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8th Workshop on
Evolutionary Computation for the Automated Design of Algorithms
(ECADA)

15-19 July 2018 @ GECCO 2018, Kyoto, Japan

http://web.mst.edu/~tauritzd/ECADA/GECCO2018/
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CALL FOR PAPERS
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We welcome original submissions on all aspects of Evolutionary Computation for
the Automated Design of Algorithms, in particular, evolutionary computation
methods and other hyper-heuristics for the automated design, generation or
improvement of algorithms that can be applied to any instance of a target
problem domain. Relevant methods include methods that evolve whole algorithms
given some initial components as well as methods that take an existing
algorithm and improve it or adapt it to a specific domain. Another important
aspect in automated algorithm design is the definition of the primitives that
constitute the search space of hyper-heuristics. These primitives should
capture the knowledge of human experts about useful algorithmic components
(such as selection, mutation and recombination operators, local searches, etc)
and, at the same time, allow the generation of new algorithm variants. Examples
of the application of hyper-heuristics, including genetic programming and
automatic configuration methods, to such frameworks of algorithmic components
are of interest to this workshop, as well as the (possibly automatic) design of
the algorithmic components themselves and the overall architecture of
metaheuristics. Therefore, relevant topics include (but are not limited to):

- Applications of hyper-heuristics, including general-purpose automatic
  algorithm configuration methods for the design of metaheuristics, in
  particular evolutionary algorithms, and other algorithms for application
  domains such as optimization, data mining, machine learning, image
  processing, engineering, cyber security, critical infrastructure protection,
  and bioinformatics.

- Novel hyper-heuristics, including but not limited to genetic programming
  based approaches, automatic configuration methods, and online, offline and
  life-long hyper-heuristics, with the stated goal of designing or improving
  the design of algorithms.

- Empirical comparison of hyper-heuristics.

- Theoretical analyses of hyper-heuristics.

- Studies on primitives (algorithmic components) that may be used by
  hyper-heuristics as the search space when automatically designing algorithms.

- Automatic selection/creation of algorithm primitives as a preprocessing step
  for the use of hyper-heuristics.

- Analysis of the trade-off between generality and effectiveness of different
  hyper-heuristics or of algorithms produced by a hyper-heuristic.

- Analysis of the most effective representations for hyper-heuristics (e.g.,
  Koza style Genetic Programming versus Cartesian Genetic Programming).

- Asynchronous parallel evolution of hyper-heuristics.

For more detailed information, see the ECADA workshop website
(http://web.mst.edu/~tauritzd/ECADA/GECCO2018/).


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IMPORTANT DATES
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Submission deadline: March 27, 2018
Reviews due: April 6, 2018
Notification of acceptance: April 10, 2018
Camera-ready deadline: April 24, 2018
Workshop date: July 15 or 16, 2018  (TBC)

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PAPER SUBMISSION
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Workshop papers must be submitted using the GECCO submission system this
year. After login, authors need to select the "Workshop Paper" submission form
and select the ECADA workshop. To see a sample of the "Workshop Paper"
submission form go to GECCO's submission site
(https://ssl.linklings.net/conferences/gecco/) and chose "Sample Submission
Forms".

Submitted papers must not exceed 8 pages and are required to be in compliance
with the GECCO 2018 Papers Submission Instructions
(http://gecco-2018.sigevo.org/index.html/tiki-index.php?page=Papers+Submission+Instructions).

It is recommended to use the same templates as the papers submitted to the main
tracks, but ECADA does not require to remove the author information.

All accepted papers will be presented at the corresponding workshop and appear
in the GECCO Conference Companion Proceedings.

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WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
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The schedule will be announced on the workshop website shortly after the paper
acceptance notification deadline.


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ORGANIZERS (in alphabetical order)
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Manuel López-Ibáñez (manuel.lopez-ibanez@manchester.ac.uk)

Daniel R. Tauritz (dtauritz@acm.org)

John R. Woodward (j.woodward@qmul.ac.uk)