Vision of the conference: Two currents in flow of technological advancement may be reaching the point that they will carry us into a new era of different social norms. On one hand, ever since man invented the lever system for primitive agriculture and hunting, Industrial automation has made a remarkable progress to liberate mankind from much hazardous, hard, and depressing work. It has also brought a remarkable compensatory growth in jobs requiring advanced technical skills. On the other hand Internet has revolutionized the way people interact in an ever-expanding global market. A wide variety of industries -- from manufacturing to tourism, recreation and even medical consulting -- increasingly rely on the internet. Remote surgery through the internet will soon become a reality.

These technological and social transformations seem to promise solutions to many pressing problems in South Asia such as adverse work environments due to the tropical heat, frequent labor unrests, inadequate resources to reach the global markets, inefficiency in planning and coordinating disaster management programs and large organizations, and others.

Thus, we are encouraging a transition from human labor and face-to-face interactions to intelligent machinery and virtual communication in order to conquer the current barriers for development.

For this transition to be successful, we must ensure that the machines can, like humans, learn from experiences, respond to changes in the environment, and cooperate with humans working at higher levels of the command structure. We must ensure that the information we send through the internet is reliable, has some sense of life, and give room for virtual interaction. To this end, we will need to utilize modern concepts from artificial life, virtual communication, and artificial evolution.

This conference aims to bring together researchers in South Asian Countries and their counterparts around the world to discuss current issues related to these objectives. Ultimately, we hope this interaction will further the social and economic objectives in the region. A secondary goal of the conference is to allow these researchers to cooperate in addressing the unfortunate realities faced by South Asian science, including the high cost of attending meetings that are held mostly in industrialized countries.