Call for Papers: WCCI 2014 Special Session "Theoretical Foundations of Bio-inspired Computation"

http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~sutton/CEC2014/

Motivation

Bio-inspired search heuristics often turn out to be highly successful for optimization in practice. The theory of these randomized search heuristics explains the success or the failure of these methods in practical applications. Theoretical analyses lead to the understanding of which problems are optimized (or approximated) efficiently by a given algorithm and which are not.
The benefits of theoretical understanding for practitioners are threefold.

• Aiding the algorithm design,
• guiding the choice of the best algorithm for the problem at hand,
• determining the optimal parameter settings.

The theory of evolutionary computation has grown rapidly in recent years. The primary aim of this special session is to bring together people working on theoretical aspects of  bio-inspired computation. The latest breakthroughs in the theory of bio-inspired computation will be reported and new directions will be set.

Scope

Potential authors are invited to submit papers describing original contributions to foundations of evolutionary computation. Although we are most interested in theoretical foundations, computational studies of a foundational nature are also welcome.

The scope of this special session includes (but is not limited to) the following topics:

• Theoretical foundations of bio-inspired heuristics
• Exact and approximation runtime analysis
• Black box complexity
• Self-adaptation
• Population dynamics
• Fitness landscape and problem difficulty analysis
• No free lunch theorems
• Statistical approaches for understanding the behaviour of bio-inspired heuristics
• Computational studies of a foundational nature

All problem domains will be considered including:

• combinatorial and continuous optimization
• single‐objective and multi‐objective optimization
• constraint handling
• dynamic and stochastic optimization
• co‐evolution and evolutionary learning

Paper Submission

You should follow the IEEE CEC 2014 submission website. On the submission system you must select "SS4. EC04: Theoretical Foundations of Bio-inspired Computation" as "Main Research Topic".
Special session papers are treated in the same way as regular conference papers. Click here to visit the main WCCI 2014 web page.

Important Dates

Paper submissions: December 20, 2013
Notification of acceptance: March 15, 2014
Final paper submission: April 15, 2014

Journal Special Issue

Papers of the highest quality amongst those published in this special session will be selected for invitation to a special issue of the “Evolutionary Computation” journal published by MIT Press.

Organisers

Pietro S. Oliveto (Department of Computer Science, The University of Sheffield, UK)  (P.Oliveto@sheffield.ac.uk)
Andrew M. Sutton (Department of Computer Science, Colorado State University) (sutton@cs.colostate.edu)

Previous editions

A previous edition of this special session was successfully organized at CEC 2013  which took place in Cancun, Mexico. The special session attracted 10 submissions of which 3 papers of the highest quality were accepted. Over 50 people attended the special session at the conference. Extended versions of the accepted papers were invited to a special issue of the Theoretical Computer Science (Elsevier) journal entitled “Evolutionary Computation 2013” (edited by T. Friedrich, J. He, T. Jansen, A. Moraglio) containing extensions of the best theoretical work published at evolutionary computation conferences in 2013.

This special session is organised as part of the IEEE CIS Task Force on Theoretical Foundations of Bio-Inspired Computation (http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~olivetps/CIStheory.html)