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The evolutionary balance between innate and learned behaviors is highly intricate, and different organisms have found different solutions to this problem. We hypothesize that the emergence and exact form of learning behaviors is naturally…
A hallmark of living systems is the ability to employ a common set of versatile building blocks that can self-organize into a multitude of different structures, in a way that can be controlled with minimal cost. This capability can only be…
Open-ended evolutionary dynamics remains an elusive goal for artificial evolutionary systems. Many ideas exist in the biological literature beyond the basic Darwinian requirements of variation, differential reproduction and inheritance. I…
Noise is a ubiquitous feature of the physical world. As a result, the first prerequisite of life is fault tolerance: maintaining integrity of state despite external bombardment. Recent experimental advances have revealed that biological…
Designing robots capable of generating interpretable behavior is a prerequisite for achieving effective human-robot collaboration. This means that the robots need to be capable of generating behavior that aligns with human expectations and,…
Biological intelligence is inherently adaptive -- animals continually adjust their actions based on environmental feedback. However, creating adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) remains a major challenge. The next frontier is to go beyond…
This positional paper outlines our vision of 'adaptive architecture', which involves the integration of robotic technology to physically change an architectural space in supporting the changing needs of its occupants, in response to the…
Evolutionary robot systems are usually affected by the properties of the environment indirectly through selection. In this paper, we present and investigate a system where the environment also has a direct effect: through regulation. We…
Biological information processing manifests a huge variety in its complexity and capability among different organisms, which presumably stems from the evolutionary optimization under limited computational resources. Starting from the…
The long-term sustainability of research software is a critical challenge, as it usually suffers from poor maintainability, lack of adaptability, and eventual obsolescence. This paper proposes a novel approach to addressing this issue by…
Dispersal is a well recognized driver of ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and simultaneously an evolving trait. Dispersal evolution has traditionally been studied in single-species metapopulations so that it remains unclear how…
Sustainability and resilience of urban systems are multifaceted concepts, requiring information about multiple system attributes to adequately evaluate and characterize. However, despite the scientific consensus on the multivariate nature…
The mortality rate of many complex multicellular organisms increase with age, which suggests that net aging damage is accumulative, despite remodeling processes. But how exactly do little mishaps in the cellular level accumulate and spread…
Advancements in digital technologies have a bootstrapping effect. The past fifty years of technological innovations from the computer architecture community have brought innovations and orders-of-magnitude efficiency improvements that…
We discuss the feasibility of predicting, managing and subsequently manipulating, the future evolution of a Complex Adaptive System. Our archetypal system mimics a population of adaptive, interacting objects, such as those arising in the…
Biological phenotypes are products of complex evolutionary processes in which selective forces influence multiple biological trait measurements in unknown ways. Phylogenetic factor analysis disentangles these relationships across the…
Composition is a powerful principle for systems biology, focused on the interfaces, interconnections, and orchestration of distributed processes to enable integrative multiscale simulations. Whereas traditional models focus on the structure…
Evolutionary Robotics offers the possibility to design robots to solve a specific task automatically by optimizing their morphology and control together. However, this co-optimization of body and control is challenging, because controllers…
We define a novel quantitative strategy inspired by the ecological notion of nestedness to single out the scale at which innovation complexity emerges from the aggregation of specialized building blocks. Our analysis not only suggests that…
Resource-constrained embedded and mobile devices are becoming increasingly common. Since few years, some mobile and ubiquitous devices such as wireless sensor, able to be aware of their physical environment, appeared. Such devices enable…