ALIFE 2026
Living and Lifelike
Complex Adaptive Systems!
The 2026 Artificial Life Conference will be
August 17-21, 2026 in Waterloo, Canada.
Meet Emerging Researchers in Artificial Life at MiniCon 16th August (hosted in the conference venue)!
Hosted by:
Sponsors:
Important Dates
All deadline are in AoE Time Zone (Anywhere on the Earth)
28 February 2026 20 February 2026
CALL FOR TUTORIALS AND WORKSHOPS
28 February 2026 20 February 2026
CALL FOR SPECIAL SESSIONS
30 March 202612 April 2026
Full Papers & Summaries: Submission
7 June 2026
Full Papers & Summaries: Notification
21 June 2026
Camera-Ready Papers
27 June 2026
Art Submission
20 July 2026
Late-Breaking Abstracts Submission
A limited number of Late-Breaking Abstracts will be accepted for poster presentation on a rolling basis until capacity is reached. Decisions are made approximately once per week.
Stay informed through socials!
Venue
Conference this year will be hosted at the University of Waterloo and Wilfred Laurier University, within walking distance of each other, in the vibrant university town of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. These two universities each provide an attractive campus with state-of-the-art facilities including accessible lecture theatres for plenary and parallel sessions, in close proximity, such as the impressive Davis Centre of the School of Computer Science, on-campus dining and diverse, nearby restaurants.
Locale and Surroundings: Canada’s Waterloo-Toronto corridor is the vibrant Silicon Valley of Canada with the premier engineering school University of Waterloo in Canada, and also popular with geese and other North American wildlife. The University of Waterloo hosts Canada’s largest engineering school, ranking among the top 50 engineering school worldwide with more than $96 million in research funding per year. The University of Waterloo has 42,000 students and 238,000 alumni in 151 countries. It is home to 74 Canada Research Chairs and is well-known for its 100% creator owned IP policy. Operating world-renowned co-operative education programs, Waterloo partners with more than 7,000 employers worldwide. The campus covers 1,000 acres in the heart of the Region of Waterloo (population 600,000) which is integral to the Waterloo-Toronto tech corridor. The area is served by international airports, rail links and modern road systems. Attractions include the nearby thriving multi-cultural metropolis of Toronto, the picturesque theatre town Stratford, Ontario, and is within driving distance of the sandy beaches such as Grand Bend Beach on Lake Huron.
Plenary and parallel sessions will mainly be held at the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics of W. Laurier University.
Local hotels: In walking distance are many excellent local hotels and restaurants such as the Delta Hotel, Waterloo, as well as university accommodation.
For accommodation and hotels please check:
About conference
The 2026 Artificial Life Conference will be August 17-21, 2026, in Waterloo, Canada.
Artificial Life is the study of the synthesis and simulation of living and lifelike systems. The theme of ALIFE 2026, Living and Lifelike Complex Adaptive Systems, invites exploration of life as an emergent process arising from the interactions of many components that can adapt, learn, or organize across scales. Such systems are typically non-linear dynamical systems, where feedback, multistability, and far-from-equilibrium processes generate collective behaviours that cannot be reduced to the sum of their parts and continually reshape themselves through development, evolution, and environmental coupling. Artificial Life provides a distinctive framework for understanding these phenomena, complementing traditional biological research by enabling controlled synthesis and simulation: we can test mechanistic and mathematical hypotheses, explore alternative constraints and substrates, and connect principles across scales from molecules, cells, organisms, societies, and ecologies. This is not limited to life-as-we-known on Earth, but also encompasses like-as-it-good be in other media, or elsewhere in the universe. We also welcome constructive biology and bioinspired innovations contributions—such as synthetic cells, protocells, programmable matter, nanomedicine, and circular bioeconomy—that build lifelike function in new media and, in doing so, sharpen biological understanding or allow the harnessing of lifelike properties for engineering, design, and sustainability, We encourage robotics contributions that investigate lifelike organization through the perception-action loop of agents and novel cognitive architectures; and we equally encourage ALife-based art and design as experimental practice that can reveal new intuitions, elucidations, and questions about living and lifelike organization.
ALIFE 2026 will again be held in a hybrid format, as has been customary in recent years.