Special Session on

Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithms, Hyper-heuristics and Memetic Computation

  2010 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2010),  Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2010)
Jul 18 - 23, 2010, Barcelona, Spain
IEEE WCCI 2010
Objectives and Themes
Topics of Interest
Call for Papers
Organisers
Program Committee
Important Dates
School of Computer Science
University of Nottingham
Jubilee Campus
Wollaton Road
Nottingham NG8 1BB
UK

T:+44(0) 115 846 6569
F:+44(0) 115 9514254
gxo@cs.nott.ac.uk

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February 7, 2010
Paper submission (Extended deadline)

Objectives and Themes

Learning and adaptation represent key components in the design of modern effective and generally applicable search methodologies. These components can be incorporated into more traditionally techniques in many forms. Memetic algorithms (MAs) are a class of population-based hybrid evolutionary algorithms (EAs) coupled with a learning procedure capable of performing refinements. They have become one of the successful computational intelligence methodologies in current use today. Despite this inarguable success, hybrid EAs may not represent the full realization of memetic computation. Although they encompass cultural evolution (in the form of local refinement) in the search cycle, they lack a complete incorporation of core principles such as memetic transmission, variation and selection. The definition of the word “meme” has remained multi-faceted in the field of computational intelligence. Memes have materialized both as information restricted to the brain as well as available in the form of behaviors and artifacts. Some researchers have looked upon memes as “ideas & knowledge”, “synapses in neural memory networks”, “memory items & abstractions’, “laterally/hierarchically organized semantic memory”, “information/neural patterns that infect human minds” and others. More recently, the full realization on the notion of ‘memes’ that are close to evolutionary principles has gathered pace within the memetic computing community; memes can be seen as evolvable strategies for problem solving, thus extending the notion of a fixed problem domain knowledge component captured at design time and left untouched.

Hyper-heuristics have emerged as a class of search methodologies that share some goals with memetic computation. In particular, they are concerned with automating the design of heuristic methods to solve hard computational search problems. An underlying strategic research challenge is to develop more generally applicable (adaptive) techniques. Hyper-heuristic research encompasses automated heuristic selection and automated heuristic generation methodologies. They generally incorporate learning mechanisms or search on a space of heuristics (or its components). They are not always population-based approaches, but also can be based on single-point search, and can incorporate constructive heuristics beside perturbation heuristics.

The aim of this special session is to bring together researchers and practitioners in hybrid evolutionary algorithms, hyper-heuristics and memetic computation; in order to learn from each other, develop common understandings, and inspire new algorithms and approaches. Special emphasis will be given to adaptive approaches that balance the trade-off between global and local search (diversification/intensification) within a coordinated framework.  In addition, diverse state-of-the-art concepts, theory, and practice of memetic computation and hyper-heuristics are also welcomed.

Topics of Interest

  • balancing global and local search (or diversification/intensification)
  • (self-) adaptive coordination of local search and/or other heuristics
  • multi-agent and cooperative approaches
  • formal and probabilistic single/multi-objective approaches
  • hyper-heuristics and automated heuristic design
  • adaptive operator selection
  • automated generation of heuristics or its components
  • approaches that mimics individual learning, social learning and imitation
  • coevolution of genes and memes
  • memes, memeplexes, meta-memes in computing and high-order evolution
  • applications to dynamic and noisy environments
  • applications to computationally expensive and large scale optimisation problems
  • real-world problem domains

Call for Papers

All papers should be submitted electronically through the Congress website (http://www.wcci2010.org/) choosing this special session  from the available list when required (http://www.wcci2010.org/special-sessions/accepted-list). Formatting instructions are available at (http://www.wcci2010.org/submission). Contributed papers will be refereed by the program committee members based on the criteria of originality, significance, quality and clarity.

There will be an open call for papers (according to the tradition of this special session) and the most relevant works will be selected.

Call for Papers in PDF format.

Organisers

Dr Gabriela Ochoa University of Nottingham, UK
Dr Shaheen Fatima
Loughborough University, United Kingdom
Dr Ferrante Neri University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Dr Yew-Soon Ong Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Program Committee

Dr Carlos Cotta
University of Malaga, Spain
Dr Swagatam Das
Jadavpur University, India
Dr Shaheen Fatima
Loughborough University, United Kingdom
Dr Maoguo Gong
Xidian University, China
Dr Steven Gustafson
GE Global Research, USA
Dr Matthew Hyde
University of Nottingham, UK
Prof Graham Kendall University of Nottingham, UK
Dr Lee-Kee Khoon, Gary Institute of High Performance Computing, A-Star, Singapore
Dr Ferrante Neri University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Dr Gabriela Ochoa University of Nottingham, UK
Dr Yew-Soon Ong Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Dr Ruhul Sarker The University of New South Wales, Australia
Dr Jim Smith University of the West of England, UK
Prof Hugo Terashima Monterrey Institute of Technology, Mexico
Dr Chuan-Kang Ting National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan
Dr Yanqing Zhang Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Dr Zexuan Zhu Shenzhen University, China

Important Dates

February 7, 2010
Paper submission (Extended deadline)
March 15, 2010
Notification of paper acceptance
May 2, 2010
Final paper submission
July 18 - 23, 2010
Congress takes place
Last Update: 17 January 2010