Save the date! The annual #Conference on #ArtificialLife - #ALIFE2026 will take place in Waterloo (Ontario, Canada), 17-21 August 2026. More details coming soon!

Check out our new preprint (work led by Andreas Massey) on "Sleep-Based Homeostatic Regularization for Stabilizing Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity in Recurrent Spiking Neural Networks". arxiv.org/abs/2601.08447

Congrats Dr. Tom Glover for a successful PhD defence at OsloMet As a supervisor, it has been a pleasure working with you and learning from you. Thanks to the evaluation committee Kamalika Bhattacharjee, Michele Braccini, and Kazi Shah Nawaz Ripon

Our paper "ARC-NCA: Towards Developmental Solutions to the Abstraction & Reasoning Corpus" has been awarded a Runner-Up #ARCprize Congrats team: E. Guichard, F. Reimers, M. Kvalsund, M. Lepperød, & me Thanks F. Chollet, G. Kamradt, M. Knoop! Paper: etimush.github.io/ARC_NCA/

Proud supervisor announcement: Tom will be defending his PhD on December 17th. Title: “Harvesting the computation of Elementary Cellular Automata with Reservoir Computing” www.oslomet.no/en/about/eve...

I am delighted to have been elected to the Board of Directors of The International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL), together with talented colleagues from around the world. I look forward to serving such a wonderful & diverse community where disciplinary boundaries disappear!

@alife2025.bsky.social was such a blast! Met lots of old and new faces and had very good conversations. Already looking forward to next year in Canada 🍁

This year's ALICE guest speakers 🧑‍🔬 - Angel Goñi-Moreno - @angelgm.bsky.social - Alyssa Adams - @alyssa-m-adams.bsky.social - Alexander Mordvintsev - Eric Medvet - @ericmedvetts.bsky.social - Kyrre Glette - @kyrre2000.bsky.social - Stefano Nichele - @stenichele.bsky.social - Susan Stepney

great opening keynote by Hector Zenil at @alife2025.bsky.social 🇯🇵 the purpose of science (and ALife) is to make sense of patterns in the world

Ready for @alife2025.bsky.social 🇯🇵 Østfold University College is well represented with F. Reimers, C. Vibe, E. Guichard, and me. Check out our 3 presentations at the Distributed Ciphers special session (EngramNCA, ARC-NCA & critical NCA) on Tue & poster session (RBNs for reservoir computing)!

I finally had the time to revise my website with updated descriptions of my research goals and lab activity: www.nichele.eu Feedback is welcome 😄 PS. Is it clear enough that I *DO NOT* focus on artificial intelligence applications? 🧠

Detailed program of the Special Session "The Distributed Ciphers" @alife2025.bsky.social Special session program also available here: www.nichele.eu/ALIFE-Distri... The entire program of ALIFE 2025 is available on the conference website: 2025.alife.org/program See you soon in Kyoto 🇯🇵

🔥🔥PhD position alert 🔥🔥 I am looking for a talented PhD student at Østfold University College (Norway) to work on "Open-Ended AI: Novel Methods for Enabling Novelty and Creativity in AI Systems". Apply here: 👇 www.jobbnorge.no/en/available...

Nice article on Neural Cellular Automata! It also talks about our work on ARC-NCA!

And here are the accepted contributions to the Special Session #TheDistributedCiphers at @alife2025.bsky.social: Details: www.nichele.eu/ALIFE-Distri... See you in Kyoto 🇯🇵

Presentation of our work on "NCAs for memory transfer + application to ARC-AGI", given at the computational series of the #Levin Lab at Tufts & Harvard Universities. Thanks M. Levin for the kind invitation & special thanks to Etienne for presenting our work. www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyc0...

A great review on Module Repetition in Neural Networks, very relevant for NCAs arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12473

Check out our new work on Critical Neural Cellular Automata 👇

We are happy to announce that @alyssa-m-adams.bsky.social will give a keynote at our Distributed Ciphers Special Session at @alife2025.bsky.social Kyoto (Oct. 6-10) #ALIFE2025 Alyssa's talk: ⭐ What Fungi, Swarms, and Cellular Automata Are Teaching Us About Intelligence ⭐

I've finally got a copy of Nils Barricelli's 1st paper on Artificial Life, in Italian (1954). Would be great to get it translated into English. My preference would be to have this done by a skilled human translator rather than AI. Any bilingual Italian-English folk out there who might be interested?

Your brain doesn’t just passively track time ⏳ - it structures it. In @Science.org we show that activity in 🧠 memory circuits (LEC) drifts constantly, but makes sharp jumps at key moments, segmenting life into meaningful events. (1/2) 👉 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Synthetic ecosystems that autonomously and continuously evolve in silico 👾 An Alifer dream we pursue with Flow-Lenia, a mass-conservative continuous CA ! If you are interested in complex systems with (1) emergent creatures and (2) intrinsic evolutionary dynamics, go check our new paper ! A 🧵

Our book chapter "Studying Encoder–Decoder Relation Between Cellular Automata to Uncover Their Computational Structure" is finally published in the book "Advances in Cellular Automata, Volume 2". This work was led by Bára Hudcová, in collaboration with Tomas Mikolov and myself.

Our #MLST podcast episode on ARC-NCA is available on early access on patreon at this link: www.patreon.com/posts/early-... We talk about artificial life and neuroAI, and the importance of developmental systems for AI. Paper: etimush.github.io/EngramNCA/ Thanks Tim for having us!

Feel the AGI 🧠

🚀 New preprint! ARC-NCA shows how Neural Cellular Automata —incl. memory-rich EngramNCA—crack tasks from the ARC-AGI benchmark, hitting GPT-4.5-level accuracy at a fraction of the cost. 🌱🤖 Web: etimush.github.io/ARC_NCA/ Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2505.08778 #NeuroAI #AGI #CA #ALIFE

“Continuous Thought Machines” Blog → sakana.ai/ctm Modern AI is powerful, but it's still distinct from human-like flexible intelligence. We believe neural timing is key. Our Continuous Thought Machine is built from the ground up to use neural dynamics as a powerful representation for intelligence.

New Paper: Continuous Thought Machines pub.sakana.ai/ctm/ Neurons in brains use timing and synchronization in the way that they compute, but this is largely ignored in modern neural nets. We believe neural timing is key for the flexibility and adaptability of biological intelligence. Thread ↓

The @alife2025.bsky.social #ALife2025 deadline has been extended 🙏🎉 New deadline May 11th 2025 23:59 AoE, still time to submit to our special session "The Distributed Ciphers" See you in Kyoto 🇯🇵 www.nichele.eu/ALIFE-Distri...

Hvor står Norge og Frankrike i KI-kappløpet ? Jeg og @kl4sp.bsky.social prøver å svare i podkasten Frankrike forklart. Takk Franck Orban for en flott samtale. Episoden: www.hf.uio.no/ilos/tjenest...

We introduce EngramNCA, a Neural Cellular Automaton (NCA) framework designed to investigate memory storage beyond traditional synaptic models. Web preprint: etimush.github.io/EngramNCA/ Arxiv preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2504.11855 #NeuroAI #ArtificialLife #NCA #ComplexSystems

Effectively implementing an embodied form of autoencoding as coined by @stenichele.bsky.social. The system demonstrates robust generalization between training and validation sets, suggesting reliable learning of the underlying computational principles.

Anyone attending the Northern Lights Deep Learning @nldlconference.bsky.social conference in January 2025 in Tromsø 🇳🇴? See you there! www.nldl.org/home

I wrote a TL;DR on our NeuroAI Safety roadmap. Get the gist of our 92-page roadmap in a 7-minute read. Featuring Marvin the adversarial chihuahua. www.neuroai.science/p/neuroai-fo...

Bad news if you thought #LLM 's and #genAI would lead to #AGI. Maybe some people will go back to studying real brains - good old fashioned #neuroscience ! foundationcapital.com/has-ai-scali... #aihype #neuroai #neuroskyence

This paper from Claudia Clopath's lab is very exciting for me. I've been musing for a while now that the challenge of approximating gradient descent is probably made way easier in the brain by feedback signals for control. Here they show it!!! openreview.net/forum?id=xav... 🧠📈 #NeuroAI 🧪

I'm not sure "neuroAI" is just rebranding. IMO it is a separate question. It can be tricky to publish (or fund) work on "how brains compute" unless you make explicit "testable predictions" (for neuro) or beat a benchmark (AI). Eg Hopfield nets do neither, which is why it ended up in PNAS

1/ I work in #NeuroAI, a growing field of research, which many people have only the haziest conception of... As way of introduction to this research approach, I'll provide here a very short thread outlining the definition of the field I gave recently at our BRAIN NeuroAI workshop at the NIH. 🧠📈

For the Blueskyers interested in #NeuroAI 🧠🤖, I created a starter pack! Please comment on this if you are not on the list and working in this field 🙂 go.bsky.app/CscFTAr