Organized by: Jean Alfonso-Decena, Q. Tyrell Davis, Benjamin Calvert, Alyssa Adams, Olaf Witkowski
Hosted by: Cross Labs
Period: August 19 - September 12, 2025 (Group work shop 3 hours a day, one day per week)
From the Pleistocene to the present, “What is Life?” is one of the most powerful questions posed and pondered by a certain branch of primates. At Cross Labs, we study living systems in terms of abstract, general principles and functions, not limited to the living things that exist in the warm, wet world of Earth’s biosphere. In other words, we spend a lot of time thinking, programming computers, and building experiments that try to uncover something interesting about what it means to be alive.
The Cross Labs Artificial Life Summer School is an introductory workshop for curious secondary school students to try out ALife research. Students get the chance to choose a theme from 3 reticular project paths and create something interesting over the course of 4 weeks of mentorship by research scientists at the Cross Labs office in Nakagyo ward, Kyoto. In October, students will have a chance to present their work at the 2025 Alife Conference. Workshop content includes neural networks, chaotic computing, cellular automata, computational microscopy, and maybe a chance to think about alien life.
OUTCOME
Poster to be presented at this year's ALife Conference 2025 in Kyoto on Oct. 6-10
Topics
Weekly curriculum
Instructor
Q. Tyrell Davis
Teaching Assistant
Benjamin Calvert
ABOUT ALIFE
The ALife 2025 Conference on Artificial Life will be held in Kyoto, Japan, 6 – 10 October 2025. This year's conference theme is Ciphers of Life, where participants are encouraged to explore the many ways that life encodes information, creates internal languages, and interacts in encrypted ways with its environment.
For details, please visit the official conference website.
Image credit: Q. Tyrell Davis
Jean Alfonso-Decena
Executive Assistant to Olaf Witkowski, Jean co-founded tech startups in Japan and the Philippines and led a Google award-winning conversational AI fintech company in Berkeley, California. Jean is also an AI consultant for global tech and academic institutions, and the founder of a spirit-tech startup helping humans evolve into radical consciousness.
Q. Tyrell Davis, PhD
Q programs computer simulations to explore characteristics and consequences in abstract life-like systems. A senior research scientist at Cross Labs, Q used to build optical microscopes and use them for imaging and manipulating proteins a few tens of nanometers across.
Benjamin Calvert
PhD student with a background in marine biology, Ben has a deep interest in animal communication and aims to bridge the gap between human and animal cognition and fostering new insights into cross-species interaction.
Alyssa Adams, PhD
Deputy Director of Cross Labs, Alyssa is a physicist and innovator who equips the lab's members with the resources and freedom needed to tackle the most profound questions in modern science and technology, while scaling the lab to the scale of its ambitions.
Olaf Witkowski, PhD
Co-founder and Director of Cross Labs, Olaf leads the lab's research activities. An expert in machine intelligence, cognitive science, and artificial life, he has conducted research at the University of Tokyo, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
