 18th July 2003 Notification of acceptance - 15th August 2003 Final paper deadline - 19th September 2003 Two categories of submission will be considered: 1. Research Papers: These are papers describing new research into artificial life visualization. They may critically assess existing techniques, discuss criteria for the success or failure of artificial life visualization, draw attention to extant problems and challenges, etc. If new techniques are suggested, it is imperative that authors discuss their usability, their strengths and, most importantly, their **limitations**. 2. Visualization Gems: These are very short papers (2-4 printed pages) which detail a single visualization technique considered to be an excellent example of its type. The paper will briefly describe the technique, its motivation, strengths, and limitations, and provide references to more detailed accounts, including, where possible the first instance of its use. It is intended that a collection of these papers will serve as a resource for the artificial life community, gathering useful information together in one easily accessible place. Please consult the important submission instructions at: http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/toms/Visualization/ Artificial Life --------------- The journal Artificial Life is devoted to a new discipline that investigates the scientific, engineering, philosophical, and social issues involved in our rapidly increasing technological ability to synthesize life-like behaviors from scratch in computers, machines, molecules, and other alternative media. By extending the horizons of empirical research in biology beyond the territory currently circumscribed by life-as-we-know-it, the study of artificial life gives us access to the domain of life-as-it-could-be. Relevant topics span the hierarchy of biological organization, including studies of the origin of life, self-assembly, growth and development, evolutionary and ecological dynamics, animal and robot behavior, social organization, and cultural evolution. |
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