Women+ @ GECCO
Summary
The Women+@GECCO workshop series started in 2013 as a venue in which accomplished women researchers welcome and support other women in evolutionary computation (EC). Over the years, the workshop has become a venue where students and junior researchers from different under-represented cohorts in EC interact in an informal setting with established women researchers and the general GECCO community, to share our experience as researchers and discuss various issues related to fostering and balancing one's professional and social life, as well as on inserting oneself in the EC community.
The workshop plays an important role at GECCO and, particularly in years that are challenging our professional and personal life, the Women+@GECCO workshop will have a hybrid format as an instance to connect ourselves as a community.
Panel Discussion
Giorgia Nadizar
Giorgia Nadizar is a third-year Ph.D. student in Applied Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Trieste.
Her research interests lie at the intersection of embodied AI and explainable/interpretable AI, focusing on developing robotic controllers that are both effective and directly human intelligible.
Throughout her academic journey, she has gained experience in multiple research environments, like the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam, the ISAE-Supaero in Toulouse, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA.
Professor Emma Hart
Prof. Hart gained a 1st Class Honours Degree in Chemistry from the University of Oxford in 1990, followed by an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Her PhD, also from the University of Edinburgh, explored the use of immunology as an inspiration for computing, examining a range of techniques applied to optimisation and data classification problems. She moved to Edinburgh Napier University in 2000 as a lecturer, and was promoted to a Chair in 2008 where she leads a group in Nature-Inspired Intelligent Systems, specialising in optimisation and learning algorithms applied in domains that range from combinatorial optimisation to robotics. Her current interests lie mainly at the intersection of evolutionary algorithms and machine-learning, in developing algorithms that are capable of learning/improving over time or learning from experience. This has applications in a range of combinatorial and continuous domains, as well as in robotics.
She is very active in the EC community worldwide. She was appointed as Editor-in-Chief of Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press) in 2017-2023 and is currently Vice-Chair of ACM SIGEVO. She was General Chair of PPSN 2016, and has acted a Track Chair at GECCO for several years. In 2025, she will be Chair ofEvoApplication (Evo*) to be held in Trieste. She has been invited to give keynotes at major international conferences including EANN 2024, EA 2022, CLAIO 2020, IEEE CEC 2019, EURO 2016 and UKCI 2015
She has a sustained track record of obtaining funding from the EU, EPSRC and of engaging with industry via Knowledge Transfer projects and consultancy. She participates enthusiastically in public-engagement activity, e.g. Pint of Science. Her work in evolutionary robotics has attracted significant media attention, e.g. in New Scientist, the Guardian, Telegraph and the Conversation. In 2021, she gave a TED Talk on Evolutionary Robotics, available online here https://tinyurl.com/2cns43zz
In 2022, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for her contributions to Computer Science. In 2023, she was awarded the ACM SIGEVO Award for Outstanding Achievement in Evolutionary Computation.
Professor Gabriela Ochoa
Gabriela Ochoa is a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Stirling in Scotland, UK. Her research lies in the foundations and methods of evolutionary algorithms and metaheuristics, with an emphasis on fitness landscape analysis, autonomous search, and cross-discipline applications in healthcare and the environment. She holds a PhD from the University of Sussex, UK, and has worked at the University Simon Bolivar, Venezuela, and the University of Nottingham, UK, before joining Stirling. Her Google Scholar h-index is 44 and her publications have gathered over 9,000 citations. Her work has been recognised with 7 best-paper awards and 10 other nominations in leading evolutionary computation conferences. Many of these articles are related to Local Optima Networks (LONs) and Search Trajectory Networks (STNs), models she has developed. She has been active in organisation and editorial roles in venues such as the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN), the Evolutionary Computation Journal (ECJ) and the ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimisation (TELO). She is a member of the executive boards of both the ACM interest group in evolutionary computation (SIGEVO) and the SPECIES society. She edits the SIGEVOlution newsletter. In 2020, she was recognised by the leading European event on bio-inspired algorithms, EvoStar, for her outstanding contributions to the field.
Organizers
- Aldeida Aleti (aldeida.aleti@monash.edu), Monash University, Australia
- Bing Xue (bing.xue@vuw.ac.nz), Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand