Why invite two kinds of submission: “full papers” and “abstracts”?
The principal driver is a desire to involve as many relevant kinds of academics as possible at ALIFE XII (see 1, above). In addition to ALIFE’s established core community, we hope to engage researchers from disciplines where conferences are not associated with published proceedings, e.g., many parts of biology, chemistry, and physics. For such conferences it is standard practice to submit abstracts which are primarily filtered only for relevance (and perhaps sanity). We also appreciate that there are many Alife academics for whom a full conference paper may not look like a good return on the investment of time and effort required. For both of these groups of people, the opportunity to make a presentation based on a 500-word abstract may make the difference between attending the conference or not. We believe that this format — that had been already installed for ALIFE XI in 2008 — will maintain the character and quality of ALIFE whilst opening it up to a more diverse and representative
