Preface:

This volume presents the proceedings of ECAL 2015: the 13th European Conference on Artificial Life, held 20–24th July 2015, in York, UK (http://ecal2015.alife.org).

Since the first ECAL in 1991, the conference has been held at various European locations every other year, alternating with ALife (the International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems). The history of those conferences and their past websites can be found on the website of the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL, http://alife.org/).

We solicited submissions in two formats: full papers (up to 8 pages) and abstracts (1 page). The extended abstract format was implemented in 2008 (ALIFE 11) to promote participation of researchers working in those disciplines where conference submissions require abstracts only. This format may be used for presenting either original work or recently published work. Both full papers and extended abstracts were peer-reviewed by multiple Program Committee members. Authors could opt for oral or poster presentation in either category. We accepted 101 submissions for oral presentation and 12 submissions for poster presentation. Authors of accepted papers modified their final versions based on the peer-review feedback.

We instituted a 'late breaking papers' session, soliciting 1–3 page abstracts which were subject to a light touch peer review, offering participants the opportunity to present up to the minute results. (These papers are available in a separate document.)

We also instituted a 'bring a poster' session (separate from the formal poster presentation session), to allow people to advertise their ongoing projects and research.

The program of ECAL 2015 comprises of a number of scientific, professional, and creative activities.

@proceedings(ECAL15,
  editor = "Paul Andrews and Leo Caves and Ren{\'e} Doursat and Simon Hickinbotham and Fiona Polack
            and Susan Stepney and Tim Taylor and Jon Timmis",
  title = "Proceedings of the European Conference on Artificial Life 2015",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the European Conference on Artificial Life 2015",
  publisher = "MIT Press",
  year = 2015
)