IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation

The conference proceedings of CEC have been continuously included in the EI Compendex Database and IEEE Xplore.

The annual IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) is one of the leading events in the area of evolutionary computation. It covers all topics in evolutionary computation, in-cluding, but not limited to: CEC 2007 features a world-class conference that aims to bring together researchers and practitioners in the field of evolutionary computation and computational intelligence from all around the globe. Technical exchanges within the research community will encompass key-note speeches, over 30 special sessions, over 10 tutorials and workshops, panel discus-sions as well as poster presentations. On top of these, participants will be treated to a series of social functions, receptions and networking sessions, which will serve as a vital channel to establish new connections and foster everlasting friendship among fellow counterparts.

About Singapore

Singapore is a vibrant commercial and financial hub, which at the same time also serves its role as a melting pot for the fusion of a diverse mix of many different cultures. Its cosmopoli-tan outlook brings the best of the east and west together and draws in millions of tourists every year. Visitors to this tropical island resort will be treated to a great array of interesting attractions, festival celebrations and cultural events, not forgetting the one-stop shopping and eating experience in this entertainment paradise. The conglomeration of all the different elements will definitely give visitors of Singapore an exciting and unforgettable experience.

Student Travel Support

The IEEE/CIS Student Travel Grant Program offers a number of travel grants to assist IEEE/CIS Student Members presenting papers at IEEE CEC 2007. For more information, please see the conference website at http://www.cec2007.org.

Best Paper Awards

The Evolutionary Programming Society will sponsor two Best Student Paper Awards and one Best Overall Paper Award at CEC 2007. These awards will be presented at the ban-quet. The winners will be chosen by the EPS Board of Directors based on the technical merit of the accepted papers to CEC 2007.

Important Dates

Paper submission is NOW open. Paper Submission Deadline: March 15, 2007 Decision Notification: May 15, 2007 Camera-ready Submission: June 15, 2007

http://www.cec2007.org

September 25 - 28, 2007, Singapore

Call For Papers International Advisory Board

Edmund Burke David Corne Kalyanmoy Deb David Fogel Toshio Fukuda Jong Hwan Kim Bob Mckay Xin Yao Gary Yen Ali Zalzala

Organizing Committee

Honorary Chair Tong Heng Lee

General Chairs Kay Chen Tan Jian Xin Xu

Program Chairs Dipti Srinivasan Lipo Wang

Technical Chairs Hussein Abbass Carlos Coello Coello Andries Engelbrecht Garrison Greenwood Graham Kendall Naoyuki Kubota

Competitions Chair Simon Lucas

Exhibits Chair Kok Kiong Tan

Finance Chair Woei Wan Tan

Industrial Liaison Chair Bernhard Sendhoff

Local Arrangements Chair Meng Hiot Lim

Poster Sessions Chair Byoung-Tak Zhang

Proceedings Chair Arthur Tay

Publicity Chairs Keshav Dahal Dikai Liu Tatsuya Okabe Zengqi Sun Lingfeng Wang Zhi-Hua Zhou

Registration Chair Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam Suganthan

Special Sessions Chair Yew Soon Ong

Student Activities Chair Slawo Wesolkowski

Tutorials Chair Yaochu Jin

Webmaster Ji Hua Brian Ang

IEEE Computational Intelligence Society

• Ant colony optimization • Artificial life • Bioinformatics & bioengineering • Coevolution & collective behavior • Combinatorial & numerical optimization • Constraint & uncertainty handling • Evolutionary design • Evolutionary intelligent agents • Evolutionary robotic & control systems • Evolving neural networks & fuzzy systems • Molecular & quantum computing • Particle swarm intelligence • Representation & operators

• Artificial immune systems • Autonomous mental &

behavior development • Cognitive systems & applications • Computational finance & economics • Evolutionary data mining • Evolutionary games • Evolutionary learning systems • Evolvable hardware & software • Memetic & hybrid algorithms • Multiobjective optimization • Real-world applications • Theory of evolutionary computation

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KC Tan National University of Singapore,SINGAPORE

CEC 2007 Conference Report

The 2007 Congress on Evolution-ary Computation (CEC) was heldin Singapore, from the 25th to the

28th of September 2007. This confer-ence attracted numerous participants,bringing together students, researchersand practitioners from an array of uni-versities and laboratories internationally,all sharing a similar interest and passionin the field of evolutionary computa-tion. All the participants convergedonto the Swissotel, the venue for thisconference, located right in the centerof Singapore near the business districtwith numerous shopping and entertain-ment outlets surrounding it.

In total, there were 1115 paper sub-missions (a record for CEC) from morethan 70 countries. Many papers demon-strated useful systems with strong ana-lytical and empirical analyses. Eachpaper was reviewed by at least tworeviewers (most papers received threereviews each). Based on these rigorousreviews, IEEE CEC 2007 accepted 653papers for inclusion in the conferenceprogram, which represents an accep-tance rate of 59 percent, of which 410oral presentations were held and theremaining, as poster contributions—allof which helped contribute to a success-ful conference, for advancement withinthe field of evolutionary computation.

The conference takes place as the fieldof evolutionary computation begins to bemore widely appreciated and accepted bythe general research community, in par-ticular the numerous industries thatwould benefit from the use of the manynovel approaches and innovative methodswithin the field of evolutionary computa-tion. With that in mind, and with confer-

ence participants convening annually todiscuss their work, the conference servesas a useful backdrop for which the futureof evolutionary computation can bestrategically mapped.

Three plenary talks were held, in themornings of each conference day, bythe invited keynote speakers—Xin Yao(A Rigorous Theoretical Framework forMeasuring Generalisation of Co-evolution-ary Learning), Gary Fogel (Medical Appli-cations of Evolutionary Computation), andSimon Lucas (Games, and the Design ofNew Hybrid Eolutionary and TemporalDifference Learning Algorithms)—follow-ing which two invited talks were held(per day)—Jong-Hwan Kim (EvolvableArtificial Creatures), Peng-Yeng Yin andFred Glover (Hidden (Tabu) Secrets ofSuccessful Evolutionary Search Methods),Marc Schoenauer (Bio-Inspired Continu-ous Optimization: The Coming of Age),Hisao Ishibuchi (Hot Issues in Evolution-ary Multiobjective Optimization), RobertG. Reynolds (Cultural Algorithms: Har-nessing the Power of Social Intelligence), andHugo de Garis (Artificial Brains: AnEvolved Neural Net Module Approach).

Nine tutorials were also organized aspart of the pre-conference program,covering the fundamentals with a state-of-the-art discussion of emerging areasof research. There were thirty-one spe-cial sessions organized by domainexperts that encompassed the technicalscope of the conference. In addition,three plenary poster sessions wereplanned which allowed for one-on-oneinteractions between the presenters andthe audiences. In all, seventy-two paral-lel sessions of oral presentations wereheld throughout a three-day period.

Aside from oral and poster presenta-tions, five competitions were organized,

—Neural Network Othello, Car Rac-ing, Ms. Pac-Man, X-Pilot AI, andmulti-objective optimization. Thesecompetitions provided an excellentopportunity for participants to test theiralgorithms and architectures and com-pare them against the best that otherresearchers around the globe couldoffer. The winner of each competitionreceived a USD500 prize and a certifi-cate that was presented at the confer-ence banquet. For the Ms. Pac-Mancompetition, rather unfortunately, thedefault toolkit scored higher than thoseobtained from the participants andhence the prize went unclaimed for thisconference. The Othello competitionand the X-Pilot AI competitions failedto attract the minimum five entrants andso were not officially run.

The game-related competition toattract the greatest number of entrieswas the Simulated Car Racing competi-tion organized by Julian Togelius. Thesuccess of this competition is due largelyto Julian’s hard work and excellentcompetition design. Julian providedsimple interfaces to connect the carcontrollers to the game, and also pro-vided an extensive toolkit includingsample neural network and heuristiccontrollers. Congratulations go to HoDuc Thang and Jon Garibaldi (Univer-sity of Nottingham, UK), on their win-ning entry, based on a fuzzy controlalgorithm.

The Multi-Objective Optimizationcontest was organised by PonnuthuraiNagaratnam Suganthan and associatedwith a CEC 2007 special session of thesame name. For this contest researchershad to submit their multi-objective opti-mization software for independent test-ing on a challenging set of benchmarks.

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This was jointly won by the followingentries:❏ Deepak Sharma, Abhay Kumar,

Kalyanmoy Deb, Karthik Sindhya,“Hybridization of SBX Based NSGA-IIand Sequential Quadratic Programmingfor Solving Multi-objective OptimizationProblems”.

❏ Saku Kukkonen and JouniLampinen, “Performance Assessment ofGeneralized Differential Evolution 3(GDE3) with a Given Set of Problems”.

The Best Student Paper Awardswent to Alexandra Alecu and A. M.Salagean for their paper “A GeneticAlgorithm for Computing the k-ErrorLinear Complexity of CryptographicSequences”, as well as to Germ’anTerrazas, Marian Gheorghe, GrahamKendall, and Natalio Krasnogor fortheir paper “Evolving Tiles for AutomatedSelf-Assembly Design”, which also wonthe Best Overall Paper Awards forCEC 2007.

Moreover, a series of events wereheld as part of the social programs toallow participants to better appreciatethe sights and sounds of Singapore. Tostart things off, on the first day of theconference, a welcome reception for allconference participants was held at theAsian Civilizations Museum, whichshowcases over 1300 artifacts collectionson the civilizations of China, SoutheastAsia, South Asia and West Asia/Islamic.A lunch gathering, together with thepresentation of grant awards, where 26student members of the IEEE Compu-tational Intelligence Society receivedtravel grants, was organized on the 27thof September, as was a meeting forstrategizing the Future Directions inEvolutionary Computation (FDEC).On the same day, the conference din-ner banquet was held. Delegatesenjoyed nine courses of fine Asian cui-sine, accompanied by excellent enter-tainment including Malaysian poledancers (not what you’re thinking!—see photos on conference website atwww.cec2007.org), and a snakecharmer. The next day, on the 28th, aWomen in Computational Intelligence(WCI) Reception and Meeting wasorganized in the afternoon. The entireconference culminated on the 28th ofSeptember with a dinner and tour at theNight Safari—the world’s first wildlifepark built for visits at night.

At the end of it all, IEEE CEC2007effectively brought together researchersand practitioners in the field of evolu-tionary computation from all aroundthe globe. Technical exchanges withinthe research community throughout theconference encompassed keynote andinvited speeches, special sessions, tutori-als, as well as oral and poster presenta-tions. Additionally, participants weretreated to a series of social events, fromformal functions to informal receptionsand networking sessions, all of whichserved as a primary channel in establish-ing new connections and fostering last-ing friendship between like-mindedcounterparts.

A gathering of the delegates (after the banquet).

The 2007 IEEE CIS Student Travel Grant (CEC) award winners.