Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation

Abstract

It is my pleasure to welcome you to Madrid for the 2015 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference--GECCO 2015. This is a special year for several reasons. Firstly, sixteen years ago, in 1999, GECCO was born and held for the first time in Orlando, Florida, USA. So happy birthday sweet sixteen, GECCO! We are now in our teenage years, and still growing stronger. Second, thirty years ago the first ICGA, the International Conference on Genetic Algorithms, was held in 1985. Several people who attended that event are still with us today to bear witness to the strength of the (r)evolutionary ideas that were presented there. And last but not least, this year witnesses the highest ever proportion of women in the Organizing Committee, following the spirit of [email protected] This year's GECCO is comprised of 18 regular tracks, plus, for the second year, the Hot Off the Press (HOP) track, which offers authors of outstanding research recently published in journals and other conferences the opportunity to present their work to the GECCO community. Under the guidance of Editorin- Chief Sara Silva, the Track Chairs and Program Committee have selected 182 out of the 505 submissions received in all tracks (excluding HOP) for oral presentation as full papers, resulting in an acceptance rate of 36%. Close to 100 short papers will be presented in the regular poster session. This year we also include an additional poster session, where late-breaking abstracts will be presented together with mstudent papers. A highlight of the conference is the keynote talks given by salient figures in the GECCO fields of interest. This year we wanted to enhance the experience by going back to our origins and have included a third talk from the Natural Sciences field. Our speakers and their subjects are Ricard Solé, "Re-designing nature with synthetic biology: from artificial ants and tissues to a new biosphere",Kate Smith-Miles, "Visualising the diversity of benchmark instances and generating new test instances to elicit insights into algorithm performance",Manuel Martín-Loeches, "Origins and evolution of human language: saltation or gradualism?". Altogether 32 tutorials cover topics ranging from broad and introductory to specialized and at the frontier of current research. GECCO also hosts fifteen workshops, including several new ones as well as at least one that predates GECCO itself. Further high points include the 12th Annual "Humies" Awards for Human-Competitive Results, which are again generously supported by John Koza, and a record number of nine competitions, ranging from Art to Industry. Finally, Evolutionary Computation in Practice continues to be an important and integral part of GECCO, aiming at getting us in touch with the "real world". All this would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of the Organizing Committee over the past year. First of all a special mention is due to Sara Silva, who did a superb job of maintaining the high quality of the conference. Anabela Simões and Gisele Pappa ensured an interesting mixture of Tutorials and Workshops respectively, while Mike Preuss was in charge of finding challenging Competitions. Katia Rodríguez-Vázquez's efforts were devoted to that key component which ensures the conference's future development: the students. Şima Etaner Uyar and Pablo García-Sánchez made us reach the public via publicity and social media, and Juan Luis Jiménez-Laredo compiled all the useful information as Proceedings Chair. Thanks also go to the Track Chairs and the Program Committee for their careful reviewing of the large number of submissions received, and to the workshop chairs and tutorial presenters.