GECCO

On behalf of the Organizing Committee, I would like to welcome you to Vancouver for the 2014 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2014). This years GECCO is comprised of 20 tracks, including the new Artificial Immune Systems and Hot Off the Press (HOP) tracks. The latter offers authors of outstanding research recently published in journals and other conferences the opportunity to present their work to the GECCO community. Under the guidance of Editor-in-Chief Christian Igel, the Track Chairs and Program Committee have selected 180 out of the 544 submissions received in all tracks (excluding HOP) for oral presentation as full papers, resulting in an acceptance rate of 33%. Close to 100 short papers will be presented in the poster session.

Highlights of the conference include keynote talks by Yoshua Bengio on "Deep Learning and Cultural Evolution", and by Dario Floreano on "Bridging Natural and Artificial Evolution", as well as an invited talk by Sumit Gulwani in the Genetic Programming track. Altogether 32 tutorials cover topics ranging from broad and introductory to specialized and at the frontier of current research. GECCO also hosts fifteen workshops, including several new ones as well as at least one that predates GECCO itself. Further high points include the 11th Annual "Humies" Awards for Human- Competitive Results, which are again generously supported by John Koza, and five competitions, ranging from Art, Design, and Creativity to the Industrial Challenge. Finally, Evolutionary Computation in Practice continues to be an important and integral part of GECCO.