GPEM 10(1) hits the streets

My hardcopy arrived in my mailbox today and it looks good! If you have a subscription yours should arrive soon.

Evolution of life in 60 seconds

Via seedmagazine.com, a very nice animation of the time scale of biological evolution on Earth. I think it makes its point beautifully, with an aesthetic that echoes Powers of Ten and The Outer Limits. The shape of the underlying curve is probably worth keeping in mind for artificial evolutionary systems as well.

GECCO conference highly ranked

According to the rankings at this site, the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) ranks 11th out of 701 considered conferences in "Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Robotics / Human Computer Interaction." The rankings are based on citation of papers, quality of referees' reports, availability of resources to students by the conference, conference papers accepted/appeared in reputable journals after the conference, and indexing (details here).

CFP: Special Issue on Parallel and Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms

Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines

Special Issue on Parallel and Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms

(Revised March 27, 2009; please note revised submission procedures.)

(Revised April 29, 2009; extended submission deadline.)

Genetic Programming, and Evolutionary Computation at
large have been extremely successful in the last decade across
a wide range of problems and applications. Current applications are
characterized by an ever growing complexity and a pronounced
distributed nature. While the use of centralized or hierarchical
architectures and algorithms has been dominant so far, they are
now becoming impractical because they have poor scalability and
fault-tolerance characteristics. Since evolutionary algorithms are
ideally suited to population partitioning and structuring, distributed
and parallel approaches appear to be a natural way to
cope with the growing computational burden associated with large
problems.

The aim of this Special Issue is to provide the reader with
contributions discussing recent advances and an indication of
future trends in the theory, development, and application of
parallel and distributed evolutionary algorithms. We encourage
submission of papers describing new concepts, models, and
strategies, along with papers describing systems and tools that
provide practical implementations. Papers describing either
hardware or software aspects of parallel and distributed
architectures are welcome. In addition, we are interested in
application papers discussing the power and applicability of these
parallel methods to real-world problems in any area of interest,
such as evolutionary design, optimization, and emerging fields
such as computational biology.

Subjects will include (but are not limited to):

- parallel and distributed evolutionary algorithms models

- theory of structured evolutionary algorithms

- performance evaluation of parallel and distributed
evolutionary algorithms

- applications of parallel and distributed evolutionary computing

- parallel and distributed implementations: software and
hardware aspects

Important dates:

* Paper submission deadline: May 15, 2009 [extended from April 30, 2009]
* Notification of acceptance: June 30, 2009
* Final manuscript: August 31, 2009

Paper Submission:

Authors are encouraged to submit high-quality, original work

that has neither appeared in, nor is under consideration by, other

journals. All submissions will be peer reviewed subject to the

standards of the journal. Manuscripts based on previously

published conference papers must be extended substantially.

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.

All enquiries on this special issue by perspective authors should
be sent to the guest editors at the addresses below.

Guest editors:

Marco Tomassini
Information Systems Institute
University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
marco.tomassini@unil.ch
Tel: +41 21 6923589

Leonardo Vanneschi
Department of Informatics, Systems and Communication (D.I.S.Co.)
Building U14, Office n. 2004
viale Sarca, 336
University of Milano-Bicocca, Milano, Italy
vanneschi@disco.unimib.it
Tel.: +39 02 64487874

Editor-in-Chief: Lee Spector, Hampshire College
Founding Editor: Wolfgang Banzhaf, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Journal Website: www.springer.com/10710

Evolectronica

Bob MacCallum has rolled out his new evolutionary music website -- using genetic programming and human fitness assessment -- just in time for Darwin's 200th birthday. The interface still isn't 100% smooth (on my mac at least), but it works and it produces some interesting output. Check it out at http://evolectronica.com.

Get GPEM tables of contents by email

It is easy to sign up for the GPEM "Table of Contents Alert" service, which will send you an email whenever a new issue is published, listing the table of contents for the issue. Just go to Springer's GPEM page and type your email address in the "Table of Contents Alert" section on the right side of the page.

Evolutionary computing and boron

Today's New York Times features an article describing a new discovery about the element boron, made in part by evolutionary computing. Full details of the discovery are provided in a January 29, 2009 letter in Nature (subscription required). They (Oganov et al.) used a special purpose evolutionary algorithm called USPEX that is not really described in the Nature piece, but it is described elsewhere including here.