7 October 2009: Applications are currently open under the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET) Government of Ireland postdoctoral fellowship scheme. Candidates must be within 3 academic years from the award of PhD and propose pursuing their work for 24 months at an Irish research laboratory. If interested in applying for such a fellowship to work at the DCU ALife lab, please first review the full documentation at the IRCSET site, and then contact us to discuss whether we can support your application. Note that the IRCSET closing date is 12th Nov 2009 5pm GMT/UTC; agreement from the host laboratory must be sought well in advance of this.
... I do not really believe that we shall succeed in creating life artificially; but after having reached the moon and landed a spaceship or two on Mars, I realize that this disbelief of mine means very little. But computers are totally different from brains, whose function is not primarily to compute but to guide and balance an organism and help it to stay alive. It is for this reason that the first step of nature toward an intelligent mind was the creation of life, and I think that should we artificially create an intelligent mind, we would have to follow the same path.
