Deadline extended for Special Issue on Evolvability and Robustness in Artificial Evolving Systems

The deadline for submissions to the Special Issue on Evolvability and Robustness in Artificial Evolving Systems has been extended to April 30, 2013. Please see the Call for Papers [PDF] for additional details.

GPEM 13(4) available online

The fourth issue of volume 13 of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines is now available online, containing:

"Open-ended evolution to discover analogue circuits for beyond conventional applications"
by Yerbol A. Sapargaliyev and Tatiana G. Kalganova

"Quantum control experiments as a testbed for evolutionary multi-objective algorithms"
by Ofer M. Shir, Jonathan Roslund, Zaki Leghtas, and Herschel Rabitz

"Evolving team behaviors with specialization"
by G. S. Nitschke, A. E. Eiben, and M. C. Schut

BOOK REVIEW

"Alma Lilia Garcia Almanza and Edward Tsang: Evolutionary applications for financial prediction: classification methods to gather patterns using genetic programming"
by Blake LeBaron

SIGEVOlution Volume 6, Issue 1, is now available

The SIGEVOlution newsletter Volume 6 Issue 1 is now available for download from: http://www.sigevolution.org
The new issue features:

• "Lessons from an App Ecosystem" by Soo Ling Lim & Peter J. Bentley
• "Distilling GeneChips" by William B. Langdon
• Calls and calendar

The newsletter is intended to be viewed electronically.
Thanks to Pier Luca Lanzi, SIGEvolution Editor-in-Chief.

Renewed and expanded editorial board

I'm very happy to report that we have completed our recent process of renewing and expanding the GPEM editorial board, with the new full board being as follows:

Editor-in-Chief:Lee Spector, Hampshire College, USA
Founding Editor:
Wolfgang Banzhaf, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, Canada

Resource Review Editor:William B. Langdon, University College London, UK

Advisory Board:David Goldberg, University of Illinois, USA

Erik Goodman, Michigan State University, USA

John Holland, University of Michigan, USA

John Koza, Stanford University, USA

Pierre Marchal, CSEM, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Ingo Rechenberg, Technical University of Berlin, Germany

Thematic Area Editors:

Area Editor for Life Sciences
James A. Foster, University of Idaho, USA

Area Editor for Data Analytics and Knowledge Discovery
Una-May O'Reilly, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Area Editor for Games
Moshe Sipper, Ben-Gurion University, Israel

Associate Editors:James A. Foster, University of Idaho, USAPauline C. Haddow, The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway

Hitoshi Iba, University of Tokyo, Japan

William B. Langdon, University College London, UK

Julian Miller, University of York, UK

Una-May O'Reilly, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Riccardo Poli, University of Essex, UK
Moshe Sipper, Ben-Gurion University, Israel

Stephen Smith, University of York, UKTerence Soule, University of Idaho, USA

Marco Tomassini, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Andy Tyrrell, University of York, UK

Leonardo Vanneschi, ISEGI, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

Editorial Board:L. Altenberg, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA

S. Cagnoni, University of Parma, Italy

K. Deb, Indian Institute of Technology, India

M. Dorigo, Free University of Brussels, Belgium

M. Ebner, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany

A. Eiben, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

A. Ekart, Aston University, UK

D. Floreano, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Switzerland

C. Gagne, Laval University, Canada

S.M. Gustafson, GE Global Research, USA

S. Harding, Machine Intelligence, Ltd., UK

I. Harvey, University of Sussex, UK

M. Heywood, Dalhousie University, Canada

C. Jacob, The University of Calgary, Canada

C. Johnson, University of Kent, UK

T. Kalganova, Brunel University, UK

M. Keijzer, Prognosys, Netherlands

D.B. Kell, UMIST, UK

D. Keymeulen, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USA

K. Krawiec, Poznan University of Technology, Poland

A. Leier, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

S. Luke, George Mason University, USA

P. Machado, University of Coimbra, Portugal

T. McConaghy, Solido Design Automation, Inc., Canada

R. McKay, Seoul National University, Korea

N.F. McPhee, University of Minnesota at Morris, USA

M. Mitchell, Portland State University, USA

D. Montana, BBN Inc., USA

J. Moore, Dartmouth Medical School, Lebanon, NH

A. Moraglio, University of Birmingham, UK

M. Nicolau, University College Dublin, Ireland

M. O'Neill, University College Dublin, Ireland

C. Ryan, University of Limerick, Ireland

M. Schoenauer, I.N.R.I.A. Futurs, France

L. Sekanina, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic

S. Silva, INESC-ID Lisboa, Portugal, Portugal

G. Squillero, Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy

C. Stephens, UNAM, Mexico

A. Stoica, California Institute of Technology, USA

I. Taney, Doshisha University, Japan

G. Tempesti, University of York, UK

M. Trefzer, University of York, UK

E. Vladislavleva, Evolved Analytics Europe BVBA, Belgium

P. Whigham, University of Otago, New Zealand

M.-L. Wong, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

T. Yu, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

B. Zhang, Seoul National University, Korea

M. Zhang, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

New GPEM impact factor

Very slightly down from the last two years but the differences don't seem particularly significant, especially since the number of citations is closer to the high end:

Year	Impact Factor	Citations*
2011	1.000	91
2010	1.167	102
2009	1.091	58

It's an imperfect measure, to be sure, although worth keeping an eye on!

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

GPEM 13(3) available online

The third issue of volume 13 of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines is now available online.

This is a special issue on "Selected Papers from the European Conference on Genetic Programming." It was edited by Sara Silva and James A. Foster and it contains expanded versions of four extremely interesting papers from EuroGP-2011. This issue also includes a book review of Cameron Browne's Evolutionary Game Design.

Here is the full list of contents:

"Guest editorial: special issue on selected papers from the European conference on genetic programming"
by Sara Silva & James A. Foster

"Parallel linear genetic programming for multi-class classification"
by Carlton Downey, Mengjie Zhang & Jing Liu

"Evolutionary dynamics on multiple scales: a quantitative analysis of the interplay between genotype, phenotype, and fitness in linear genetic programming"
by Ting Hu, Joshua L. Payne, Wolfgang Banzhaf & Jason H. Moore

"The Regulatory Network Computational Device"
by Rui L. Lopes & Ernesto Costa

"A genetic programming approach to the evolution of brain–computer interfaces for 2-D mouse–pointer control"
by Riccardo Poli, Mathew Salvaris & Caterina Cinel

BOOK REVIEW

"Cameron Browne: Evolutionary game design, Springer briefs in computer science series"
by Amine Boumaza

GPEM 13(2) available online

The second issue of volume 13 of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines is now available online, containing:


"Learning local linear Jacobians for flexible and adaptive robot arm control"
by Patrick O. Stalph & Martin V. Butz

"A Markovianity based optimisation algorithm"
by Siddhartha Shakya, Roberto Santana & Jose A. Lozano

"Operator equalisation for bloat free genetic programming and a survey of bloat control methods"
by Sara Silva, Stephen Dignum & Leonardo Vanneschi

"Evolving controllers for high-level applications on a service robot: a case study with exhibition visitor flow control"
by Alex Fukunaga, Hideru Hiruma, Kazuki Komiya & Hitoshi Iba

BOOK REVIEW

"W. Brian Arthur: The nature of technology: what it is and how it evolves"
by Muge Ozman

BOOK REVIEW
"Moshe Sipper: Evolved to Win"
by Timothy Gosling

Editorial board renewal/expansion update

As some of you may be aware we are currently engaged in the process of renewing and modestly expanding the GPEM editorial board.

Following up on discussions at last year's board meeting, I have consulted with the Advisory Board and undertaken the first few steps of a multi-step process, the most visible results of which are that we now have three "Thematic Area Editors" (who retain their status as Associate Editors but have additional titles and additional responsibilities related to the shepherding of papers in their areas; we are starting with three but may add more in the future) along with three new Associate editors (which, after one retirement, increases the number of Associate Editors by two).

I am very excited about these additions, which are:

Thematic Area Editors:

• Area Editor for Life Sciences
  James A. Foster, University of Idaho, USA
• Area Editor for Data Analytics and Knowledge Discovery
  Una-May O'Reilly, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
• Area Editor for Games
  Moshe Sipper, Ben-Gurion University, Israel

New Associate Editors:

• Terence Soule, University of Idaho, USA
• Andy Tyrrell, University of York, UK
• Leonardo Vanneschi, ISEGI, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

Welcome new Associate Editors!

We are now proceeding with renewal/expansion of the full board, with the hope that the process will be completed by the time of our board meeting at this summer's GECCO conference.

GPEM 13(1) now available online

The first issue of volume 13 of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines is now available online. It includes a special section on "Evolutionary algorithms for data mining" guest edited by Pierre Collet and Man Leung Wong, along with several other items of interest. The full contents are:

EDITORIAL
"Editorial introduction"
by Lee Spector

"The evolution of higher-level biochemical reaction models"
by Brian J. Ross

"Multi-class pattern classification using single, multi-dimensional feature-space feature extraction evolved by multi-objective genetic programming and its application to network intrusion detection"
by Khaled Badran and Peter Rockett

SOFTWARE REVIEW
"Software review: the ECJ toolkit"
by David R. White

EDITORIAL
"Evolutionary algorithms for data mining"
by Pierre Collet and Man Leung Wong

"Symbiotic coevolutionary genetic programming: a benchmarking study under large attribute spaces"
by John A. Doucette, Andrew R. McIntyre, Peter Lichodzijewski and Malcolm I. Heywood

"Knowledge mining sensory evaluation data: genetic programming, statistical techniques, and swarm optimization"
by Kalyan Veeramachaneni, Ekaterina Vladislavleva and Una-May O’Reilly

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

MIT story on GPEM article on sensory evaluation data

There's a nice story on MIT news, "The mathematics of taste," which is also being picked up on some other sites, about the GPEM article on "Knowledge mining sensory evaluation data: genetic programming, statistical techniques, and swarm optimization" by Kalyan Veeramachaneni, Ekaterina Vladislavleva and Una-May O’Reilly.