Conference Review: Evolvable Hardware 2004

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About 100 or so people were present at the conference, which was a bit up on earlier years (e.g., 70, 90, etc). There were 36 talks, a panel discussion, 12 posters, and at least 7 group posters. The first authors of papers, both invited and solicited, came from 13 different countries (US 13, UK 7, Germany 3, Mexico 3, Brazil 2, and 1 each from Czech Republic, Romania, Japan, Switzerland, Spain, Norway, France, Italy, or as is done increasingly lately, the EU (European Union 14)). From these sustained numbers, it is clear that the research field of evolvable hardware is now well established and is a stable component in other conferences such as Evolutionary Computation (EC), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Neural Networks (NNs), Evolutionary Systems (ES) etc. There is already a journal dealing with the field (”Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines”) and probably about 100 researchers in the specialty, spread worldwide over at least 16 countries (according to Adrian Thompson’s list, to be found at http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/adrianth/EHW groups.html, last updated, September 2003!). The UK is still the strongest nation in the world in EH with at least 16 groups, closely followed by the US with at least 14 groups, then Germany 5, Italy 3, 2 each for Canada, Japan, Norway, and 1 each for Denmark, Czech Republic, Israel, Holland, Switzerland, Romania, Mexico, Brazil, Australia. The conference was spread over 3 days with 4 invited speakers who spoke an hour each, and 32 ordinary speakers of 25 minutes each. The first evening, a poster session (12 posters) included an additional group poster session (7 of them) that allowed the major EH research groups around the world to show off what they do. The paper sessions were grouped into 7 categories: Evolution of Analog Systems (2 sessions), Evolution of Digital Systems (2 sessions), Revolutionary Technologies for Space (2 special sessions), Fault Tolerance and Survivability, Embryonics and