Workshop on Complexity through Development and Self-Organizing Representations

Complexity through Development and
Self-Organizing Representations
CODESOAR 2006
Building complexity from simplicity

Workshop on,

To be held as part of the

Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2006)
July 8-12, 2006 (Saturday-Wednesday)
Renaissance Seattle Hotel
Seattle, Washington, USA
Organized by ACM SIG-EVO
www.isgec.org/GECCO-2006

1/18/2006:
March 31st, 2006: Submission deadline

1/18/2006:
Call for Papers: txt, pdf, doc

Important Dates

Submission Deadline:
31 March, 2006

Author Notification:
12 April, 2006

Camera-Ready Deadline:
19 April, 2006

Chairs

  Ivan I. Garibay*
  Sanjeev Kumar**
  Julian Miller***
  Ozlem Garibay*
  Kivanc Oner*

*Evolutionary Computation Laboratory, University of Central Florida
**Sibley School of Mech. and Aerospace Eng. , Cornell University
***Department of Electronics , University of York

Program Committe

Rod Adams , University of Hertfordshire , UK
Josh Bongard, Cornell University, USA
Peter Bentley, University College London , UK
Angelo Cangelosi, University of Plymouth , UK
Keith Downing , Norwegian University of Science and Technology , Norway
Ivan Garibay, University of Central Florida, USA
Pauline Haddow, Norwegian University of Science and Technology , Norway
Gregory Hornby, Computational Sciences Div. at NASA Ames Research Center
Sanjeev Kumar, Sibley School of Mech. and Aerospace Eng., Cornell University
W. Bill Langdon, Computer Science, University of Essex, UK
Joseph Lewis, Computer Science Department, San Diego State University, USA
Julian Miller, University of York , UK
Chrystopher Nehaniv, University of Hertfordshire , UK
Luis Rocha, University of Indiana, USA
Lukas Sekanina, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic
Ken Stanley, University of Central Florida, USA
Susan Stepney, University of York, York, UK
Richard Tateson, BTExact , UK
Gunnat Tufte, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Andy Tyrrell, University of York, UK
Annie Wu, University of Central Florida, USA

Contact Info

Seattle, Washington, July 8-9, 2006

This workshop follows on from the successful workshops on self-organization in representations in evolutionary algorithms, and scalable, evolvable, emergent developmental systems at previous GECCO conferences. This year's workshop is a unified workshop covering both closely related areas. It promises to be an exciting, thought provoking, and successful workshop.

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been applied to an ever increasing variety of problem domains, for which they have achieved human competitive results on small evolutionary design problems. The application of EAs to tasks of ever increasing difficulty is fraught with problems, namely: stagnation of search in large search spaces, negative epistatic effects, disruption of large building blocks, and scalability, amongst others. Recently, the problem of scalability has attracted much attention, and deservedly so, as its resolution is linked to other critical and demanding open research problems such as: development, evolvability, and modularity. In order to improve the scalability of such systems fundamental research must be undertaken to discover how to evolve increasingly more complex designs.

For this we look at the two systems that have achieved scalability: human engineering and natural systems. Manually constructed systems have achieved such things as aircraft with over a million parts, software with tens of millions of lines of code and over a hundred million transistors in microprocessors, suggesting that we can improve the scalability of automated design by using principles of engineering. Similarly, natural evolution and developmental biology have produced adaptable and self-repairing systems of even greater complexity using principles of self-organization.

Self-organization is fundamental to the developmental process at all levels: molecular, genetic, and cellular. Nature evolves instructions in the form of genes that are used to specify the construction of organisms during the process of development. With reports of the number of genes in the human genome being revised downwards, the role of self-organization in complex webs of gene regulation is all the more salient. Given these new findings, perhaps the self-organization of genotypic instructions and biological structure from cells during multicellular development is a key missing ingredient from EAs? To this end, it is anticipated that models of biological cells and multicellular development represent a valuable source of knowledge that will aid us in designing EAs with emergent phenomena such as: adaptability, scale-free-ness, evolvability, and robustness. Regardless of the developmental model or generative representation chosen -- cellular automata, genetic regulatory networks, L-systems, etc - we must understand exactly what gives such systems their computational power and exactly how they affect evolvability.

This workshop will focus on domain-independent methods for representing complex solutions with self-organizable building blocks, and on developmental principles for specifying the construction of complex systems. The workshop welcomes multidisciplinary work, including submissions from biologists on relevant biology that may help shed more light on developmental, self-organizing principles for evolutionary computation.

Topics of interest include

Models of complexity building using self-organization
Emergent behavior in representations
Methods of design and evaluation of self-organizable representational building blocks
Scalability of self-organizational processes to high complexities
Self-organization theoretical approaches: complexity, chaos, synergetics, self-organized criticality, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, etc.
Self-organized development
Genotype-phenotype mappings for self-organization and single & multicellular development
Pattern formation, morphogenesis, cellular differentiation, and growth
Models of genetic regulatory networks, modularity, segmentation, and compartmentalization
Scalability & Evolvability of developmental processes
Robustness, self-repair and regeneration in developmental processes
Real world applications of developmental principles

Workshop Format

This workshop seeks to bring together researchers from diverse problem domains to informally discuss issues related to the representation of complex solutions using developmentally inspired processes and the self-organization of simple building blocks. We focus on evolutionary algorithms but we address the issue of building complexity from simplicity in general. We plan to have a series of short technical presentations followed by a panel discussion.

We welcome technical papers describing completed or on-going research as well as position papers outlining current research issues, approaches or research agendas. We also welcome suggestions to panel discussions. Presentations will be short but will include extra time for discussion.

Workshop Submission Instructions

Please submit proposed contributions via email to igaribay@cs.ucf.edu in PS or PDF format by March 31st. Contributions can vary from one-page position statements up to full twelve-page camera-ready papers. Accepted contributions will be published in the GECCO-2006 workshops proceedings.

Camera Ready Instructions

Camera ready papers MUST be received by APRIL 19 (this is a hard deadline).
The maximum contribution length is 12 pages. The format for camera ready contributions is the same GECCO-2006 LNCS format used for the main conference. (GECCO-2006 workshops submission format)

Camera Ready Format

Authors are welcome to resubmit their 3-4 page outline or to submit an extend version of their contribution. Camera ready papers should be no longer than 12 pages. For more information about formatting please visit: format for manuscripts submitted to GECCO-2006.

Attendance

Open to all GECCO 2006 attendees

More information

For more information, comments or suggestions please email Ivan Garibay at igaribay@cs.ucf.edu