Organizers

Krzysztof Krawiec, General Chair

Poznan University of Technology, Poland | webpage

Krzysztof Krawiec is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Computing Science at Poznan University of Technology, Poland. His primary research areas are genetic programming, semantic genetic programming, and coevolutionary algorithms, with applications in program synthesis, modeling, pattern recognition, and games. Dr. Krawiec co-chaired the European Conference on Genetic Programming in 2013 and 2014, GP track at GECCO'16, and is an associate editor of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines journal.

Francisco Chicano, Editor-in-Chief

University of Malaga, Spain | webpage

Francisco Chicano is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Computing Sciences of the University of Malaga, Spain. He has a degree in Computer Science (2003) and Physics (2014) and a PhD in Computer Science (2007). His research interests and publications include the application of theoretical results to the design of new search algorithms and operators for combinatorial optimization and the application of metaheuristic algorithms to software engineering problems (Search-Based Software Engineering). He has served as Program Chair in the EvoCOP conference, as Track Chair in GECCO and is in the editorial board of Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press), Journal of Systems and Software, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization.

Bilel Derbel, Local Chair

University of Lille, France | webpage

Bilel Derbel is an associate Professor (2007), having a research habilitation (2017), at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Lille, France,. He has a PhD in Computer Science (2006) from the University of Bordeaux (LaBRI, France). He was an assistant professor (2006) at the University of Aix-Marseille, France. He is deputy team leader of the BONUS ‘Big Optimisation aNd Ultra-Scale Computing’ research group at Inria Lille — Nord Europe, and CRIStAL, CNRS UMR 9189. He is a co-founder member of the LIA-MODO international laboratory between Shinshu Univ., Japan, and Univ. Lille, France. He has been a program committee member of evolutionary computing conferences such as GECCO, CEC, EvoOP, PPSN, etc. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics: Systems. He co-authored more than seventy scientific papers. He was awarded best paper awards in EMO'19, SEAL'17, ICDCN'11, and was nominated for the best paper award in EvoCOP'20, PPSN'18 and PPSN'14. His research topics are focused on the synergies between evolutionary algorithms, fitness landscape analysis and high-performance computing. His current interests are on the design and analysis of autonomous and distributed evolutionary algorithms for single- and multi-objective optimisation.

Alberto Tonda, Proceedings Chair

National Institute of Research for Agriculture and Environment (INRAE), and Université Paris-Saclay, France

Alberto Tonda received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science Engineering from Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 2011. Currently, he is a Permanent Researcher (CRCN) at the National Institute of Research for Agriculture and Environment (INRAE), and Université Paris-Saclay, Paris, France. His research interests include semi-supervised modeling of complex systems, evolutionary optimization and machine learning, with main applications in food science and biology. He led COST Action CA15118 FoodMC, a 4-year European networking project on in-silico modelling in food science. He published over 30 contributions in peer-reviewed journals, and over 60 conference papers. He was part of the program committee of 10 conferences of the domain, and he is currently an editorial board member of the journal Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines.

Katya Rodríguez-Vázquez, Student Affairs Chair

UNAM, Mexico | webpage

Received the Bachelor Degree in Computing Engineering from the National University of Mexico, in 1994 and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Sheffield, UK in 1999.She is currently a Research at the Institute of Applied Mathematics and Systems Engineering, National University of México. She has published a number of papers in international journals and conferences. Her research interests are in evolutionary computation, and multiobjective optimization and its applications in diverse fields. Dr. Rodríguez-Vázquez has been a Member of the Technical Program Committee for conferences related to evolutionary computation.

Sara Tari, Student Affairs Chair

Univ. Littoral Côte d'Opale, France | webpage

Aniko Ekart, Publicity Chair

Aston University, UK | webpage

Aniko Ekart is currently Head of Computer Science at Aston University, Birmingham, United Kingdom. She holds a PhD in Informatics from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. Her research interests include the theory and application of evolutionary computation and genetic programming in particular. She has experience in real-world applications of a variety of computational intelligence and data mining methods, including visual art, logistics (engineering) and vascular health (medicine). She has been working on various European Union funded research projects, including Advanced predictive analysis based decision support engine for logistics (ADVANCE), Actions for Excellence in Smart Cyber-Physical Systems applications through exploitation of Big Data in the context of Production Control and Logistics (EXCELL) and INdividual Vascular SignaTure: A new machine learning tool to aid personalised management of risk for cardiovascular disease (INVeST).

Nadarajen Veerapen, Electronic Media Chair

Université de Lille, France

Nadarajen Veerapen is an Associate Professor (maître de conférences) at the University of Lille, France. Previously he was a research fellow at the University of Stirling in Scotland. He holds a PhD in Computing Science from the University of Angers, France, where he worked on adaptive operator selection. His research interests include local search, hybrid methods, search-based software engineering and visualisation. He is the Electronic Media Chair for GECCO 2021 and has served as Electronic Media Chair for GECCO 2020, Publicity Chair for GECCO 2019 and as Student Affairs Chair for GECCO 2017 and 2018. He has previously co-organised the workshop on Landscape-Aware Heuristic Search at PPSN 2016, GECCO 2017-2019.

Arnaud Liefooghe, Virtualization Chair

University of Lille, France | webpage

Arnaud Liefooghe has been an Associate Professor with the University of Lille, France, since 2010. He is a member of the CRIStAL Research Center, CNRS, and of the Inria Lille-Nord Europe Research Center. He is also the Co-Director of the MODŌ international lab between Shinshu University, Japan, and the University of Lille. He received a PhD degree from the University of Lille in 2009. In 2010, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the University of Coimbra, Portugal. In 2020, he was on CNRS sabbatical at JFLI, and an Invited Professor at the University of Tokyo, Japan. His research activities deal with the foundations, the design and the analysis of stochastic local search heuristic algorithms, with a particular interest in multi-objective optimization and landscape analysis. He has co-authored over eighty scientific papers in international journals and conferences. He was a recipient of the best paper award at EvoCOP 2011 and at GECCO 2015. He has recently served as the co-Program Chair for EvoCOP 2018 and 2019, as the Proceedings Chair for GECCO 2018, and as the co-EMO Track Chair for GECCO 2019.

Sébastien Verel, Local Organizer

Univ. Littoral Côte d'Opale, France | webpage

Sébastien Verel is a professor in Computer Science at the Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale, Calais, France, and previously at the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France, from 2006 to 2013. He received a PhD in computer science from the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France, in 2005. His PhD work was related to fitness landscape analysis in combinatorial optimization. He was an invited researcher in DOLPHIN Team at INRIA Lille Nord Europe, France from 2009 to 2011. His research interests are in the theory of evolutionary computation, multiobjective optimization, adaptive search, and complex systems. A large part of his research is related to fitness landscape analysis. He co-authored of a number of scientific papers in international journals, book chapters, book on complex systems, and international conferences. He is also involved in the co-organization EC summer schools, conference tracks, workshops, a special issue on EMO at EJOR, as well as special sessions in indifferent international conferences.

Omar Abdelkafi, Local Organizer

University of Lille, France

Gisele L. Pappa, Tutorials

UFMG, Brazil | webpage

Gisele Pappa is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at UFMG, Brazil. Her main research interests are the intersection of the areas of machine learning and evolutionary computation, with a special interest in genetic programming and its applications in classification and regression tasks. She has also been actively researching the use of EAs for automated machine learning, focusing on applications for health data and also fraud detection.

Hugo Terashima-Marín, Workshops

Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico | webpage

Hugo Terashima-Marín holds a BSc in Computational Systems from Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Monterrey in 1982; MSc in Computer Science from University of Oklahoma in 1987; MSc in Information Technology and Knowledge-based Systems from University of Edinburgh in 1994; and PhD in Informatics from Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Monterrey in 1998.%%%Dr. Terashima-Marin is a Full Professor at the School of Engineering and Sciences, Leader of the Research Group with Strategic focus in Intelligent Systems and Director of the Graduate Program in Computer Science. He is a member of the National System of Researchers, the Mexican Academy of Sciences, and the Mexican Academy of Computing. He participates as a member of the Technical and Academic Council for the Thematic Network of Applied Computational Intelligence supported by CONACyT. His research areas are computational intelligence, heuristics, metaheuristics and hyper-heuristics for combinatorial optimization, characterization of problems and algorithms, constraint handling and applications of artificial Intelligence. He has been principal investigator of various projects for industry and CONACyT. He has current collaboration with research groups in the University of Nottingham, the University of Edinburgh-Napier, and the University of Stirling in the UK, and University Andrés Bello in Santiago de Chile. He has published more than 90 research articles in international journals and conferences. He has supervised 5 PhD dissertations and 30 Master Thesis.%%%In the past, he has been Director of the MSC in Intelligent Systems, PhD in Artificial Intelligence, PhD in Information Technology and Communications, the PhD Programs, and Graduate Programs at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Monterrey.

Alberto Moraglio, Workshops

University of Exeter, UK | webpage

Alberto Moraglio is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science in the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences at the University of Exeter, UK. He is the founder of the Geometric Theory of Evolutionary Algorithms, which unifies Evolutionary Algorithms across representations and has been used for the principled design and rigorous theoretical analysis of new successful search algorithms. He has had several tutorials at GECCO, IEEE CEC and PPSN, and an extensive publication record on this subject. He has served as co-chair for the GP track, the GA track and the Theory track in past editions of GECCO. He also co-chaired past editions of the European Conference on Genetic Programming, and is an associate editor of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines journal. He has applied his geometric theory to derive a new form of Genetic Programming based on semantics with appealing theoretical properties which is rapidly gaining popularity in the GP community.

Marcella Scoczynski Ribeiro Martins, Competitions

Federal University of Technology - Paraná, Brazil | webpage

Marcella Scoczynski is an Assistant Professor at Federal University of Technology - Parana UTFPR, Brazil. She has done her PhD on Computer Engineering at Federal University of Technology - Parana UTFPR, Brazil. Her thesis has awarded at the Theses Competition during Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems (BRACIS 2018) and at the Theses Contest during 5th IEEE Latin American Conference on Computational Intelligence (LA-CCI 2018). Her main research interests are numerical and combinatorial optimization, evolutionary computation and metaheuristics (with a particular interest in estimation of distribution algorithms), and landscape analysis. She co-authored scientific papers in international journals and conferences.

Markus Wagner, Competitions

University of Adelaide, Australia | webpage

Markus Wagner is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Computer Science, University of Adelaide, Australia. He has done his PhD studies at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbruecken, Germany and at the University of Adelaide, Australia. For the outcomes of his studies, he has received the university's Doctoral Research Medal - the first for his school - and three best paper awards. His research topics range from mathematical runtime analysis of heuristic optimisation algorithms and theory-guided algorithm design to applications of heuristic methods to renewable energy production, professional team cycling and software engineering. So far, he has been a program committee member 60+ times, and he has written 150+ articles with 150+ different co-authors. He is on SIGEVO's Executive Board and serves as the first ever Sustainability Officer. He has contributed to GECCOs as Workshop Chair and Competition Chair, and he has chaired several education-related committees within the IEEE CIS.

Thomas Bartz-Beielstein, Evolutionary Computation in Practice

TH Koeln, Germany | webpage

* Academic Background: Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.), TU Dortmund University, 2005, Computer Science.%%%* Professional Experience: Shareholder, Bartz & Bartz GmbH, Germany, 2014 – Present; Speaker, Research Center Computational Intelligence plus, Germany, 2012 – Present; Professor, Applied Mathematics, TH Köln, Germany, 2006 – Present.%%%* Professional Interest: Computational Intelligence; Simulation; Optimization; Statistical Analysis; Applied Mathematics.%%%* ACM Activities: Organizer of the GECCO Industrial Challenge, SIGEVO, 2011 – Present; Event Chair, Evolutionary Computation in Practice Track, SIGEVO, 2008 – Present; Tutorials Evolutionary Computation in Practice, SIGEVO, 2005 – 2013; GECCO Program Committee Member, Session Chair, SIGEVO, 2004 – Present. %%%* Membership and Offices in Related Organizations: Program Chair, International Conference Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia, 2014; Program Chair, International Workshop on Hybrid Metaheuristics, TU Dortmund University, 2006; Member, Special Interest Group Computational Intelligence, VDI/VDE-Gesellschaft für Mess- und Automatisierungstechnik, 2008 – Present.%%%* Awards Received: Innovation Partner, State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, 2013; One of the top 20 researchers in applied science by the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Research of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, 2017.

Bogdan Filipic, Evolutionary Computation in Practice

Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia | webpage

Bogdan Filipic is a senior researcher and head of Computational Intelligence Group at the Department of Intelligent Systems of the Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia, and associate professor of Computer Science at the Jozef Stefan International Postgraduate School. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Ljubljana. His research interests are in computational intelligence, evolutionary computation and stochastic optimization. He focuses on evolutionary multiobjective optimization, including result visualization, constraint handling and use of surrogate models. He is also active in promoting evolutionary computation in practice and has led optimization projects for steel industry, car manufacturing and energy management. He was the general chair of PPSN 2014, organized several special sessions and tracks at major international conferences, and serves as a program chair for BIOMA 2020. He was a guest lecturer at the University of Oulu, Finland, and the VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and was giving tutorials at recent CEC and GECCO conferences.

Sowmya Chandrasekaran, Evolutionary Computation in Practice

Th Köln | webpage

M. Eng. Sowmya Chandrasekaran is a research associate at Institute for Data Science, Engineering and Analytics TH Köln, Germany. Her research interest includes: Artificial Intelligence, Anomaly Detection, Statistical Performance Analysis, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Internet of Things.

Carola Doerr, Hot-off the Press

CNRS and Sorbonne University, France | webpage

Carola Doerr, formerly Winzen, is a permanent CNRS researcher at Sorbonne University in Paris, France. Carola's main research activities are in the mathematical analysis of randomized algorithms, with a strong focus on evolutionary algorithms and other black-box optimizers. She has been very active in the design and analysis of black-box complexity models, a theory-guided approach to explore the limitations of heuristic search algorithms. Most recently, she has used knowledge from these studies to prove superiority of dynamic parameter choices in evolutionary computation, a topic that she believes to carry huge unexplored potential for the community. Carola has received several awards for her work on evolutionary computation, among them the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society and four best paper awards at GECCO. She is/was program chair of PPSN 2020, FOGA 2019 and the theory tracks of GECCO 2015 and 2017. Carola is an editor of two special issues in Algorithmica. She is also vice chair of the EU-funded COST action 15140 on ``Improving Applicability of Nature-Inspired Optimisation by Joining Theory and Practice (ImAppNIO)''.

Federica Sarro, Late Breaking Abstracts

University College London, UK | webpage

Federica is a Professor of Software Engineering at the Department of Computer Science, University College London, UK. Her research sits at the intersection of Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and Predictive Analytics with a focus on software project management, quality assurance, app stores analytics, software fairness, automated software testing, repair and optimisation. She has published over 80 scholarly papers and has received several international awards, including the ACM Distinguished Paper Award at FSE’19 and the ACM SIGEVO HUMIES Award at GECCO'16. She has been Chair the SBSE track at GECCO 2017 and 2018 and of the International Symposium on Search-Based Software Engineering (SSBSE) in 2016. She has been elected the Chair of the Steering Committee of SSBSE in 2018 and member of the Steering Committee of two international software engineering conferences (ICPC and ESEM) in 2019 and 2020. Federica is on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization, the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, and the Empirical Software Engineering Journal.

John Koza, Humies

- | webpage

Erik Goodman, Humies

Michigan State University and BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, USA | webpage

Erik Goodman is a Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, of Mechanical Engineering, and of Computer Science & Engineering at Michigan State University. He is Director of the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, an NSF Science and Technology Center funded at $25 million in 2010. He studied genetic algorithms under John Holland at the University of Michigan, before they had been named. His use of a genetic algorithm in 1971 to solve for 40 coefficients of a highly nonlinear model of a bacterial cell was the first known GA application on a real-world problem, and required nearly a year for one run on a dedicated computer. He has developed and used evolutionary algorithms ever since, including for parameterization of complex ecosystem models, for evolution of cooperative behavior in artificial life, for factory layout and scheduling, for protein folding and docking, for design of composite structures, and for data mining and pattern classification. His recent research has centered on sustainable evolutionary computation, design of mechatronic systems using genetic programming, and multi-objective evolutionary algorithms in support of multi-criterion decision making. He was co-founder and formerly VP Technology of Red Cedar Technology, which provides tools for automated engineering design based on evolutionary computation. He chaired ICGA-97 and GECCO-2001, chaired GECCO's sponsoring organization, ISGEC, from 2001-2004, and was the founding chair of ACM SIGEVO, 2005-2007.

William B. Langdon, Humies

University College London, UK | webpage

William B. Langdon has been working on GP since 1993. His PhD was the first book to be published in John Koza and Dave Goldberg's book series. He has previously run the GP track for GECCO 2001 and was programme chair for GECCO 2002 having previously chaired EuroGP for 3 years. More recently he has edited SIGEVO's FOGA and run the computational intelligence on GPUs (CIGPU) and EvoPAR workshops. His books include A Field Guide to Genetic Programming, Foundations of Genetic Programming and Advances in Genetic Programming 3. He also maintains the genetic programming bibliography. His current research uses GP to genetically improve existing software, CUDA, search based software engineering and Bioinformatics.

Christine Zarges, Summer School

Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK

Christine Zarges received her degree and PhD from the TU Dortmund, Germany, in 2007 and 2011, respectively. Afterwards, she held a postdoctoral research position at the University of Warwick, England, UK, and a Birmingham Fellowship at the University of Birmingham, England, UK. She is a Lecturer at Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK, since August 2016.%%%Her research focuses on the theoretical analysis of all kinds of randomised search heuristics such as evolutionary algorithms and artificial immune systems with the aim to understand their working principles and guide their design and application. She is also interested in computational and theoretical aspects of natural processes and systems. She has given tutorials on """"Artificial Immune Systems for Optimisation"""" at previous GECCOs and was co-chair of the Artificial Immune Systems track at GECCO 2014, the Artificial Immune Systems and Artificial Chemistries track at GECCO 2015 and Hot off the Press chair at GECCO 2017. She is member of the editorial board of Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press) and was co-organiser of FOGA 2015 and co-workshop chair at PPSN 2016 and 2018. She is a Management Committee member for the UK and working group leader in COST Action CA15140 (Improving Applicability of Nature-Inspired Optimisation by Joining Theory and Practice).

Miguel Nicolau, Summer School

University College Dublin, Ireland | webpage

Miguel is a Lecturer in Business Analytics, in the School of Business of University College Dublin, Ireland. His research interests revolve around Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Evolutionary Computation, Business Analytics, Genetic Programming, and Real-World Applications. He is a senior member of the UCD's NCRA (Natural Computing Research & Applications) group.

Marie-Eléonore Kessaci, Women@GECCO

Université de Lille, France

Swetha Varadarajan, Women@GECCO

Colorado State University, United States

Tea Tušar, Job Market

Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia | webpage

Tea Tušar is a research associate at the Department of Intelligent Systems of the Jožef Stefan Institute, and an assistant professor at the Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School, both in Ljubljana, Slovenia. After receiving the PhD degree in Information and Communication Technologies from the Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School for her work on visualizing solution sets in multiobjective optimization, she has completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at Inria Lille in France where she worked on benchmarking multiobjective optimizers. Her research interests include evolutionary algorithms for singleobjective and multiobjective optimization with emphasis on visualizing and benchmarking their results and applying them to real-world problems.

Boris Naujoks, Job Market

Cologne University of Applied Sciences, Germany | webpage

Boris Naujoks is a professor for Applied Mathematics at TH Köln - Cologne University of Applied Sciences (CUAS). He joint CUAs directly after he received his PhD from Dortmund Technical University in 2011. During his time in Dortmund, Boris worked as a research assistant in different projects and gained industrial experience working for different SMEs. Meanwhile, he enjoys the combination of teaching mathematics as well as computer science and exploring EC and CI techniques at the Campus Gummersbach of CUAS. He focuses on multiobjective (evolutionary) optimization, in particular hypervolume based algorithms, and the (industrial) applicability of the explored methods.

Peter A. N. Bosman, Business Committee

Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, The Netherlands | webpage

Peter A. N. Bosman is a senior researcher in the Life Sciences research group at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) (Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science) located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Peter was formerly affiliated with the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University, where also he obtained both his MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science, more specifically on the design and application of estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs). He has (co-)authored over 125 refereed publications on both algorithmic design aspects and real-world applications of evolutionary algorithms. At the GECCO conference, Peter has previously been track (co-)chair (EDA track, 2006, 2009), late-breaking-papers chair (2007), (co-)workshop organizer (OBUPM workshop, 2006; EvoDOP workshop, 2007; GreenGEC workshop, 2012-2014), (co-)local chair (2013) and general chair (2017).

Darrell Whitley, Business Committee

Colorado State University, United States

Darrell Whitley is a Professor of Computer Science at Colorado State University. He served as the Chair of the International Society of Genetic Algorithm from 1993 to 1997, and as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Evolutionary Computation from 1997 to 2003. He was Chair of the Governing Board of ACM SIGEVO from 2007 to 2011. He was named an ACM Fellow in 2019 for his contributions to the field of genetic and evolutionary computation.