Themed session at  ALife XI, the Eleventh International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (August 5-8, 2008, Winchester, UK),  on  Information in Complex Systems and Artificial Life Special session at  AHS-2008, the NASA/ESA Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems (June 22-25, 2008, Noordwijk, The Netherlands),  on  Evolutionary and Self-Organizing Sensors, Actuators and Processing Hardware (ESOSAPH) M. Prokopenko (ed.), Advances in Applied Self-organizing Systems, Springer-Verlag, London, UK, 2007.