This book constitutes the revised selected papers of the 12th Italian Workshop on Advances in Artificial Life, Evolutionary Computation, WIVACE 2017, held in Venice, Italy, in September 2017.The 23 full papers presented were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 33 submissions. They cover the following topics: physical-chemical phenomena; biological systems; economy and society; complexity; optimization.

The monograph discusses models of synthetic protocells, which are cell-like structures obtained from non-living matter endowed with some rudimentary kind of metabolism and genetics, but much simpler than biological cells. They should grow and proliferate, generating offsprings that resemble in some way the parent protocells with some variation, so that selection may take place. Sustainable protocell populations have not yet been obtained experimentally and mathematical models are therefore extremely important to address key questions concerning their synthesis and behavior. Different protocell "architectures" have been proposed and high-level abstract models like those that are presented in this book are particularly relevant to gain a better understanding of the different properites. These models are able to treat all the major dynamical phenomena in a unified framework, so they can be seen as "virtual laboratories" for protocell research. Particular attention is paid to the problem of synchronization of the fission rate of the whole protocell and the duplication rate of its "protogenetic" material, which is shown to be an emergent property that spontaneously develops in successive generations. The book is of interest for a broad range of scientists working in soft matter physics, chemistry and biology, interested in the role protocells may play on the development of new technologies with medical, environmental and industrial applications as well as scientists interested in the origin of life.

This volume describes our intellectual path from the physics of complex sys tems to the science of artificial cognitive systems. It was exciting to discover that many of the concepts and methods which succeed in describing the self organizing phenomena of the physical world are relevant also for understand ing cognitive processes. Several nonlinear physicists have felt the fascination of such discovery in recent years. In this volume, we will limit our discussion to artificial cognitive systems, without attempting to model either the cognitive behaviour or the nervous structure of humans or animals. On the one hand, such artificial systems are important per se; on the other hand, it can be expected that their study will shed light on some general principles which are relevant also to biological cognitive systems. The main purpose of this volume is to show that nonlinear dynamical systems have several properties which make them particularly attractive for reaching some of the goals of artificial intelligence. The enthusiasm which was mentioned above must however be qualified by a critical consideration of the limitations of the dynamical systems approach. Understanding cognitive processes is a tremendous scientific challenge, and the achievements reached so far allow no single method to claim that it is the only valid one. In particular, the approach based upon nonlinear dynamical systems, which is our main topic, is still in an early stage of development."

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, AI*IA 2009, held in Reggio Emilia, Italy, in December 2009.

The 50 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 83 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge representation and reasoning, machine learning, evolutionary computation, search, natural language processing, multi-agent systems and application.

Cellular Automata (CA), about to enter their fifties, are coming of age, seen by the breadth and quality of CA-related research carried out worldwide, as well as by the appearance of interesting applications to real world problems. The papers collected in this book, presented at ACRI 98 (Third Conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry -7-9 October 1998), further demonstrate the vitality of this line ofresearch. Until some years ago, a researcher interested in dynamical modelling of spatially of the partial extended systems had only one language at his disposal, namely that differential equations (PDE). These are wonderful tools to use when an analytical solution can be found or a perturbative approach can provide a good approximation of the observed phenomena. The use of digital computers has enormously expanded the explanatory and predictive power of partial differential equations by allowing one to treat cases which had been outside the scope of a "pen and pencil" approach. However, it has also opened up a way to new formalisms which are able to describe interesting phenomena and are, at the same time, well-suited for digital simulation.

The Italian community in Artificial Life and Evolutionary computation has grown remarkably in recent years, and this book is the first broad collection of its major interests and achievements (including contributions from foreign countries). The contributions in Artificial Life as well as in Evolutionary Computation allow one to see the deep connections between the two fields. The topics addressed are extremely relevant for present day research in Artificial Life and in Evolutionary Computation, which include important contributions from very well-known researchers. The volume provides a very broad picture of the Italian activities in this field.