GECCO 2021

The 2021 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2021 @ Lille, https://gecco-2021.sigevo.org/) was organized as an online-only conference on July 10-14. After 2020, this is the second time that GECCO is going online. This report describes the virtual environments used for the conference and provides statistics about the GECCO virtualization.

GECCO 2021

The 2021 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2021) was planned to be held in hybrid mode in Lille, France, on July 10th-14th, 2021. After a careful analysis of the evolution of the pandemic and the results of a poll to frequent attendees on the preferred form of attendance, a decision was made in mid-December to run GECCO'21 in online/virtual mode only. This report provides statistics about submissions and authorship, and some comments about the evolution and growth of GECCO.

Darrell Whitley Awarded as the 2022 Evolutionary Computation Pioneer

Prof. Darrell Whitley has received the 2022 IEEE Pioneer Award on Evolutionary Computation from the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society "For early contributions to the practical implementation and theoretical understanding of evolutionary algorithms."

ACM SIGEVO best dissertation award 2021

The SIGEVO Best Dissertation Award was created in 2019 to recognize excellent thesis research by doctoral candidates in the field of evolutionary computing. Doctoral dissertation awards are also given by other Special Interest Groups of ACM, such as SIGCOMM, SIGKDD, SIGARCH and others. The SIGEVO Best Dissertation Award is given annually to a maximum of 1 winner and a maximum of 2 honorable mentions. The award presentation takes place at the awards ceremony of GECCO. The award carries a monetary value of $1,000 contributed by SIGEVO to be awarded to the winner. The award winner and honorable mentions each receive a plaque.

GECCO 2021

The 2021 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2021) was planned to be held in hybrid mode in Lille, France, on July 10th-14th, 2021. After a careful analysis of the evolution of the pandemic and the results of a poll to frequent attendees on the preferred form of attendance, a decision was made in mid-December to run GECCO'21 in online/virtual mode only. This report provides statistics about submissions and authorship, and some comments about the evolution and growth of GECCO.

2021 Humies winners awarded at GECCO!

The GECCO Conference, held virtually this year in Lille, France, July 10-14, was the home for the 18th Annual Human-Competitive Results Awards. The Humies competition annually awards $10,000 in cash prizes for computational results that are deemed to be competitive with results produced by human beings, but are generated automatically by computer. This year, there were 20 entries submitted, and the judges selected six of those to be finalists, based on the papers and entry forms they submitted. Because GECCO was virtual, the six Humies finalists did not present live talks, but instead submitted 10-minute videos that were shown during the Humies session and viewed by the judges in making their selections of the prize winners. All 20 entries and the six finalists' videos are all available to the general public at the website for the Humies, www.human-competitive.org, so anyone can watch them there.

Joint Lectures on Evolutionary Algorithms (JoLEA)

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI)'s Peter A.N. Bosman, Arkadiy Dushatskiy and Marco Virgolin, together with Leiden University's Thomas Bäck, Anna Kononova and Jacob P. de Nobel, Utrecht University's Dirk Thierens, and Vrije University of Amsterdam's Gusz Eiben, proudly present the Joint Lectures on Evolutionary Algorithms (JoLEA).

A computational creativity approach from music to images

Our system generates abstract images from music that serve as inspiration for the creative process. We developed one of many possible approaches for a cross-domain association between the musical and visual domains, by extracting features from MIDI music files and associating them to visual characteristics. The associations were led by the authors' aesthetic preferences and some experimentation. Three different approaches were pursued, two with direct or random associations and a third using a genetic algorithm that considers music and color theory while searching for better results. The resulting images were evaluated through online surveys, which confirmed that not only they were abstract, but also that there was a relationship with the music that served as the basis for the association process. Moreover, the majority of the participants ranked highest the images improved with the genetic algorithm. This newsletter contribution summarizes the full version of the article, which was presented at EvoMUSART 2021 (the 10th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design).

Search trajectories illuminated

This article summarizes our recent journal paper entitled "Search trajectory networks: A tool for analysing and visualising the behaviour of metaheuristics", where we propose a graph-based, data-driven modeling tool (STNs) to visualize and analyze the dynamics of any type of metaheuristic (evolutionary, swarm-based or single-point).