A Word from the Chair of SIGEVO

Welcome to the Proceedings of GECCO-2008, the tenth GECCO, and in turn a “recombination” of the Seventeenth International Conference on Genetic Algorithms (ICGA) and the Thirteenth Genetic Programming Conference (GP). If you are reading this at GECCO-2008, welcome to Atlanta and we hope you are enjoying the conference. General Chair Conor Ryan, Editor-in-Chief Maarten Keijzer and an outstanding team of chairs of the various activities and tracks have put together a great conference. 

If you were not able to attend GECCO-2008 in person, we trust that you will find the articles contained in these Proceedings to be of lasting value. The Proceedings are in the ACM Digital Library and indexed by ISI; they are globally accessible and readily found, which benefits both readers and authors. The highly decentralized review process used for reviewing papers for GECCO has once again produced an outstanding result – 44% of the submissions were accepted as full papers, with additional papers accepted for presentation as posters with abstracts in these proceedings. The decentralized review process assures that each category of papers is reviewed by experts in that subspecialty.

ACM SIGEVO

The members of ACM SIGEVO, sponsor of GECCO, have already seen major benefits of becoming a part of ACM. Key among new benefits is the outstanding newsletter, SIGEVOlutions, produced by editor Pier Luca Lanzi and an excellent editorial board. If you are accessing these proceedings and are not a member of SIGEVO, please consider joining (for the low price of $25/year for non-students, and $10/year for student members). In addition to SIGEVOlutions, members receive a major discount for GECCO registration. Incidentally, all SIGEVO members are invited to submit announcements and brief articles of interest to Pier Luca at lanzi@elet.polimi.it.

SIGEVO is also trying to use it resources wisely. One way we can give back to the community is to support students. SIGEVO is providing approximately 25,000 dollars in student travel to help develop the research community of tomorrow. 

Conor Ryan did a great job at the helm as General Chair of GECCO-2008. Special thanks are due to Pat Cattolico (Tiger Mountain Scientific, Inc.) for outstanding work handling the logistics for GECCO; Pat deserves far more credit for the success of GECCO than most people will ever know. Maarten Keijzer, Program Chair and Editor-in-Chief of the Proceedings, did an excellent job lining up track chairs, organizing the review process, and editing the proceedings. 

Franz Rothlauf will be General Chair in 2009 and GECCO-2009 will be held in Canada, in Montreal.

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FOGA

The Ninth FOGA Workshop was held in Mexico City, January 7-11, 2007, under sponsorship of SIGEVO. In January 2009 FOGA will be held in Orlando, Florida. FOGA is being hosted and organized by Paul Wiegand, Annie Wu, Thomas Jansen and Ivan Garibay. You can find more information at www.sigevo.org/foga-2009.

Involvement in SIGEVO

SIGEVO is now a regular SIG of the ACM. Our bylaws are on the SIGEVO web pages, as is a list of the Executive Committee—an 18-member body. I was elected to be chair of SIGEVO during the 2007 GECCO conference in London. In the future, six EC members will be elected each odd-numbered year. I’d like to thank the officers who have served with me this last year: John Koza (Vice Chair), Una-May O’Reilly (Secretary), and Wolfgang Banzhaf (Treasurer). A special thanks goes to Erik Goodman, the previous Chair of SIGEVO for both his past efforts and for his help and support during the last year.

If you are interested in devoting some time and energy to GECCO or SIGEVO, please let us know. You can contact me at whitley@cs.colostate.edu. We have many more ideas than we have people to implement them, and we’re still open to more ideas. 

It is a pleasure and an honor to chair SIGEVO. I have been a part of the evolutionary computation community for over 20 years, and in many ways it has become another family. 

I look forward to continuing involvement in SIGEVO.

Darrell Whitley
SIGEVO Chair