Welcome to Conference Site

We would like to invite you to attend the International conference on Morphological Computation taking place at the European Center of Living Technology (ECLT), Venice Italy. The conference will be broadly interdisciplinary, including discussions in the area of computation (robotics, computation theory), chemistry and molecular biology (micro-patterning with biological polymers, interacting self-assembled micro-structures), and material science (intelligent micro materials, complex physical materials, complex surface patterning). One key goal of the conference is to help identify a new and fruitful center of gravity at the heart of these overlapping research areas. Our guiding idea is that the time is ripe to formulate and develop a new paradigm for fully embodied computation, which might be quite different from the conventional Turing computational paradigm based on symbol manipulation. The breadth of the endeavor will naturally bring together people from different research communities, so that they can learn of their overlapping interests and converging research. Contributions should identify key open questions and key principles that can be generalized to other contexts. They should also clearly identify key results now in hand.

The constellation of areas that have strong overlap and potential contributions to morphological computation include:

- embodied computation (robotics, biology, cognitive science)

- amorphous computing

- organic computing

- membrane computing (P-calculus, formal language theory)

- DNA computing

- self-assembled computing

- molecular computing

- models of complex physical materials like glass

- micro-patterning, tiling systems

- computational complexity theory, motion planning problem

- non-computational cognitive science using dynamical systems

Call For Abstract

We solicit submissions of long abstracts (maximum length of 3 pages) which report original results and insights on the issues listed above. All submissions should be sent electronically to [iida at csail.mit.edu] in PDF format, which will be reviewed by the committee members. We are planning to publish a follow-up proceedings after the conference.

Program & Invited Speakers

Detailed Program

Proceedings (12MB)

Erik Winfree, Caltech, USA
In vitro synthetic biology: from self-assembly to biochemical circuits

Rodney Douglas, University of Zurich, ETHZ, Switzerland

Takashi Ikegami, University of Tokyo, Japan

John McCaskill, University of Bochum, Germany
Evolving Self-Assembling Molecular Recognition Systems

Akio Ishiguro, Tohoku University, Japan
A Modular Robot That Exhibits Amoeboid Locomotion, Self-assembly, and Self-repair

Thomas Knight, CSAIL MIT, USA

Jun Tani, Riken, Japan
Toward "Organic Compositionality": Dynamical Systems Accounts for Cognitive Behaviors

John Reif, Duke University, USA
Autonomous Programmable Biomolecular Devices Using Self-Assembled DNA Nanostructures

Satoshi Murata, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan Models of Self-Replication

Rolf Pfeifer, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Morphological Computation: Basic Concepts

Rob Shaw, ProtoLife, Italy

Registration

Please send the following registration form to Francesca Bernardi.
Registration Form

Travel Information

Location of European Center of Living Technology (ECLT)

Conference Organizers and Contact Information

Norman Packard (ProtoLife)

Rolf Pfeifer (University of Zurich)

Mark Bedau (ProtoLife, Reed University)

Fumiya Iida (MIT, University of Zurich) - scientific contact person -

Contact

Francesca Bernardi (ECLT) - organizational contact person -

Contact