CFP: Tenth Anniversary Special Issue on Progress in Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines

Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines

Tenth Anniversary Special Issue on Progress in Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines

(Revised May 19, 2009; please note revised title and deadlines. 2nd revision July 15, 2009. 3rd revision September 25, 2009; please note revised schedule)

Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines is ten years old in 2010. To mark this, a prestigious special issue of the journal will be published. A number of articles by leading figures have already been commissioned:

• "Theoretical Results in Genetic Programming: The next ten years?" by Riccardo Poli, William B. Langdon, Nic McPhee and Leonardo Vanneschi
• "Human Competitive Results Using Genetic Programming" by John Koza
• "Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines: Ten Years of Reviews" by William B. Langdon and Steven Gustafson

Open submissions

We encourage the submission of high quality papers that review or analyze progress in the field, present the state-of-the-art in the evolution of software and hardware, describe promising new approaches or application areas, or foundational topics in genetic programming and evolvable machines.

Subjects include, but are not limited to:

- Theoretical understanding of Genetic Programming

- Important Application Areas of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines

- New approaches and paradigms

- Fundamental Issues

- Wide ranging reviews and/or analysis of Research in Genetic and Evolvable Machines

Important Dates

- Paper submission deadline: November 23, 2009

- Notification of acceptance: January 15, 2009

- Final manuscript: February 15, 2010

Authors are encouraged to submit high-quality, original work that has neither appeared in, nor is under consideration by, other journals.All open 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 prospective authors should be sent to the guest editors at the addresses below.

Guest editors

Julian Miller

Department of Electronics

University of York,

Heslington, York,

YO10 5DD, UK

jfm7@ohm.york.ac.uk

Riccardo Poli

School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering,

University of Essex,

Wivenhoe Park, Colchester,

CO4 3SQ, UK

rpoli@essex.ac.uk

Editor-in-Chief: Lee Spector, Hampshire College

Founding Editor: Wolfgang Banzhaf, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Journal Website: www.springer.com/10710

The Genie in the Machine: How Computer-Automated Inventing is Revolutionizing Law and Buisness

Robert Plotkin has just published a new book for general readers on computer-automated invention and its legal and business implications. I haven't yet read it all the way through but I see that it focuses quite heavily on invention by means of genetic and evolutionary computation. The author consulted with many researchers in developing the ideas -- including myself and several other GPEM editors and authors, listed in the acknowledgments -- so I think that he is well informed about the underlying science and engineering.

The book is The Genie in the Machine: How Computer-Automated Inventing is Revolutionizing Law and Business, published by Stanford University Press, May 2009, ISBN 978-0804756990.

Deadline extended for Special Issue on Parallel and Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms

The deadline for submitting papers to the Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines Special Issue on Parallel and Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms has been extended.

The new deadline is: May 15, 2009

More information about the special issue is available here.

Evolution of Modularity, GP, and a new PLoS Computational Biology paper by Kashtan et al.

A new paper by Kashtan et al. in PLoS Computational Biology presents an interesting study of the evolution of modularity, extending their previous work showing "that modular structure can spontaneously emerge if goals (environments) change over time, such that each new goal shares the same set of sub-problems with previous goals."

The evolution of modularity is a topic of longstanding interest in GP and evolutionary computation more generally, within which we often seek to evolve modular programs or structures. Many also seek to leverage the modularity of representations to accelerate evolution. A lot of the work on automatically defined functions, etc., has been concerned with these issues and I think that cross-fertilization with the new computational biology results could be fruitful.

The closest thing that I know of in the GP literature to the Kashtan et al. results is a paper by Terry Van Belle and David Ackley in GECCO 2002, in which they observed the "evolution of evolvability in experiments using genetic programming to solve a symbolic regression problem that varies in a partially unpredictable manner." Alan Robinson and I were inspired by this to do a similar experiment in PushGP, which allows modularity to arise from scratch via code self-manipulation, and we wrote it up briefly in a GECCO 2002 Workshop paper (see section 3.2).

GPEM 10(2) now available online

The second issue of volume 10 of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines is now available online, containing the following articles:

Incorporating characteristics of human creativity into an evolutionary art algorithm

by Steve DiPaola, Liane Gabora

Using enhanced genetic programming techniques for evolving classifiers in the context of medical diagnosis

by Stephan M. Winkler, Michael Affenzeller, Stefan Wagner

Dynamic limits for bloat control in genetic programming and a review of past and current bloat theories

by Sara Silva, Ernesto Costa

A review of procedures to evolve quantum algorithms

by Adrian Gepp, Phil Stocks

Book Review: Riccardo Poli, William B. Langdon, Nicholas F. McPhee: A Field Guide to Genetic Programming

by Michael O’Neill

Website for The Art of Artificial Evolution

A nice website has been set up for The Art of Artificial Evolution: A Handbook on Evolutionary Art and Music, a book edited by Juan Romero and Penousal Machado that was reviewed by Jeroen Eggermont in GPEM 10(1).

Medical applications as a growth area for genetic and evolutionary computing

Within the last week we've been notified of several new citations to GPEM articles on medical/pharmaceutical applications, which is consistent with my impression that this is a particularly promising growth area for the field.

Our special issue on "Medical Applications of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation" (guest editors Stephen L. Smith and Stefano Cagnoni) was published in December of 2007, and we have published related work both before and after that special issue -- for example we published "Use of genetic programming to diagnose venous thromboembolism in the emergency department" by Milo Engoren and Jeffrey A. Kline in March, 2008, and two relevant articles in September, 2008 ("Genetic programming for medical classification: a program simplification approach" by Mengjie Zhang and Phillip Wong, and "Analysis of mass spectrometry data of cerebral stroke samples: an evolutionary computation approach to resolve and quantify peptide peaks" by Julio J. Valdes, Alan J. Barton, and Arsalan S. Haqqani). Also upcoming and now in Online First: "Using enhanced genetic programming techniques for evolving classifiers in the context of medical diagnosis" by Stephan M. Winkler, Michael Affenzeller and Stefan Wagner.

I think that there's  a lot of potential here both for new applications and for GPEM to bring more of the ongoing work to the broader research community. I would encourage researchers who work in this area to contact me about possibilities.