Guest Speakers

Guest speakers lead the discussion groups and facilitate the projects. Further speakers for ALICE 2027 will be announced later.

Emily Dolson

Emily Dolson is Assistant Professor at Michigan State University, with appointments in Computer Science & Engineering and in Ecology, Evolutionary Biology & Behavior, where she leads the ECODE Lab (Evolutionary Control of Digital Ecologies). The lab works on how to control the direction evolution takes in an ecological community, a problem that shows up in cancer, in microbiomes, and inside evolutionary algorithms. They come at it through artificial life, building digital systems that evolve on the same principles as biological ones and open-source tools that record every step of that evolution. She serves on the board of the International Society for Artificial Life, which named her its Distinguished Early-Career Investigator in 2025 and recognised her exceptional service to the field in 2019.

Christian Guckelsberger

Christian Guckelsberger is a computer scientist, art historian, and Assistant Professor in Creative Technologies at Aalto University, where he leads the Autotelic Interaction Research group and holds an Academy Research Fellowship from the Research Council of Finland. His goal is to build artificial systems that are creative in their own right and in interaction with people. Intrinsic motivation is central to creativity in humans and other animals, and he argues it is a key to creativity in machines too. He builds psychologically plausible models of it, with a focus on multi-agent interaction, and applies them in videogames, fine art and design. In games, creativity runs in both directions, in how people play and in how games are made. His work bridges artificial life, human-computer interaction, psychology, philosophy and creative practice.