CFP: Special Issue on Evolvability and Robustness in Artificial Evolving Systems

[Call for Papers PDF]

Guest Editor
Lee Altenberg, Associate Editor, BioSystems
gpem@dynamics.org


The journal Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (GPEM) was founded to focus on artificial evolutionary systems that are active — which take inputs from their environment and act on them to produce their behavior.

The evolution of active systems generally requires that their complexity be able to expand to meet the tasks at hand, entailing more open-ended search spaces. This open-endedness allows higher-order dynamics to emerge around the systems’ variational properties (Altenberg, 1994) — how changes in their structure map to changes in their behavior — in particular, the open-endedness allows new behaviors in the evolution of evolvability and robustness.

GPEM is calling for papers for a special issue on Evolvability and Robustness in Artificial Evolving Systems. Under the rubrics of ‘evolvability’ and ‘robustness’, a diversity of concepts have been introduced as the literature has expanded. This special issue will not aim to exclude any of them. However, confusion has entered the literature due to imprecise usage of these terms. Therefore, a unique requirement for this special issue will be that the authors provide precise quantitative definitions for the aspects of ‘evolvability’ and ‘robustness’ they investigate.

Examples of topics sought include:

• The emergence, or the engineering, of evolvability or robustness into artificial evolutionary systems (AESs);
• New theoretical understanding of the evolution of evolvability, robustness, modularity, neutral networks, and their inter-relationships;
• Case studies of the evolution of evolvability, robustness, or neutral networks in AESs; 
• Methodology for measuring evolvability and/or robustness;
• Relationships between 1) the robustness of the AES’s behavior to variation in inputs and environment, and 2) its robustness under change from the genetic operators (e.g. ‘plasto-genetic congruence’ Ancel and Fontana (2000));
• Mechanisms whereby variational properties of the environment or inputs can shape the variational properties of the AESs under the genetic operators;
• Generalization of the biological concept of distribution of mutation effects on fitness to the distribution of genetic operator effects on the objective functions in AESs (Nordin and Banzhaf, 1995).

All enquiries should be sent to Lee Altenberg at: gpem@dynamics.org. Manuscripts should conform to the standard format stipulated in Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines’s Information for Authors. All submissions will be peer reviewed subject to the standards of the journal.

Paper Submission

Authors are encouraged to submit high-quality, original work that has neither appeared in, nor is under consideration by, other journals.

Springer offers authors, editors and reviewers of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines a web-enabled online manuscript submission and review system. Our online system offers authors the ability to track the review process of their manuscript.

Manuscripts should be submitted to: http://GENP.edmgr.com. This online system offers easy and straightforward log-in and submission procedures, and supports a wide range of submission file formats. Instructions for Authors may be found at www.springer.com/10710

Important Dates [Deadline Extended]

• Paper submission deadline: December 15, 2012 April 30, 2013
• Notification of acceptance: February 15, 2013 June 30, 2013
• Final manuscript: March 15, 2013 August 31, 2013

www.Springer.com/10710

ISSN: 1389-2576 (print) 1573-7632 (electronic)

Editor-in-Chief: Lee Spector, Hampshire College

Founding Editor: Wolfgang Banzhaf, Memorial University of Newfoundland