Connectionists: Generative and Developmental Systems Track, GECCO 2011, Call for Papers and Participation

[Jeff Clune]

              GENERATIVE AND DEVELOPMENTAL SYSTEMS TRACK
    2011 GENETIC AND EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION CONFERENCE (GECCO-2011)
                           http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2011



Dear Connectionists,

We wanted to bring to your attention a new venue that may be of interest to
some Connectionists: the Generative and Developmental Systems (GDS) track at
GECCO 2011, which is the premier conference for GDS-related work worldwide.

GDS is the study of indirect representations (also known as generative or
developmental encodings), which are often inspired by biological
development, where complex phenotypes are grown from compact genomes. The
aim of such systems is to exploit powerful representations that efficiently
encode complex structures.  In recent years, GDS approaches have
increasingly focused on encoding large-scale neural structures, which is why
it is relevant to Connectionists.  Such approaches aim to evolve brain-like
structures with a high number of connections and regular connectivity
patterns.

Our program committee of GDS experts means that your paper will be reviewed
by many leaders in the field. Moreover, the attendance and enthusiasm at the
GDS track has increased every year since it started in 2007. The size and
prestige of the GECCO conference will allow many researchers to learn
about your work who might be outside your traditional area, both at the
conference and via the proceedings (GECCO  has the highest impact rating of
all conferences in the field of Evolutionary Computation and Artificial
Life*).

Traditionally, GDS has focused on mappings that involve a developmental
stage, implemented in a variety of ways including re-write systems and cell
chemistry simulations.  However, GDS concerns a wide range of indirect
encodings, including high-level abstractions of biological development and
environmental interactions.

GDS research both sheds light on biological development and furthers
engineering goals by harnessing generative representations for evolutionary
design.  Overall, GDS concerns a wide range of indirect representations
concerned with the genotype-phenotype map and encourages comparison,
discussion, and analysis of the advantages and relationships among various
representations. The GDS track is also open to papers regarding applications
of generative encodings to interesting problems.

We invite all papers related to GDS, including those in the following
subject areas: artificial development, artificial embryogeny, compositional
pattern producing networks (CPPNs), computational embryology, developmental
encodings, evolutionary design, generative representations, genetic
regulatory networks (GRNs), indirect encodings, genotype to phenotype
mappings, procedural representations, Lindenmayer Systems (L-Systems), etc.

For more information, visit the GDS Community webpage at gds.wikispot.org


IMPORTANT DATES
* Submission deadline: January 26, 2011
* Notification of paper acceptance: March 23, 2011
* Camera-ready submission: April 8, 2011
* GECCO-2010 Conference: July 12-16, 2011


The conference will be held in Dublin, Ireland.


For more information, please see the GDS track description at:
http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2011/organizers-tracks.html#gds


Best Regards,

Jeff Clune and Greg Hornby

2011 GECCO GDS Track Chairs

* http://www.cs-conference-ranking.org/conferencerankings/topicsii.html




GECCO is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery Special
Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (SIGEVO). SIG
Services: 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY, 10121, USA,
1-800-342-6626 (USA and Canada) or +212-626-0500 (Global).






Best regards,
Jeff Clune

Postdoctoral Fellow
Hod Lipson's Computational Synthesis Laboratory
Cornell University
jeffclune at cornell.edu
www.msu.edu/~jclune

**Call for papers! Generative and Developmental Systems Track, GECCO 2011
(Dublin). Deadline Jan. 26th.**