Call for Participation

COEVOLUTION DISCUSSION FORUM

What Can Coevolution Do for Us? A Problem-Oriented View
http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/gecco05/coec_forum/

at the
2005 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
Washington, DC USA
June 25 - 29, 2005

Coevolution is a promising problem solving technique that can be applied in interactive domains. This includes problems in which candidate solutions are evaluated using tests and problems in which multiple components are to be co-adapted. By adaptively choosing which interactions to evaluate, coevolution can provide an evaluation function that is not only efficient but may also be more accurate than a fixed, user-defined evaluation function.

As a result of this capability, as well as their often complicated dynamics, coevolutionary algorithms have historically provided researchers with much hope and consternation. Intuition about their potential abounded, and early interest in coevolution was stimulated by a number of successful results. Despite this promising start, however, coevolution has been employed in only a very limited number of practical applications so far.

Our theoretical understanding of coevolution has meanwhile developed substantially. Current views of coevolution place a strong emphasis on understanding the relationship between the underlying problem that one wishes to solve and the nature of the coevolutionary algorithm that is being applied. This focus leads to a more realistic expectation of the potential of coevolutionary algorithms, and clarifies the goals of coevolutionary algorithms for different problems.

At last year's GECCO, an informal and unofficial meeting was held where terminology in the field of coevolutionary computation was discussed. This very lively discussion was felt by all participants to be a valuable event, and has resulted in a much clearer picture of how researchers in the field currently use terminology and where more consistent terminology could be established. Indeed, this discussion led to the establishment of a Coevolution Wiki as a means of maintaining public discourse on the subject. Based on the success of this meeting, there will be a similar forum discussion this year that is open to any interested attendants as part of the GECCO Workshop Program.

AIMS AND FORMAT

The 2005 coevolution discussion forum will be an open meeting in the form of a two-hour forum discussion. The general point of the forum is to foster an open discussion concerning relevant issues in coevolutionary computation with active audience participation. The specific aims of this meeting are twofold:

To this end, five topics that cover the main open issues in coevolution have been identified to provide a structure for the discussion:

An invited panel of active coevolution researchers will serve to ensure that a discussion will be initiated. The discussion will be moderated by a member of the panel.

CONTACT INFORMATION

Anthony Bucci
DEMO Lab
Computer Science Department MS018
Brandeis University
Waltham MA 02454
USA
Office Phone: +1-781-736.3366
abucci@cs.brandeis.edu
Edwin D. de Jong
ICS, DSS Group
Utrecht University
PO Box 80.089
NL-3508 TB Utrecht
The Netherlands
Office Phone: +31-30-253.9049
dejong@cs.uu.nl
R. Paul Wiegand
Naval Research Laboratory
1400 E. West Hwy, Apt 1619
Silver Spring, MD 20910
USA
Office Phone: +1-202-404.1139
paul@tesseract.org