Synthetic Biology and Artificial Intelligence: Toward Cross-Fertilization

The workshop “What Can Synthetic Biology Offer to Artificial Intelligence?,” hosted by the 14th European Conference on Artificial Life (Lyon, France, 4–8 September 2017), brought together specialists from different disciplines to discuss the possibility of generating synergies between synthetic biology (SB) and artificial intelligence (AI). The specific goal was the exploration of cognition through “understanding-bybuilding” strategies. The workshop participants were asked to define potentially effective roles that SB could play in the development of the “embodied approach” that characterizes contemporary cognitive science and AI, with a focus on frontier research on minimal artificial life and cognition.