Artificial life organizations

This article describes organizations that promote Artificial life.

ISAL is a "democratic, international, professional society dedicated to promoting scientific research and education relating to artificial life, including sponsoring conferences, publishing scientific journals and newsletters, and maintaining web sites related to artificial life", originally incorporated in 2001

Since its formation, ISAL has taken over organizing professional conferences on artificial life, alternating each year between the International Conference on Artificial Life in even years and the European Conference on Artificial Life in odd years. Each conference is uniquely identified with a Roman numeral.

The current president of ISAL is Charles Ofria from Michigan State University. From 2001-2015, the president of ISAL was Mark Bedau. The ISAL board of directors currently contains 9 elected members and 5 appointed members to carry out specific roles.

The ISAL also publishes the preeminent artificial life scholarly journal Artificial Life through MIT Press.

Biota.org is run by Tom Barbalet, and "promotes and assists the engineering of complete, biologically-inspired, synthetic ecosystems and organisms". Biota.org ran an annual Digital Biota Conference Series from 1996 to 2001. More recently, Biota.org has hosted a "collection of interviews, conference lectures and conversations with artificial life developers, academics and users" through a podcast.

The Grey Thumb Society was a group of "scientists, engineers, hackers, artists, and hobbyists... with a strong interest in artificial life, artificial intelligence, biology, complex systems, and other related topics". Grey Thumb societies appeared around the world but by 2011 most of the groups' activities had wound down. There's a recent attempt to revive Grey Thumb Society in NYC: http://www.meetup.com/Grey-Thumb-NYC/

...
Wikipedia