Imy Khan

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📣 Decisions are out for Full Papers & Summaries!
Camera-Ready Versions Due Aug 18th 2025 (AoE)

We’re delighted to announce that notifications for full paper & summary submissions were released on Monday, 4 August 2025. Authors, please check your emails!

I'm sorry to hear that @kngwyu.bsky.social. Could you try for a late breaking abstract or a workshop, that might allow you to use the funding (if your school will let you do that)?

Yay, paper accepted!

See you soon, @alife2025.bsky.social :)

#ALIFE2025

✊🏿💕🎮

Hey #ALifers! Want a free entry to #ALIFE2025? You still have time to sketch up a mascot design to become the face of the conference! Details in the post below.

I have two main goals when I go to Kyoto for @alife2025.bsky.social:

1. Have an awesome and memorable #ALIFE2025 conference.
2. Buy a suitcase load of Pokémon plushies.

UN warns malnutrition surging in Gaza as Starmer suggests UK to help with aid air drops - live updates The World Food Programme says 90,000 women and children are now in

The BBC article is, yet again, passive in describing the reason for the mass starvation and malnutrition.

How this coloniser force gets away with this time and time again is simply unbelievable. My heart breaks for my Palestinian brothers and sisters.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cx...

GitHub - hsayama/PyCX: PyCX is a Python-based sample code repository for complex systems research and education. PyCX is a Python-based sample code repository for complex systems research and education. - hsayama/PyCX

I finally had time to update PyCX to ver. 1.2! Many new models and bug fixes. Enjoy!!
github.com/hsayama/PyCX

We see the same thing in sports, where Arab states get accused of "sportswashing" to cover up xyz, as though the Western countries are any better.

The position is riddled with so many holes and xenophobic positions that I can't even begin to argue against 😮‍💨

The language and attitude towards ME countries is truly baffling at the best of times. "Authoritarian", "dictatorships", won't do business with them bc of "security concerns." All of it is used to push the idea that western world = good and brown ME = bad.

A Collectivist, Economic Perspective on AI Information technology is in the midst of a revolution in which omnipresent data collection and machine learning are impacting the human world as never before. The word "intelligence" is being used as...

What if AI isn’t about building solo geniuses, but designing social systems?
Michael Jordan advocates blending ML, economics, and uncertainty management to prioritize social welfare over mere prediction.
A must-read rethink.
arxiv.org/abs/2507.062...

👼🗺📍

The next foundational paper of complexity science will be discussed

Thurs, July 10, at 2:00 pm EDT.

Paper: C. E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (1948).

people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/te...

Super honoured to be an ambassador for #ALIFE2025.
If you have never been to an #ALIFE conference before, then I encourage you to check it out this year. There will be both online and in-person options! :D

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Palestine Action to be banned after judge denies temporary block A High Court judge refused its request to temporarily block the government from proscribing it as a terror group.

Palestine Action, a well-established direct action civil disobedience group which (mostly) stays within the law, and which does not pursue violence, has been designated a terrorist group in the same way as ISIS, Al Qaeda, etc.

A clear attack on our rights. Truly disgraceful by the UK government.

a cartoon drawing of a girl with long hair and a bow on her head ALT: a cartoon drawing of a girl with long hair and a bow on her head

oh no did the murderous occupying forces get their feewings hurt :(

Since Bob Vylan said "Death, death to the IDF" the IDF has killed 400 Palestinians.

Which is why he said what he said.

Someone is not enjoying the heatwave.

anyway stop extrapolating from questions about trust and positive interactions to forming "attachments" or "bonds" because they're definitely not the same thing :D

#HRI
#ArtificialIntelligence
#ALIFE

These biobehavioural measures are driven by changes in oxytocin, underpinning the presence of (functional) social bonds in natural systems.

The essence of the argument is that if humans are truly bonded with robots, then we will also see these changes in OT, manifesting as changes in the above.

To kick-start the conversation, I propose we start with 3 measurable factors in the #HRI context:
1. Reductions in physiological stress
2. Narrowing of spatial proximity (by human)
3. Inter-dyad behavioural synchrony

(That is a non-exhaustive list, so inb4 "what about X?")

I say, yes, we should.

Self-reports are methodologically (extremely) limited in this context.

We should instead focus on objective, (unconscious) biobehavioural proxies of social bonding, grounded in the evolutionary and neurobiological mechanisms we observe in natural systems.

We don't give prairie voles or chimpanzees questionnaires to determine their "bonded" status, so why do we do it in human-robot dyads?

If social #robots are truly becoming assistive and collaborative partners, shouldn't we be measuring bond formation with the same rigour as in natural systems?

Social "bonding" is deeply rooted in our evolutionary history & neurobiology, manifested through a suite of shared physiological and behavioural responses across species.

Social bonding, at its core, is a functional phenomenon.

This fundamental truth is often overlooked in current #HRI research.

Operationalising Social Bonding in Human-Robot Dyads Through Physiological and Biobehavioural Proxies of Oxytocin Given our evolutionary disposition as social animals, it is perhaps inevitable that humans will develop affective social bonds with artificial entities, such as robots. In natural systems, social bond...

I realised I never talked about a couple of things I wrote last year, so here we go.

What does it mean to form a "social bond" with a robot?

Existing approaches often miss the mark, relying heavily on subjective, post-interaction psychological measures which...isn't right IMO. 😄

#ALIFE #HRI

maaaaaaan what is it about airports that makes people forget how to be normal human beings?

That is a great idea. I proposed to my wife that I could probably train some type of NN to predict when the baby might (probabilistically) start crying, but she was not sold on this idea... I will try again with this new use case.

On this topic, @annaciaunica.bsky.social did some really cool work on co-embodiment & co-homeostasis (of mother and baby) a few years ago and definitely worth checking out.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33872985/