Workshops

Anna V Kononova

Anna V. Kononovais an Assistant Professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced ComputerScience. She received her MSc degree in Applied Mathematics from Yaroslavl State University (Russia) in 2004 and PhD degree in Computer Science from University of Leeds (UK) in 2010. After a total of 5 years of postdoctoral experiences at Technical University Eindhoven (The Netherlands) and Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh, UK), Anna has spent a number of years working as a mathematician in industry. Her current research interests include analysis of optimisation algorithms and machine learning.

Niki van Stein

Niki van Stein received her PhD degree in Computer Science in 2018, from the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University, The Netherlands. From 2018 until 2021 she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at LIACS, Leiden University and she is currently an Assistant Professor at LIACS. Her research interests lie in explainable AI for EC and ML, surrogate-assisted optimisation and surrogate-assisted neural architecture search, usually applied to complex industrial applications.

Daniela Zaharie

Daniela Zaharie is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science from the West University of Timisoara (Romania) with a PhD degree on a topic related to stochastic modelling of neural networks and a Habilitation thesis on the analysis of the behaviour of differential evolution algorithms. Her current research interests include analysis and applications of metaheuristic algorithms, interpretable machine learning models and data mining.

Fabio Caraffini

Fabio Caraffini is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK). Fabio holds a PhD in Computer Science (De Montfort University, UK, 2014) and a PhD in Mathematical Information Technology (University of Jyväkylä, Finland, 2016) and was awarded a BSc in ``Electronics Engineering and an MSc in ``Telecommunications Engineering by the University of Perugia (Italy) in 2008 and 2011 respectively. His research interests include theoretical and applied computational intelligence with a strong emphasis on metaheuristics for optimisation.

Thomas Bäck

Thomas Bäck is Full Professor of Computer Science at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University, The Netherlands, where he is head of the Natural Computing group since 2002. He received his PhD (adviser: Hans-Paul Schwefel) in computer science from Dortmund University, Germany, in 1994, and then worked for the Informatik Centrum Dortmund (ICD) as department leader of the Center for Applied Systems Analysis. From 2000 - 2009, Thomas was Managing Director of NuTech Solutions GmbH and CTO of NuTech Solutions, Inc. He gained ample experience in solving real-life problems in optimization and data mining through working with global enterprises such as BMW, Beiersdorf, Daimler, Ford, Honda, and many others. Thomas Bäck has more than 350 publications on natural computing, as well as two books on evolutionary algorithms: Evolutionary Algorithms in Theory and Practice (1996), Contemporary Evolution Strategies (2013). He is co-editor of the Handbook of Evolutionary Computation, and most recently, the Handbook of Natural Computing. He is also editorial board member and associate editor of a number of journals on evolutionary and natural computing. Thomas received the best dissertation award from the German Society of Computer Science (Gesellschaft für Informatik, GI) in 1995 and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award in 2015.

Boris Naujoks

Boris Naujoks is a professor for Applied Mathematics at TH Köln - Cologne University of Applied Sciences (CUAS). He joint CUAs directly after he received his PhD from Dortmund Technical University in 2011. During his time in Dortmund, Boris worked as a research assistant in different projects and gained industrial experience working for different SMEs. Meanwhile, he enjoys the combination of teaching mathematics as well as computer science and exploring EC and CI techniques at the Campus Gummersbach of CUAS. He focuses on multiobjective (evolutionary) optimization, in particular hypervolume based algorithms, and the (industrial) applicability of the explored methods.

Carola Doerr

Carola Doerr, formerly Winzen, is a CNRS research director at Sorbonne Université in Paris, France. Carola's main research activities are in the analysis of black-box optimization algorithms, both by mathematical and by empirical means. Carola is associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization (TELO) and board member of the Evolutionary Computation journal. She is/was program chair for the BBSR track at GECCO 2024, the GECH track at GECCO 2023, for PPSN 2020, FOGA 2019 and for the theory tracks of GECCO 2015 and 2017. She has organized Dagstuhl seminars and Lorentz Center workshops. Together with Pascal Kerschke, Carola leads the 'Algorithm selection and configuration' working group of COST action CA22137. Carola's works have received several awards, among them the CNRS bronze medal, the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society, best paper awards at GECCO, CEC, and EvoApplications.

Pascal Kerschke

Pascal Kerschke is professor of Big Data Analytics in Transportation at TU Dresden, Germany. His research interests cover various topics in the context of benchmarking, data science, machine learning, and optimization - including automated algorithm selection, Exploratory Landscape Analysis, as well as continuous single- and multi-objective optimization. Moreover, he is the main developer of flacco, co-authored further R-packages such as smoof and moPLOT, co-organized numerous tutorials and workshops in the context of Exploratory Landscape Analysis and/or benchmarking, and is an active member of the Benchmarking Network and the COSEAL group.

Mike Preuss

Mike Preuss is assistant professor at LIACS, the Computer Science department of Leiden University. He works in AI, namely game AI, natural computing, and social media computing. Mike received his PhD in 2013 from the Chair of Algorithm Engineering at TU Dortmund, Germany, and was with ERCIS at the WWU Muenster, Germany, from 2013 to 2018. His research interests focus on the field of evolutionary algorithms for real-valued problems, namely on multi-modal and multi-objective optimization, and on computational intelligence and machine learning methods for computer games. Recently, he is also involved in Social Media Computing, and he is publications chair of the upcoming multi-disciplinary MISDOOM conference 2019. He is associate editor of the IEEE ToG journal and has been member of the organizational team of several conferences in the last years, in various functions, as general co-chair, proceedings chair, competition chair, workshops chair.

Vanessa Volz

Vanessa Volz is an AI researcher at modl.ai (Copenhagen, Denmark), with focus in computational intelligence in games. She received her PhD in 2019 from TU Dortmund University, Germany, for her work on surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms applied to game optimisation. She holds B.Sc. degrees in Information Systems and in Computer Science from WWU Münster, Germany. She received an M.Sc. with distinction in Advanced Computing: Machine Learning, Data Mining and High Performance Computing from University of Bristol, UK, in 2014. Her current research focus is on employing surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms to obtain balance and robustness in systems with interacting human and artificial agents, especially in the context of games.

Olaf Mersmann

Olaf Mersmann is a Professor for Data Science at TH Köln - University of Applied Sciences. He received his BSc, MSc and PhD in Statistics from TU Dortmund. His research interests include using statistical and machine learning methods on large benchmark databases to gain insight into the structure of the algorithm choice problem.

Tinkle Chugh

Dr Tinkle Chugh is a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Exeter. He is the Associate Editor of the Complex and Intelligent Systems journal. Between Feb 2018 and June 2020, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the BIG data methods for improving windstorm FOOTprint prediction project funded by Natural Environment Research Council UK. He obtained his PhD degree in Mathematical Information Technology in 2017 from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His thesis was a part of the Decision Support for Complex Multiobjective Optimization Problems project, where he collaborated with Finland Distinguished Professor (FiDiPro) Yaochu Jin from the University of Surrey, UK. His research interests are machine learning, data-driven optimization, evolutionary computation, and decision-making.

Richard Allmendinger

Richard Allmendinger is Professor of Applied AI at the Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS) and Associate Dean for Business Engagement of the Faculty of Humanities, The University of Manchester (UoM), and Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. Richard is also an Advisor for River Capital Ltd, and Senior Scientist at Eharo Ltd. His expertise is in the development and application of sequential decision-making methods to problems with multiple objectives, uncertainties and resourcing issues arising in areas such as healthcare, manufacturing, engineering, music, sports, and finance. Richard has attracted £39M+ in grant funding as PI/co- I from UKRI, industry, and other sources, is an Editor for several AI journals, and has served in numerous chair roles for different AI conferences. He is an External Examiner at Warwick Business School and a former UoM Director of the ESRC- funded CDT in Data Analytics & Society.

Hadi Akbarzadeh Khorshidi

Hadi A. Khorshidi is a Senior Research Fellow in Cancer Health Service Research and an Adjunct Senior Fellow in School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne. He has extensive research experiences in medical data mining, optimisation, machine learning, and uncertainty. He completed his PhD in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Monash University in 2016. He is an Associate Investigator at ARC training centre in Optimisation Technologies, Integrated Methodologies, and Applications (OPTiMA). He has published more than 55 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers (Google citations 980+, H-index 18). He is a chief investigator in a joint research project awarded by Manchester-Melbourne Research Fund, and recipient of funding for Frailty Dynamic Simulation Modelling from NSW Agency for Clinical Innovation. He is an associate editor in International Journal of System Assurance Engineering and Management. He has been a member of editorial boards in International Journal of Quality and Reliability Management and The TQM Journal. He has served as a guest editor for IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE TEVC) and Information Systems and Operations Research (INFOR).

Daniel Tauritz

Daniel R. Tauritz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Auburn University (AU), the Director for National Laboratory Relationships in AU's Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, the founding Head of AU’s Biomimetic Artificial Intelligence Research Group (BioAI Group), the founding director of AU’s Biomimetic National Security Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (BONSAI Lab), a cyber consultant for Sandia National Laboratories, a Guest Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and founding academic director of the LANL/AU Cyber Security Sciences Institute (CSSI). He received his Ph.D. in 2002 from Leiden University. His research interests include the design of generative hyper-heuristics, competitive coevolution, and parameter control, and the application of computational intelligence techniques in security and defense. He was granted a US patent for an artificially intelligent rule-based system to assist teams in becoming more effective by improving the communication process between team members.

John R. Woodward

John Woodward is a Reader and Head of Computer Science at Loughborough University. He has organized workshops at GECCO including Metaheuristic Design Patterns and ECADA, Evolutionary Computation for the Automated Design of Algorithms which has run for 8 years. He has also given tutorials on the same topic at PPSN, CEC, and GECCO. He currently holds a grant examining how Genetic Improvement techniques can be used to adapt scheduling software for airport runways. With his PhD Student, Saemundur Haraldsson (who this proposal is in collaboration with), won a best paper award in a GI workshop at GECCO. He has also organized a GI workshop at UCL as part of their very successful Crest Open Workshops.

Emma Hart

Prof. Hart gained a 1st Class Honours Degree in Chemistry from the University of Oxford, 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 work mainly involves development of algorithms inspired by biological evolution to discover novel solutions to challenging problems. She was appointed as Editor-in-Chief of Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press) in 2017. She has been invited to give keynotes at major international conferences including CLAIO 2020, IEEE CEC 2019, EURO 2016 and UKCI 2015 and was General Chair of PPSN 2016, and as a Track Chair at GECCO for several years. She is an elected member of the Executive Board of the ACM SIG on Evolutionary Computation. More broadly, she invited member of the UK Operations Research Society Research Panel, and in Scotland, co-leads the Artificial Intelligence theme within SICSA. She was appointed as a panel member for REF2021 (UoA11 Computer Science). In 2020 she was appointed to the Steering Committee that developed Scotland's AI Strategy published in 2021 . She has a sustained track record of obtaining funding from the EU, EPSRC and of engaging with industry via KTP projects and consultancy, and 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

John McCall

John McCall is Head of Research for the National Subsea Centre at Robert Gordon University. He has researched in machine learning, search and optimisation for 25 years, making novel contributions to a range of nature-inspired optimisation algorithms and predictive machine learning methods, including EDA, PSO, ACO and GA. He has 150+ peer-reviewed publications in books, international journals and conferences. These have received over 2400 citations with an h-index of 22. John and his research team specialise in industrially-applied optimization and decision support, working with major international companies including BT, BP, EDF, CNOOC and Equinor as well as a diverse range of SMEs. Major application areas for this research are: vehicle logistics, fleet planning and transport systems modelling; predictive modelling and maintenance in energy systems; and decision support in industrial operations management. John and his team attract direct industrial funding as well as grants from UK and European research funding councils and technology centres. John is a founding director and CEO of Celerum, which specialises in freight logistics. He is also a founding director and CTO of PlanSea Solutions, which focuses on marine logistics planning. John has served as a member of the IEEE Evolutionary Computing Technical Committee, an Associate Editor of IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine and the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Journal, and he is currently an Editorial Board member for the journal Complex And Intelligent Systems. He frequently organises workshops and special sessions at leading international conferences, including several GECCO workshops in recent years.

Jaume Bacardit

Jaume Bacardit is Reader in Machine Learning at Newcastle University in the UK. He has receiveda BEng, MEng in Computer Engineering and a PhD in Computer Science from Ramon Llull University, Spain in 1998, 2000 and 2004, respectively. Bacardit’s research interests include the development of machine learning methods for large-scale problems, the design of techniques to extract knowledge and improve the interpretability of machine learning algorithms, known currently as Explainable AI, and the application of these methods to a broad range of problems, mostly in biomedical domains. He leads/has led the data analytics efforts of several large interdisciplinary consortiums: D-BOARD (EU FP7, €6M, focusing on biomarker identification), APPROACH (EI-IMI €15M, focusing on disease phenotype identification) and PORTABOLOMICS (UK EPSRC £4.3M focusing on synthetic biology). Within GECCO he has organised several workshops (IWLCS 2007-2010, ECBDL’14), been co-chair of the EML track in 2009, 2013, 2014, 2020 and 2021, and Workshops co-chair in 2010 and 2011. He has 90+ peer-reviewed publications that have attracted 4600+ citations and a H-index of 31 (Google Scholar).

Alexander Brownlee

Alexander (Sandy) Brownlee is a Lecturer in the Division of Computing Science and Mathematics at the University of Stirling. His main topics of interest are in search-based optimisation methods and machine learning, with a focus on decision support tools, and applications in civil engineering, transportation and software engineering. He has published over 70 peer-reviewed papers on these topics. He has worked with several leading businesses including BT, KLM, and IES on industrial applications of optimisation and machine learning. He serves as a reviewer for several journals and conferences in evolutionary computation, civil engineering and transportation, and is currently an Editorial Board member for the journal Complex And Intelligent Systems. He has been an organiser of several workshops and tutorials at GECCO, CEC and PPSN on genetic improvement of software.

Stefano Cagnoni

Stefano Cagnoni graduated in Electronic Engineering at the University of Florence, Italy, where he also obtained a PhD in Biomedical Engineering and was a postdoc until 1997. In 1994 he was a visiting scientist at the Whitaker College Biomedical Imaging and Computation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1997 he has been with the University of Parma, where he has been Associate Professor since 2004. Recent research grants include: a grant from Regione Emilia-Romagna to support research on industrial applications of Big Data Analysis, the co-management of industry/academy cooperation projects: the development, with Protec srl, of a computer vision-based fruit sorter of new generation and, with the Italian Railway Network Society (RFI) and Camlin Italy, of an automatic inspection system for train pantographs; a EU-funded “Marie Curie Initial Training Network" grant for a four-year research training project in Medical Imaging using Bio-Inspired and Soft Computing. He has been Editor-in-chief of the "Journal of Artificial Evolution and Applications" from 2007 to 2010. From 1999 to 2018, he was chair of EvoIASP, an event dedicated to evolutionary computation for image analysis and signal processing, then a track of the EvoApplications conference. From 2005 to 2020, he has co-chaired MedGEC, a workshop on medical applications of evolutionary computation at GECCO. Co-editor of journal special issues dedicated to Evolutionary Computation for Image Analysis and Signal Processing. Member of the Editorial Board of the journals “Evolutionary Computation” and “Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines”. He has been awarded the "Evostar 2009 Award" in recognition of the most outstanding contribution to Evolutionary Computation.

Giovanni Iacca

Giovanni Iacca is an Associate Professor in Information Engineering at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Trento, Italy, where he founded the Distributed Intelligence and Optimization Lab (DIOL). Previously, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Germany (RWTH Aachen, 2017-2018), Switzerland (University of Lausanne and EPFL, 2013-2016), and The Netherlands (INCAS3, 2012-2016), as well as in industry in the areas of software engineering and industrial automation. He is co-PI of the PATHFINDER-CHALLENGE project "SUSTAIN" (2022-2026). Previously, he was co-PI of the FET-Open project "PHOENIX" (2015-2019). He has received two best paper awards (EvoApps 2017 and UKCI 2012). His research focuses on computational intelligence, distributed systems, and explainable AI applied e.g. to medicine. In these fields, he co-authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications. He is actively involved in organizing tracks and workshops at some of the top conferences on computational intelligence, and he regularly serves as a reviewer for several journals and conference committees. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Applied Soft Computing, and Frontiers in Robotics and AI.

David Walker

David Walker is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Exeter. He obtained a PhD in Computer Science in 2013 for work on visualising solution sets in many-objective optimisation. His research focuses on developing new approaches to solving hard optimisation problems with Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), as well as identifying ways in which the use of Evolutionary Computation can be expanded within industry, and he has published journal papers in all of these areas. His recent work considers the visualisation of algorithm operation, providing a mechanism for visualising algorithm performance to simplify the selection of EA parameters. While working as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Exeter his work involved the development of hyper-heuristics and, more recently, investigating the use of interactive EAs in the water industry. Since joining Plymouth Dr Walker’s research group includes a number of PhD students working on optimisation and machine learning projects. He is active in the EC field, having run an annual workshop on visualisation within EC at GECCO since 2012 in addition to his work as a reviewer for journals such as IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Applied Soft Computing, and the Journal of Hydroinformatics. He is a member of the IEEE Taskforce on Many-objective Optimisation.

Yue Xie

Yue Xie is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Future Roads Fellow in the University of Cambridge. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Adelaide in 2021, where her research focused on evolutionary computation through both theoretical analysis and real-world applications. Prior to joining University of Cambridge, she held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Optimization and Logistics group at the University of Adelaide, and a CERC Post-doctoral Fellow in the CSIRO Data61. Yue’s research interested are the embodied artificial intelligence and bio-inspired optimization and she has applied knowledge to tackle real-world problems, such as smart traffic and soft robotics.

David Howard

David leads the Robotic Design and Interaction Group and is a Principal Research Scientist in the Cyber Physical Systems program at CSIRO, Australia's national science body. He leads multiple projects at the intersection of soft robotics, evolutionary machine learning, and the computational design of novel physical objects. He currently leads the AI4Design portfolio. His interests include nature-inspired algorithms, learning, autonomy, soft robotics, the reality gap, and evolution of form. His work has been featured in local and national media.
He received his BSc in Computing from the University of Leeds in 2005, and the MSc in Cognitive Systems at the same institution in 2006. In 2011 he received his PhD from the University of the West of England. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM, and an avid proponent of education, STEM, and outreach activities. His work has been published in IEEE and Nature journals.

Fumiya Iida

Fumiya Iida is a Professor of Robotics at Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. He received his bachelor and master degrees in mechanical engineering at Tokyo University of Science in Japan, and Dr. sc. nat. in Informatics at University of Zurich in Switzerland. During his PhD project, he was also engaged in biomechanics research of human locomotion at Locomotion Laboratory, University of Jena in Germany. While he worked as a postdoctoral associate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in USA, he awarded the Fellowship for Prospective Researchers from the Swiss National Science Foundation, and then, the Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship hosted by ETH Zurich. In 2014 he moved to the University of Cambridge as the director of Bio-Inspired Robotics Laboratory.

Josie Hughes

Josie Hughes is an Assistant Professor at EPFL where she established the CREATE Lab in the Institute of Mechanical Engineering in 2021. She undertook her undergraduate, masters and PhD studies at the University of Cambridge as part of the Sensor CDT, joining the Bio-inspired Robotics Lab (BIRL). Her PhD focused on examining the role of passivity in bio-inspired manipulators, and methodologies for exploiting morphology for soft large area soft sensing. Following this, she worked as a postdoctoral associate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in USA in the Distributed Robotics Lab. Her research focuses on developing novel design paradigms for designing robot structures that exploit their physicality and interactions with the environment. This includes the development of robotic hands, soft manipulators and automation systems for applications focused on sustainability and science. Her group explore applications for agri-food, human collaboration, robot scientists and also environmental monitoring. Her work has been published in journals including Science Robotics and Nature Machine Intelligence, and she has won numerous International Robotics Competitions Awards.

Jamal Toutouh

Jamal Toutouh is a Researcher Assistant Professor at the University of Málaga (Spain). Previously, he was a Marie Skłodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA, at the MIT CSAIL Lab. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering at the University of Malaga (Spain), which was awarded the 2018 Best Spanish Ph.D. Thesis in Smart Cities. His dissertation focused on the application of Machine Learning methods inspired by Nature to address Smart Mobility problems. His current research explores the combination of Nature-inspired gradient-free and gradient-based methods to address Generative Modelling and Adversarial Machine Learning. The main idea is to devise new algorithms to improve the efficiency and efficacy of the state-of-the-art methodology by mainly applying evolutionary computation and related techniques, such as particle swarm optimization in the form of Evolutionary Machine Learning approaches. Besides, he is on the application of Machine Learning to address problems related to Smart Mobility, Smart Cities, and Climate Change.

Una-May O’Reilly

Dr. Una-May O'Reilly is the leader of ALFA Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. An evolutionary computation researcher for 20+ years, she is broadly interested in adversarial intelligence — the intelligence that emerges and is recruited while learning and adapting in competitive settings. Her interest has led her to study settings where security is under threat, for which she has developed machine learning algorithms that variously model the arms races of tax compliance and auditing, malware and its detection, cyber network attacks and defenses, and adversarial paradigms in deep learning. She is passionately interested in programming and genetic programming. She is a recipient of the EvoStar Award for Outstanding Achievements in Evolutionary Computation in Europe and the ACM SIGEVO Award Recognizing Outstanding Achievements in Evolutionary Computation. Devoted to the field and committed to its growth, she served on the ACM SIGEVO executive board from SIGEVO's inception and held different officer positions before retiring from it in 2023. She co-founded the annual workshops for Women@GECCO and has proudly watched their evolution to Women+@GECCO. She was on the founding editorial boards and continues to serve on the editorial boards of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, and ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization. She has received a GECCO best paper award and an GECCO test of time award. She is honored to be a member of SPECIES, a member of the Julian Miller Award committee, and to chair the 2023 and 2024 committees selecting SIGEVO Awards Recognizing Outstanding Achievements in Evolutionary Computation.

João Correia

João Correia is an Assistant Professor at the University of Coimbra, a researcher of the Computational Design and Visualization Lab. and a member of the Evolutionary and Complex Systems (ECOS) of the Centre for Informatics and Systems of the same university. He holds a PhD in Information Science and Technology from the University of Coimbra and an MSc and BS in Informatics Engineering from the same university. His main research interests include Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning, Adversarial Learning, Computer Vision and Computational Creativity. He is involved in different international program committees of international conferences in the areas of Evolutionary Computation, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Art and Computational Creativity, and he is a reviewer for various conferences and journals for the mentioned areas, namely GECCO and EvoStar, served as remote reviewer for the European Research Council Grants and is an executive board member of SPECIES. He was also the publicity chair and chair of the International Conference of Evolutionary Art Music and Design conference, currently the publicity chair for EvoStar - The Leading European Event on Bio-Inspired Computation and chair of EvoApplications, the International Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation. Furthermore, he has authored and co-authored several articles at the different International Conferences and journals on Artificial Intelligence and Evolutionary Computation. He is involved in national and international projects concerning Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning, Generative Models, Computational Creativity and Data Science.

Penousal Machado

Penousal Machado leads the Cognitive and Media Systems group at the University of Coimbra. His research interests include Evolutionary Computation, Computational Creativity, and Evolutionary Machine Learning. In addition to the numerous scientific papers in these areas, his works have been presented in venues such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Portugal) and the “Talk to me” exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art, NY (MoMA).

Erik Hemberg

Erik Hemberg is a Research Scientist in the AnyScale Learning For All (ALFA) group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, USA. He has a PhD in Computer Science from University College Dublin, Ireland and an MSc in Industrial Engineering and Applied Mathematics from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. His research interests involves coevolutionary algorithms, grammatical representations and generative models. His work focuses on developing autonomous, pro-active cyber defenses that are anticipatory and adapt to counter attacks. He is also interested in automated semantic parsing of law, and data science for education and healthcare.

Stefan Wagner

Stefan Wagner received his MSc in computer science in 2004 and his PhD in technical sciences in 2009, both from Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. From 2005 to 2009 he worked as associate professor for software project engineering and since 2009 as full professor for complex software systems at the Campus Hagenberg of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. From 2011 to 2018 he was also CEO of the FH OÖ IT GmbH, which is the IT service provider of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. Dr. Wagner is one of the founders of the research group Heuristic and Evolutionary Algorithms Laboratory (HEAL) and is project manager and head architect of the open-source optimization environment HeuristicLab. He works as project manager and key researcher in several R&D projects on production and logistics optimization and his research interests are in the area of combinatorial optimization, evolutionary algorithms, computational intelligence, and parallel and distributed computing.

Michael Affenzeller

Michael Affenzeller has published several papers, journal articles and books dealing with theoretical and practical aspects of evolutionary computation, genetic algorithms, and meta-heuristics in general. In 2001 he received his PhD in engineering sciences and in 2004 he received his habilitation in applied systems engineering, both from the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. Michael Affenzeller is professor at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Campus Hagenberg, head of the research group Heuristic and Evolutionary Algorithms Laboratory (HEAL), head of the Master degree program Software Engineering, vice-dean for research and development, and scientific director of the Softwarepark Hagenberg.

Dennis G. Wilson

Dennis G. Wilson is an Assistant Professor of AI and Data Science at ISAE-SUPAERO in Toulouse, France. He obtained his PhD at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT) on the evolution of design principles for artificial neural networks. Prior to that, he worked in the Anyscale Learning For All group in CSAIL, MIT, applying evolutionary strategies and developmental models to the problem of wind farm layout optimization. His current research focuses on genetic programming, neural networks, and the evolution of learning.

Roman Kalkreuth

Roman Kalkreuth is a postdoctoral researcher at the CNRS Computer Lab of Paris 6 (LIP6) which belongs to Sorbonne University in Paris, France. His research primarily focuses on the analysis, development and benchmarking of graph-based genetic programming representation models and related algorithms.

Eric Medvet

Eric Medvet is an Associate Professor at the University of Trieste, Italy. His research interests include embodied AI, artificial life, and evolutionary optimization.

Giorgia Nadizar

Giorgia Nadizar is a third year PhD student at the University of Trieste, Italy. Her research interests lie at the intersection of embodied AI and explainable/interpretable AI.

Giovanni Squillero

Giovanni Squillero is an associate professor of computer science at Politecnico di Torino, Department of Control and Computer Engineering. His research mixes computational intelligence and machine learning, with particular emphasis on evolutionary computation, bio-inspired meta-heuristics, and multi-agent systems; in more down-to-earth activities, he studies approximate optimization techniques able to achieve acceptable solutions with reasonable resources. The industrial applications of his work range from electronic CAD to bio-informatics. Up to April 2022, he is credited as an author in 3 books, 36 journal articles, 11 book chapters, and 154 papers in conference proceedings; he is also listed among the editors in 16 volumes.

Squillero has been a Senior Member of the IEEE since 2014; currently, he is serving in the technical committee of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Games, and in the editorial board of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines. He was the program chair of the European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation in 2016 and 2017, and he is now a member of the EvoApplications steering committee. In 2018 he co-organized EvoML, the workshop on Evolutionary Machine Learning at PPSN; in 2016 and 2017, MPDEA, the workshop on Measuring and Promoting Diversity in Evolutionary Algorithms at GECCO; and from 2004 to 2014, EvoHOT, the Workshops on Evolutionary Hardware Optimization Techniques.

Since 1998, Squillero lectured 66 university courses (15 Ph.D. and 51 M.S./B.Sc.; 36 in Italian and 30 in English); he contributed to additional 37 courses as an assistant or in other subsidiary roles. He was given the opportunity to present his research in 14 international events among invited talks, seminars and tutorials.

Alberto Tonda

Alberto Tonda received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science Engineering from Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 2011. Currently, he is a Permanent Researcher (CRCN) at the National Institute of Research for Agriculture and Environment (INRAE), and Université Paris-Saclay, Paris, France. His research interests include semi-supervised modeling of complex systems, evolutionary optimization and machine learning, with main applications in food science and biology. He led COST Action CA15118 FoodMC, a 4-year European networking project on in-silico modelling in food science. He published over 30 contributions in peer-reviewed journals, and over 60 conference papers. He was part of the program committee of 10 conferences of the domain, and he is currently an editorial board member of the journal Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines.

Yuri Lavinas

I’m a PhD candidate, in the final year, at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. My research interests are related to Computational Intelligence, such as Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life, especially Evolutionary Algorithms (EC), with a recent focus on multi-objective optimization. I’m engaged in cooperating in projects for using EC as a tool to solve problems in any field.

EC are heuristics based on ideas from biological evolution. The goal of EC is to learn solutions to challenging computational problems using ideas taken from the evolutionary process. EC can solve a few examples of problems: parameter optimization, product design, expert systems design, linear and non-linear regression, and automated control.

Specialities: Genetic Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Evolutionary Computation, and Artificial Life.

Silvino Fernández Alzueta

He is an R&D Engineer at the Global R&D Division of ArcelorMittal for more than 15 years. He develops his activity in the ArcelorMittal R&D Centre of Asturias (Spain), in the framework of the Business and TechnoEconomic Department. His has a Master Science degree in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Engineering Project Management, both obtained at University of Oviedo in Spain. His main research interests are in analytics, metaheuristics and swarm intelligence, and he has broad experience in using these techniques in industrial environment to optimize production processes. His paper "Scheduling a Galvanizing Line by Ant Colony Optimization" obtained the best paper award in the ANTS conference in 2014.

Pablo Valledor Pellicer

He is a research engineer of the Global R&D Asturias Centre at ArcelorMittal (world's leading integrated steel and mining company), working at the Business & Technoeconomic department. He obtained his MS degree in Computer Science in 2006 and his PhD on Business Management in 2015, both from the University of Oviedo. He worked for the R&D department of CTIC Foundation (Centre for the Development of Information and Communication Technologies in Asturias) until February 2007, when he joined ArcelorMittal. His main research interests are metaheuristics, multi-objective optimization, analytics and operations research.

Thomas Stützle

Thomas Stützle is a research director of the Belgian F.R.S.-FNRS working at the IRIDIA laboratory of Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. He received his PhD and his habilitation in computer science both from the Computer Science Department of Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, in 1998 and 2004, respectively. He is the co-author of two books about ``Stochastic Local Search: Foundations and Applications and ``Ant Colony Optimization and he has extensively published in the wider area of metaheuristics including 22 edited proceedings or books, 11 journal special issues, and more than 250 journal, conference articles and book chapters, many of which are highly cited. He is associate editor of Computational Intelligence, Evolutionary Computation and Applied Mathematics and Computation and on the editorial board of seven other journals. His main research interests are in metaheuristics, swarm intelligence, methodologies for engineering stochastic local search algorithms, multi-objective optimization, and automatic algorithm configuration. In fact, since more than a decade he is interested in automatic algorithm configuration and design methodologies and he has contributed to some effective algorithm configuration techniques such as F-race, Iterated F-race and ParamILS.

Matthew Johns

Dr Matt Johns is a Research Software Engineer at the University of Exeter. He obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Exeter developing methods for incorporating domain expertise into evolutionary algorithms. His research is focused on developing new approaches to the design and management of complex engineering systems by combining visual analytics, heuristic optimisation, and machine learning. His research interests include evolutionary optimisation, engineering systems optimisation, human-computer interaction, and interactive visualisation.

Ed Keedwell

Ed Keedwell is Professor of Artificial Intelligence, and a Fellow of the Alan Turing Insitute. He joined the Computer Science discipline in 2006 and was appointed as a lecturer in 2009. He has research interests in optimisation (e.g. genetic algorithms, swarm intelligence, hyper-heuristics) machine learning and AI-based simulation and their application to a variety of difficult problems in bioinformatics and engineering yielding over 160 journal and conference publications. He leads a research group focusing on applied artificial intelligence and has been involved with successful funding applications totalling over £3.5 million from the EPSRC, Innovate UK, EU and industry. Particular areas of current interest are the optimisation of transportation systems, the development of sequence-based hyper-heuristics and human-in-the-loop optimisation methods for applications in engineering.

Nick Ross

Nick Ross is a Computer Science PhD Student in the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences at the University of Exeter. He is researching the gamification of optimisation and how it might apply to water distribution systems. His research interests include nature-inspired computing, capturing user heuristics, serious games and gamification, and artificial intelligence.

David Walker

David Walker is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Exeter. He obtained a PhD in Computer Science in 2013 for work on visualising solution sets in many-objective optimisation. His research focuses on developing new approaches to solving hard optimisation problems with Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), as well as identifying ways in which the use of Evolutionary Computation can be expanded within industry, and he has published journal papers in all of these areas. His recent work considers the visualisation of algorithm operation, providing a mechanism for visualising algorithm performance to simplify the selection of EA parameters. While working as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Exeter his work involved the development of hyper-heuristics and, more recently, investigating the use of interactive EAs in the water industry. Since joining Plymouth Dr Walker’s research group includes a number of PhD students working on optimisation and machine learning projects. He is active in the EC field, having run an annual workshop on visualisation within EC at GECCO since 2012 in addition to his work as a reviewer for journals such as IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Applied Soft Computing, and the Journal of Hydroinformatics. He is a member of the IEEE Taskforce on Many-objective Optimisation.

Abubakar Siddique

Dr. Siddique's main research lies in creating novel machine learning systems, inspired by the principles of cognitive neuroscience, to provide efficient and scalable solutions for challenging and complex problems in different domains, such as Boolean, computer vision, navigation, and Bioinformatics. He has shared his expertise by delivering five tutorials and talks at various forums, including the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO). Additionally, he serves the academic community as an author for prestigious journals and international conferences, including IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, and GECCO.

During his academic journey, Dr. Siddique received the "Student Of The Session" Award, the VUWSA Gold Award, and the "Emerging Research Excellence" Medal. Prior to joining academia, he spent nine years at Elixir Technologies Pakistan, a California (USA) based leading software company. His last designation was a Principal Software Engineer where he led a team of software developers. He developed enterprise-level software for customers such as Xerox, IBM, and Adobe.

Michael Heider

Michael Heider is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Augsburg, Germany. He received his B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Augsburg in 2016 and his M.Sc. in Computer Science and Information-oriented Business Management in 2018. His main research is directed towards Learning Classifier Systems, especially following the Pittsburgh style, with a focus on regression tasks encountered in industrial settings. Those have a high regard for both accurate as well as comprehensive solutions. To achieve comprehensibility/explainability he focuses on compact and simple rule sets. Besides that, his research interests include optimization techniques and unsupervised learning (e.g. for data augmentation or feature extraction). He is an elected organizing committee member of the International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems since 2021.

Muhammad Iqbal

Dr Iqbal has more than 20 years of teaching and research experience in computer science. His main research interests are in the area of computational intelligence. His research focuses on pattern recognition and document recognition problem domains using computational intelligence and transfer learning techniques. Currently, Dr Iqbal is serving as an Assistant Professor at Higher Colleges of Technology in the United Arab Emirates. Previously, he was leading the research and development team at 'Xtracta Limited, New Zealand' to develop artificial intelligent powered information extraction systems capable of extracting data from scanned, photographed, or digital documents with a focus on the financial domain. He has been serving as a peer reviewer for international journals and conferences. To date, he has authored more than 40 international publications, including top journal publications in IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Evolutionary Computation, and Pattern Recognition, and two best paper awards at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference in 2013 and 2014 in the Evolutionary Machine Learning track.

Hiroki Shiraishi

Hiroki Shiraishi was born in Chiba, Japan, in 1999. He received a B.E. degree in informatics and an M.E. degree in informatics from the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan, in 2021 and 2023, respectively. Since 2023, he has been a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Yokohama National University, Yokohama, Japan. From 2023 to 2024, he was a visiting student at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China. His research interests include fuzzy systems and evolutionary machine learning, with a specific focus on Learning Classifier Systems (LCSs) and Learning Fuzzy Classifier Systems (LFCSs). He received a Best Paper Award at GECCO in 2022 for his work on LCSs and a nomination for the Best Paper Award at GECCO in 2023 for his work on LFCSs. He has been a co-track chair for the International Workshop on Evolutionary Rule-Based Machine Learning (IWERL) at GECCO since 2024.

Emma Hart

Prof. Hart gained a 1st Class Honours Degree in Chemistry from the University of Oxford, 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 work mainly involves development of algorithms inspired by biological evolution to discover novel solutions to challenging problems. She was appointed as Editor-in-Chief of Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press) in 2017. She has been invited to give keynotes at major international conferences including CLAIO 2020, IEEE CEC 2019, EURO 2016 and UKCI 2015 and was General Chair of PPSN 2016, and as a Track Chair at GECCO for several years. She is an elected member of the Executive Board of the ACM SIG on Evolutionary Computation. More broadly, she invited member of the UK Operations Research Society Research Panel, and in Scotland, co-leads the Artificial Intelligence theme within SICSA. She was appointed as a panel member for REF2021 (UoA11 Computer Science). In 2020 she was appointed to the Steering Committee that developed Scotland's AI Strategy published in 2021 . She has a sustained track record of obtaining funding from the EU, EPSRC and of engaging with industry via KTP projects and consultancy, and 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

Quentin Renau

Quentin Renau is a Research Fellow at Edinburgh Napier University. He obtained his Engineering diploma in applied mathematics from Institut National des Sciences Appliquées in Rouen (2017) and his PhD in computer science from the French École Polytechnique in collaboration with Sorbonne Université and Thales Research and Technology (2022). He was appointed Outstanding Student in the Evostar 2021 conference. His research interests are in optimisation, search heuristics, algorithm selection and configuration and lifelong learning systems.

Christopher Stone

Christopher Stone is a Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science where he works in instance generation methods in the CSP/SAT domains. His PhD (supervised by Prof. Hart at ENU) developed new methods to automatically generate heuristics and problem instances for combinatorial optimisation problems over multiple domains, using graph based representation and graph rewriting systems that made use of both synthesised data and real world data.

Ian Miguel

Ian Miguel is a Professor and Head of School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, where he also held a five-year Royal Academy of Engineering/EPSRC Research Fellowship. Ian's research focuses on Constraint Programming, and in particular the automation of constraint modelling: the task of deriving an encoding of a problem of interest so as to lead to best solver performance. This work is situated in the Essence language for specifying combinatorial optimisation problems and the Conjure and Savile Row automated constraint modelling systems. Ian has attracted research funding of over £4M

Sarah L. Thomson

Sarah L. Thomson is a lecturer at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Her PhD was in fitness landscape analysis, with a strong focus on algorithm performance prediction. She has published extensively in this field and her work has received recognitions of its quality (shortlisted nominee for best SICSA PhD thesis in Scotland; best paper nomination at EvoCOP; being named an outstanding student of EvoSTAR on two occasions). Her research interests include fractal analysis of landscapes, explainable artificial intelligence, and real-world evolutionary computation applications.

Nadarajen Veerapen

Nadarajen Veerapen is an Associate Professor (maître de conférences) at the University of Lille, France. Previously he was a research fellow at the University of Stirling in Scotland. He holds a PhD in Computing Science from the University of Angers, France, where he worked on adaptive operator selection. His research interests include local search, hybrid methods, search-based software engineering and visualisation. He is the Electronic Media Chair for GECCO 2021 and has served as Electronic Media Chair for GECCO 2020, Publicity Chair for GECCO 2019 and as Student Affairs Chair for GECCO 2017 and 2018. He has previously co-organised the workshop on Landscape-Aware Heuristic Search at PPSN 2016, GECCO 2017-2019.

Katherine Malan

Katherine Malan is an associate professor in the Department of Decision Sciences at the University of South Africa. She received her PhD in computer science from the University of Pretoria in 2014 and her MSc & BSc degrees from the University of Cape Town. She has over 25 years' lecturing experience, mostly in Computer Science, at three different South African universities. Her research interests include automated algorithm selection in optimisation and learning, fitness landscape analysis and the application of computational intelligence techniques to real-world problems. She is editor-in-chief of South African Computer Journal, associate editor for Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, and has served as a reviewer for over 20 Web of Science journals.

Arnaud Liefooghe

Arnaud Liefooghe is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of the Littoral Opal Coast (ULCO), France. He is the co-director of the MODŌ international lab between France and Japan. Previously, he was an associate professor at the University of Lille. In 2010, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Coimbra. In 2020, he was on a CNRS sabbatical leave at JFLI and an Invited Professor at the University of Tokyo. Since 2021, he has been appointed as a Collaborative Professor at Shinshu University, Japan. His research lies in the foundations, design and analysis of local search and evolutionary algorithms, with a particular interest in multi-objective optimization and landscape analysis. He has co-authored over a hundred peer-reviewed scientific papers in international journals and conferences. He was the recipient of a best paper award at EvoCOP 2011, GECCO 2015 and GECCO 2023. He was the co-Program Chair of EvoCOP (in 2018 and 2019) and held various responsibilities for GECCO (Proceedings Chair in 2018, co-EMO Track Chair in 2019, Virtualization Chair in 2021, and co-Hybrid Scheduling Chair in 2023). He is currently the Reproducibility Chair for the ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization (TELO) and the co-Track Chair of the new Benchmarking, Benchmarks, Software, and Reproducibility (BBSR) track for GECCO 2024.

Sébastien Verel

Sébastien Verel is a professor in Computer Science at the Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale, Calais, France, and previously at the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France, from 2006 to 2013. He received a PhD in computer science from the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France, in 2005. His PhD work was related to fitness landscape analysis in combinatorial optimization. He was an invited researcher in DOLPHIN Team at INRIA Lille Nord Europe, France from 2009 to 2011. His research interests are in the theory of evolutionary computation, multiobjective optimization, adaptive search, and complex systems. A large part of his research is related to fitness landscape analysis. He co-authored of a number of scientific papers in international journals, book chapters, book on complex systems, and international conferences. He is also involved in the co-organization EC summer schools, conference tracks, workshops, a special issue on EMO at EJOR, as well as special sessions in indifferent international conferences.

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 applications of evolutionary algorithms and metaheuristics, with emphasis on adaptive search, fitness landscape analysis and visualisation. 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. Her Google Scholar h-index is 40, and her work on network-based models of computational search spans several domains and has obtained 4 best-paper awards and 8 other nominations. She collaborates cross-disciplines to apply evolutionary computation in healthcare and conservation. 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 board for the ACM interest group in evolutionary computation, SIGEVO, and the editor of 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.

Erik Hemberg

Erik Hemberg is a Research Scientist in the AnyScale Learning For All (ALFA) group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, USA. He has a PhD in Computer Science from University College Dublin, Ireland and an MSc in Industrial Engineering and Applied Mathematics from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. His research interests involves coevolutionary algorithms, grammatical representations and generative models. His work focuses on developing autonomous, pro-active cyber defenses that are anticipatory and adapt to counter attacks. He is also interested in automated semantic parsing of law, and data science for education and healthcare.

Roman Senkerik

Roman Senkerik was born in Zlin, the Czech Republic, in 1981. He received an MSc degree in technical cybernetics from the Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Faculty of applied informatics in 2004, the Ph.D. degree also in technical Cybernetics, in 2008, from the same university, and Assoc. prof. Degree in Informatics from VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, in 2013.

From 2008 to 2013 he was a Research Assistant and Lecturer with the Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Faculty of applied informatics. Since 2014 he is an Associate Professor and since 2017 Head of the A.I.Lab https://ailab.fai.utb.cz/ with the Department of Informatics and Artificial Intelligence, Tomas Bata University in Zlin. He is the author of more than 40 journal papers, 250 conference papers, and several book chapters as well as editorial notes. His research interests are the development of evolutionary algorithms, their modifications and benchmarking, soft computing methods, and their interdisciplinary applications in optimization and cyber-security, machine learning, neuro-evolution, data science, the theory of chaos, and complex systems. He is a recognized reviewer for many leading journals in computer science/computational intelligence. He was a part of the organizing teams for special sessions/workshops/symposiums at GECCO, IEEE WCCI, CEC, or SSCI events.

Joel Lehman

Joel Lehman is a machine learning researcher interested in algorithmic creativity, evolutionary algorithms, artificial life, and AI for wellbeing. Most recently he was a research scientist at OpenAI co-leading the Open-Endedness team (studying algorithms that can innovate endlessly). Previously he was a founding member of Uber AI Labs, first employee of Geometric Intelligence (acquired by Uber), and a tenure track professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. He co-wrote with Kenneth Stanley a popular science book called "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned" on what AI search algorithms imply for individual and societal accomplishment.

Una-May O’Reilly

Dr. Una-May O'Reilly is the leader of ALFA Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. An evolutionary computation researcher for 20+ years, she is broadly interested in adversarial intelligence — the intelligence that emerges and is recruited while learning and adapting in competitive settings. Her interest has led her to study settings where security is under threat, for which she has developed machine learning algorithms that variously model the arms races of tax compliance and auditing, malware and its detection, cyber network attacks and defenses, and adversarial paradigms in deep learning. She is passionately interested in programming and genetic programming. She is a recipient of the EvoStar Award for Outstanding Achievements in Evolutionary Computation in Europe and the ACM SIGEVO Award Recognizing Outstanding Achievements in Evolutionary Computation. Devoted to the field and committed to its growth, she served on the ACM SIGEVO executive board from SIGEVO's inception and held different officer positions before retiring from it in 2023. She co-founded the annual workshops for Women@GECCO and has proudly watched their evolution to Women+@GECCO. She was on the founding editorial boards and continues to serve on the editorial boards of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, and ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization. She has received a GECCO best paper award and an GECCO test of time award. She is honored to be a member of SPECIES, a member of the Julian Miller Award committee, and to chair the 2023 and 2024 committees selecting SIGEVO Awards Recognizing Outstanding Achievements in Evolutionary Computation.

Pier Luca Lanzi

Pier Luca Lanzi received the Laurea degree in computer science from the Université degli Studi di Udine and the Ph.D. degree in Computer and Automation Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano. He is an associate professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Dept. of Electronics and Information. His research areas include genetic and evolutionary computation, reinforcement learning, and machine learning. He is interested in applications to data mining and autonomous agents. He is member of the editorial board of the "Evolutionary Computation Journal" and Editor in chief of SIGEVOlution, the ACM Newsletter of SIGEVO, the Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation.

Michal Pluhacek

Assoc. prof Michal Pluhacek received his Ph.D. degree in Information Technologies in 2016 with the dissertation topic: Modern method of development and modifications of evolutionary computational techniques. He became an assoc. prof. in 2023 after successfully defending his habilitation thesis on the topic „Inner Dynamics of Evolutionary Computation Techniques: Meaning for Practice.“ He currently works as a senior researcher at the Regional Research Centre CEBIA-Tech of Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Czech Republic. He is the author of many journal and conference papers on Particle Swarm Optimization and related topics. His research focus includes swarm intelligence theory and applications and artificial intelligence in general. In 2019, he finished six-months long research stay at New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA, focusing on swarm intelligence and swarm robotics. Recently, he is focusing his research on the interconnection of evolutionary computing and the large language models. More info: https://ailab.fai.utb.cz/our-team/

Tome Eftimov

Tome Eftimov is a researcher at the Computer Systems Department at the Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is a visiting assistant professor at the Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Stanford University, USA, where he investigated biomedical relations outcomes by using AI methods. In addition, he was a research associate at the University of California, San Francisco, investigating AI methods for rheumatology concepts extraction from electronic health records. He obtained his PhD in Information and Communication Technologies (2018). His research interests include statistical data analysis, metaheuristics, natural language processing, representation learning, and machine learning. He has been involved in courses on probability and statistics, and statistical data analysis. The work related to Deep Statistical Comparison was presented as tutorial (i.e. IJCCI 2018, IEEE SSCI 2019, GECCO 2020, and PPSN 2020) or as invited lecture to several international conferences and universities. He is an organizer of several workshops related to AI at high-ranked international conferences. He is a coordinator of a national project “Mr-BEC: Modern approaches for benchmarking in evolutionary computation” and actively participates in European projects.

Ernesto Tarantino

Ernesto Tarantino was born in S. Angelo a Cupolo, Italy, in 1961. He received the Laurea degree in Electrical Engineering in 1988 from University of Naples, Italy. He is currently a researcher at National Research Council of Italy. After completing his studies, he conducted research in parallel and distributed computing. During the past decade his research interests have been in the fields of theory and application of evolutionary techniques and related areas of computational intelligence. He is author of more than 100 scientific papers in international journal, book and conferences. He has served as referee and organizer for several international conferences in the area of evolutionary computation.

De Falco Ivanoe

Ivanoe De Falco received his degree in Electrical Engineering “cum laude” from the University of Naples “Federico II”, Naples, Italy, in 1987. He is currently a senior researcher at the Institute for High-Performance Computing and Networking (ICAR) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), where he is the Responsible of the Innovative Models for Machine Learning (IMML) research group. His main fields of interest include Computational Intelligence, with particular attention to Evolutionary Computation, Swarm Intelligence and Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Parallel Computing, and their application to real-world problems, especially in the medical domain. He is a member of the World Federation on Soft Computing (WFSC), the IEEE SMC Technical Committee on Soft Computing, the IEEE ComSoc Special Interest Research Group on Big Data for e-Health, the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Task Force on Evolutionary Computer Vision and Image Processing, and is an Associate Editor of Applied Soft Computing Journal (Elsevier). He is the author of more than 120 papers in international journals and in the proceedings of international conferences.

Antonio Della Cioppa

Antonio Della Cioppa received the Laurea degree in Physics and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, both from University of Naples “Federico II,” Naples, Italy, in 1993 and 1999, respectively. From 1999 to 2003, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy. In 2004, he joined the Department of Information Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Mathematical Applications, University of Salerno, where he is currently Associate Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. His main fields of interest are in the Computational Intelligence area, with particular attention to Evolutionary Computation, Swarm Intelligence and Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Parallel Computing, and their application to real-world problems. Prof. Della Cioppa is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the ACM Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Task Force on Evolutionary Computer Vision and Image Processing. He serves as Associate Editor for the Applied Soft Computing journal (Elsevier), Evolutionary Intelligence (Elsevier), Algorithms (MDPI). He has been part of the Organizing or Scientific Committees for tens of international conferences or workshops, and has authored or co-authored about 100 papers in international journals, books, and conference proceedings.

Edgar Galvan

Edgar Galvan is a Senior Researcher in the Department of Computer Science, Maynooth University. He is the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Cluster Leader at the Innovation Value Institute and at the Naturally Inspired Computation Research Group. Prior to this, he held multiple research positions in Essex University, University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin and INRIA Paris-Saclay. He is an expert in the properties of encodings, such as neutrality and locality, in Genetic Programming as well as a pioneer in the study of Semantic-based Genetic Programming. His research interests also include applications to combinatorial optimisation, games, software engineering and deep neural networks. Dr. Edgar Galvan has independently ranked as one of the all-time top 1% researchers in Genetic Programming, according to University College London. He has published in excess of nearly 70 peer-reviewed publications. Edgar has over 2,300 citations and a H-index of 27.

Scafuri Umberto

Umberto Scafuri was born in Baiano (AV) on May 21, 1957. He got his Laurea degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Naples ""Federico II"" in 1985. He currently works as a technologist at the Institute of High Performance Computing and Networking (ICAR) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR). His research activity is basically devoted to parallel and distributed architectures and evolutionary models.

Mengjie Zhang

Mengjie Zhang is a Fellow of Royal Society of New Zealand, a Fellow of IEEE, and currently Professor of Computer Science at Victoria University of Wellington, where he heads the interdisciplinary Evolutionary Computation Research Group. He is a member of the University Academic Board, a member of the University Postgraduate Scholarships Committee, Associate Dean (Research and Innovation) in the Faculty of Engineering, and Chair of the Research Committee of the Faculty of Engineering and School of Engineering and Computer Science. His research is mainly focused on evolutionary computation, particularly genetic programming, particle swarm optimisation and learning classifier systems with application areas of feature selection/construction and dimensionality reduction, computer vision and image processing, evolutionary deep learning and transfer learning, job shop scheduling, multi-objective optimisation, and clustering and classification with unbalanced and missing data. He is also interested in data mining, machine learning, and web information extraction. Prof Zhang has published over 700 research papers in refereed international journals and conferences in these areas. He has been serving as an associated editor or editorial board member for over 10 international journals including IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, the Evolutionary Computation Journal (MIT Press), ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimisation, Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (Springer), IEEE Transactions on Emergent Topics in Computational Intelligence, Applied Soft Computing, and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, and as a reviewer of over 30 international journals. He has been a major chair for eight international conferences. He has also been serving as a steering committee member and a program committee member for over 80 international conferences including all major conferences in evolutionary computation. Since 2007, he has been listed as one of the top ten world genetic programming researchers by the GP bibliography (http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~wbl/biblio/gp-html/index.html). He is the Tutorial Chair for GECCO 2014, an AIS-BIO Track Chair for GECCO 2016, an EML Track Chair for GECCO 2017, and a GP Track Chair for GECCO 2020 and 2021. Since 2012, he has been co-chairing several parts of IEEE CEC, SSCI, and EvoIASP/EvoApplications conference (he has been involving major EC conferences such as GECCO, CEC, EvoStar, SEAL). Since 2014, he has been co-organising and co-chairing the special session on evolutionary feature selection and construction at IEEE CEC and SEAL, and also delivered a keynote/plenary talk for IEEE CEC 2018,IEEE ICAVSS 2018, DOCSA 2019, IES 2017 and Chinese National Conference on AI in Law 2017. Prof Zhang was the Chair of the IEEE CIS Intelligent Systems Applications, the IEEE CIS Emergent Technologies Technical Committee, and the IEEE CIS Evolutionary Computation Technical Committee; a Vice-Chair of the IEEE CIS Task Force on Evolutionary Computer Vision and Image Processing, and the IEEE CIS Task Force on Evolutionary Deep Learning and Applications; and also the founding chair of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Chapter in New Zealand.

Antoine Cully

Antoine Cully is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at Imperial College London (United Kingdom). His research is at the intersection between artificial intelligence and robotics. He applies machine learning approaches, like evolutionary algorithms, on robots to increase their versatility and their adaptation capabilities. In particular, he has recently developed Quality-Diversity optimization algorithms to enable robots to autonomously learn large behavioural repertoires. For instance, this approach enabled legged robots to autonomously learn how to walk in every direction or to adapt to damage situations. Antoine Cully received the M.Sc. and the Ph.D. degrees in robotics and artificial intelligence from the Sorbonne Université in Paris, France, in 2012 and 2015, respectively, and the engineer degree from the School of Engineering Polytech’Sorbonne, in 2012. His Ph.D. dissertation has received three Best-Thesis awards. He has published several journal papers in prestigious journals including Nature, IEEE Transaction in Evolutionary Computation, and the International Journal of Robotics Research. His work was featured on the cover of Nature (Cully et al., 2015), received the "Outstanding Paper of 2015" award from the Society for Artificial Life (2016), the French "La Recherche" award (2016), and two Best-Paper awards from GECCO (2021, 2022).

Stéphane Doncieux

Stéphane Doncieux is Professeur des Universités (Professor) in Computer Science at Sorbonne University, Paris, France. He is engineer of the ENSEA, a French electronic engineering school. He obtained a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition in 1999. He pursued and defended a PhD in Computer Science in 2003. He was responsible, with Bruno Gas, of the SIMA research team since its creation in 2007 and up to 2011. From 2011 to 2018, he was the head of the AMAC (Architecture and Models of Adaptation and Cognition) research team with 11 permanent researchers, 3 post-doc students and engineers and 11 PhD students. As from January 2019, he is deputy director of the ISIR lab, one of the largest robotics lab in France. He has organized several workshops on ER at conferences like GECCO or IEEE-IROS and has edited 2 books. Stéphane Doncieux was co-chair of the GECCO complex systems track in 2019 and 2020. His research is in cognitive robotics, with a focus on the use of evolutionary algorithms in the context of synthesis of robot controllers. He worked on selective pressures and on the use of evolutionary methods in a developmental robotics approach in which the evolutionary algorithms are used for their creativity to bootstrap a cognitive process and allow it to acquire an experience that can be later redescribed in another representation for a faster and more effective task resolution. This is the goal of the H2020 DREAM European project that he has coordinated (http://dream.isir.upmc.fr).

Matthew C. Fontaine

Matthew C. Fontaine is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California (2019-present). His research blends the areas of discrete optimization, generative models, quality diversity, neuroevolution, procedural content generation, scenario generation in training, and human-robot interaction (HRI) into powerful scenario generation systems that enhance safety when robots interact with humans. In the field of quality diversity, Matthew has made first-author contributions of the Covariance Matrix Adaptation MAP-Elites (CMA-ME) algorithm and recently introduced the Differentiable Quality Diversity (DQD) problem, including the first DQD algorithm MAP-Elites via a Gradient Arborescence (MEGA). He is also a maintainer of the Pyribs quality diversity optimization library, a library implementing many quality diversity algorithms for continuous optimization. Matthew received his BS (2011) and MS (2013) degrees from the University of Central Florida (UCF) and first studied quality diversity algorithms through coursework with Ken Stanley. He was a research assistant in the Interactive Realities Lab (IRL) at the Institute for Simulation and Training (IST) at UCF from 2008-2014 studying human training, a teaching faculty member at UCF from 2014 to 2017, and a software engineer in simulation at Drive.ai working on scenario generation in autonomous vehicles from 2017-2018.

Adam Gaier

Adam Gaier is a Senior Research Scientist at the Autodesk AI Lab pursuing basic research in evolutionary and machine learning and the application of these techniques to problems in design and robotics. He received master's degrees in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems form the University of Sussex and Autonomous Systems at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, and a PhD from Inria and the University of Lorraine — where his dissertation focused on tackling expensive design problems through the fusion of machine learning, quality diversity, and neuroevolution approaches. His PhD work received recognition at top venues across these fields: including a spotlight talk at NeurIPS (machine learning), multiple best paper awards at GECCO (evolutionary computation), a best student paper at AIAA (aerodynamics design optimization), and a SIGEVO Dissertation Award.

Amy K Hoover

Amy K. Hoover is an Assistant Professor of Informatics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She is a researcher in the field of creative AI, and her work intersects with data science, human-computer interaction, and many areas of artificial intelligence. She has previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Playable Innovative Technologies Lab (PLAIT) at Northeastern University and at the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta. She has also been named the 2022 National Certified Flight Instructor of the Year by the FAA and the General Aviation Awards Industry Board.

Jean-Baptiste Mouret

Jean-Baptiste Mouret is a senior researcher ("directeur de recherche) at Inria, a French research institute dedicated to computer science and mathematics. He was previously an assistant professor ("mâitre de conférences) at ISIR (Institute for Intelligent Systems and Robotics), which is part of Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6 (UPMC, now Sorbonne Université). He obtained a M.S. in computer science from EPITA in 2004, a M.S. in artificial intelligence from the Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris, France) in 2005, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the same university in 2008. He was the principal investigator of an ERC grant (ResiBots - Robots with animal-like resilience, 2015-2020) and was the recipient of a French "ANR young researcher grant (Creadapt - Creative adaptation by Evolution, 2012-2015). Overall, J.-B. Mouret conducts researches that intertwine evolutionary algorithms, neuro-evolution, and machine learning to make robots more adaptive. His work was featured on the cover of Nature (Cully et al., 2015) and it received the "2017 ISAL Award for Distinguished Young Investigator in the field of Artificial Life, the "Outstanding Paper of 2015 award from the Society for Artificial Life (2016), the French "La Recherche" award (2016), 3 GECCO best paper awards (2011, GDS track; 2017 & 2018, CS track), and the IEEE CEC "best student paper" award (2009). He co-chaired the "Evolutionary Machine Learning track at GECCO 2019 and the "Generative and Developmental Systems'' track in 2015.

John Rieffel

John Rieffel is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Union College in Schenctady, NY, USA. Prior to joining Union he was a postdoc at Cornell University and Tufts University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brandeis University in 2006. His undergraduate-driven research lab at Union College focuses on soft robotics, tensegrity robotics, and evolutionary fabrication. John has published at GECCO, ALIFE/ECAL, and IEEE-RoboSoft, conferences, and in em Soft Robotics, Artificial Life, and Proceedings of the Royal Society Interface, among others.

Alberto Moraglio

Alberto Moraglio is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter, UK. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Essex and Master and Bachelor degrees (Laurea) in Computer Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy. He is the founder of a Geometric Theory of Evolutionary Algorithms, which unifies Evolutionary Algorithms across representations and has been used for the principled design and rigorous theoretical analysis of new successful search algorithms. He gave several tutorials at GECCO, IEEE CEC and PPSN, and has an extensive publication record on this subject. He has served as co-chair for the GP track, the GA track and the Theory track at GECCO. He also co-chaired twice the European Conference on Genetic Programming, and is an associate editor of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines journal. He has applied his geometric theory to derive a new form of Genetic Programming based on semantics with appealing theoretical properties which is rapidly gaining popularity in the GP community. In the last three years, Alberto has been collaborating with Fujitsu Laboratories on Optimisation on Quantum Annealing machines. He has formulated dozens of Combinatorial Optimisation problems in a format suitable for the Quantum hardware. He is also the inventor of a software (a compiler) aimed at making these machines usable without specific expertise by automating the translation of high-level description of combinatorial optimisation problems to a low-level format suitable for the Quantum hardware (patented invention).

Mayowa Ayodele

Mayowa Ayodele holds a PhD in Evolutionary Computation from Robert Gordon University, Scotland. She works as a Senior Solutions Architect at D-wave Quantum Inc. In this role, she specialises in addressing customer challenges through the utilisation of D-wave's quantum, hybrid, and classical optimisation solvers. Previously, she held the position of Principal Researcher at Fujitsu Research of Europe, United Kingdom, dedicating three years to investigating quantum-inspired techniques for solving optimisation problems.

Over the past decade, a significant portion of her research has revolved around the application of diverse algorithm categories, including, evolutionary algorithms for tackling problems in logistics, including the scheduling of trucks, trailers, ships, and platform supply vessels. In recent years, her focus has shifted towards formulating single and multi-objective constrained optimisation problems as Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) as well as application quantum optimisation techniques to practical problems.

Francisco Chicano

Francisco Chicano holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Málaga and a Degree in Physics from the National Distance Education University. Since 2008 he is with the Department of Languages and Computing Sciences of the University of Málaga. His research interests include quantum computing, the application of search techniques to Software Engineering problems and the use of theoretical results to efficiently solve combinatorial optimization problems. He is in the editorial board of Evolutionary Computation Journal, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Systems and Software, ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization and Mathematical Problems in Engineering. He has also been programme chair and Editor-in-Chief in international events.

Ofer Shir

Ofer Shir is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Tel-Hai College and a Principal Investigator at Migal-Galilee Research Institute – both located in the Upper Galilee, Israel. Ofer Shir holds a BSc in Physics and Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel (conferred 2003), and both MSc and PhD in Computer Science from Leiden University, The Netherlands (conferred 2004, 2008; PhD advisers: Thomas Bäck and Marc Vrakking). Upon his graduation, he completed a two-years term as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University, USA (2008-2010), hosted by Prof. Herschel Rabitz in the Department of Chemistry – where he specialized in computational aspects of experimental quantum systems. He then joined IBM-Research as a Research Staff Member (2010-2013), which constituted his second postdoctoral term, and where he gained real-world experience in convex and combinatorial optimization as well as in decision analytics. His current topics of interest include Statistical Learning within Optimization and Deep Learning in Practice, Self-Supervised Learning, Algorithmically-Guided Experimentation, Combinatorial Optimization and Benchmarking (White/Gray/Black-Box), Quantum Optimization and Quantum Machine Learning.

Lee Spector

Dr. Lee Spector is a Professor of Computer Science at Amherst College, an Adjunct Professor and member of the graduate faculty in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an affiliated faculty member at Hampshire College, where he taught for many years before moving to Amherst College. He received a B.A. in Philosophy from Oberlin College in 1984, and a Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland in 1992. At Hampshire College he held the MacArthur Chair, served as the elected faculty member of the Board of Trustees, served as the Dean of the School of Cognitive Science, served as Co-Director of Hampshire’s Design, Art and Technology program, supervised the Hampshire College Cluster Computing Facility, and served as the Director of the Institute for Computational Intelligence. At Amherst College he teaches computer science and directs an initiative on Artificial Intelligence and the Liberal Arts. My research and teaching focus on artificial intelligence and intersections of computer science with cognitive science, philosophy, physics, evolutionary biology, and the arts. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Springer journal Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines and a member of the editorial boards of the MIT Press journal Evolutionary Computation and the ACM journal Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the ACM Special Interest Group on Evolutionary Computation (SIGEVO) and he has produced over 100 scientific publications. He serves regularly as a reviewer and as an organizer of professional events, and his research has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and DARPA among other funding sources. Among the honors that he has received is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. National Science Foundation for excellence in both teaching and research, the NSF Director's Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars.

Matthieu Parizy

Matthieu Parizy is a Research Director at Fujitsu Limited in Kawasaki, Japan where he has been working since 2008. Over the last 5 years, in the Digital Annealer Project, he has led the development of visualization and tuning techniques for quantum inspired Ising machines. He holds a M.Eng. from ESIEE Paris (2008) and a D.Eng. degree in computer engineering from Waseda University (2023). His thesis is on the topic of maximizing performance of Ising machines from the application layer, including formalization techniques for non-binary problems as well as automated hyperparameter tuning techniques. Previously, he had been doing research on VLSI IC design techniques.

Markus Wagner

Markus Wagner is an Associate Professor at Monash University, Australia. He has done his PhD studies at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbruecken, Germany and at the University of Adelaide, Australia. For the outcomes of his research, he has received a University Doctoral Research Medal, four best paper awards, a best poster award, a best presentation award, and a Humies Gold Award. His research topics range from mathematical runtime analysis of heuristic optimisation algorithms and theory-guided algorithm design to applications of heuristic methods to renewable energy production, professional team cycling and software engineering. So far, he has been a program committee member 80+ times, and he has written 150+ articles with 200+ different co-authors. He is an ACM Lifetime Member, is on SIGEVO's Executive Board and serves as the first ever Sustainability Officer. He has contributed to GECCOs as Workshop Chair and Competition Chair, and he has chaired several education-related committees within the IEEE CIS, where he also served as founding chair of task forces on benchmarking and on energy.

Alma Rahat

Dr Rahat is an Associate Professor of Data Science. His expertise is in evolutionary and Bayesian search and optimisation. Particularly, he has worked on developing effective acquisition functions for optimising single and multi-objective problems and locating the feasible space of solutions. He has a strong track record of working with industry on a broad range of optimisation problems, which resulted in numerous articles in top journals and conferences, including a best paper in the Real-World Applications track at GECCO, and a patent with Hydro International Ltd. Recently, he has been actively contributing to the Welsh Government's response to the pandemic using his expertise in machine learning and parameter optimisation with funding from both the Welsh Government (Co-PI and Co-I; £750k) and EPSRC (EP/W01226X/1, PI; £230k). His work, with colleagues at Swansea, has resulted in generating medium-term projections of admissions and deaths every week for the First Minister of Wales, and the UK Health Security Agency.

He is one of 24 members of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Task Force on Data-Driven Evolutionary Optimization of Expensive Problems. He has been the lead organiser for the Surrogate-Assisted Evolutionary Optimisation (SAEOpt) workshop at GECCO since 2016, and was the Proceedings Chair for GECCO 2022. Furthermore, he successfully led Swansea University's application to join the Turing University Network in 2023, and he is currently the Turing Academic Liaison for the university.

Currently, he is interested in developing methods for optimising constrained and expensive single and multi-objective problems, and active learning, that may be applied in different contexts, e.g. engineering design, educational technology, computational modelling, decision-making, and policy exploration.

Dr Rahat has a BEng (Hons.) in Electronic Engineering from the University of Southampton, UK, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Exeter, UK. He completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education at Swansea University, and he is now a fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). He worked as a product development engineer after his bachelor's degree, and held post-doctoral research positions at the University of Exeter. Before moving to Swansea, he was a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Plymouth, UK.

Richard Everson

Richard Everson is Professor of Machine Learning and Director of the Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Exeter. His research interests lie in statistical machine learning and multi-objective optimisation, and the links between them. Current research is on surrogate methods, particularly Bayesian optimisation, for large expensive-to-evaluate optimisation problems, especially computational fluid dynamics design optimisation.

Jonathan Fieldsend

Jonathan Fieldsend, Editor-in-Chief University of Exeter, UK is Professor of Computational Intelligence at the University of Exeter. He has a degree in Economics from Durham University, a Masters in Computational Intelligence from the University of Plymouth and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Exeter. He has over 100 peer-reviewed publications in the evolutionary computation and machine learning domains, with particular interests in multiple-objective optimisation, and the interface between optimisation and machine learning. Over the years, he has been a co-organiser of a number of different Workshops at GECCO (VizGEC, SAEOpt and EAPwU), as well as EMO Track Chair in GECCO 2019 and GECCO 2020. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, and ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization, and on the Editorial Board of Complex and Intelligence Systems. He is a vice-chair of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Task Force on Data-Driven Evolutionary Optimisation of Expensive Problems, and sits on the IEEE CIS Task Force on Multi-modal Optimisation and the IEEE CIS Task Force on Evolutionary Many-Objective Optimisation.

Handing Wang

Handing Wang received the B.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees from Xidian University, Xi'an, China, in 2010 and 2015. She is currently a professor with School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University, Xi'an, China. Dr. Wang is an Associate Editor of IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine and Complex & Intelligent Systems, chair of the Task Force on Intelligence Systems for Health within the Intelligent Systems Applications Technical Committee of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. Her research interests include nature-inspired computation, multi- and many-objective optimization, multiple criteria decision making, and real-world problems. She has published over 10 papers in international journal, including IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (TEVC), IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics (TCYB), and Evolutionary Computation (ECJ).

Yaochu Jin

Yaochu Jin received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 1988, 1991, and 1996 respectively, and the Dr.-Ing. degree from Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, in 2001. He is Professor in Computational Intelligence, Department of Computer Science, University of Surrey, Guildford, U.K., where he heads the Nature Inspired Computing and Engineering Group. He is also a Finland Distinguished Professor, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland and a Changjiang Distinguished Professor, Northeastern University, China. His main research interests include evolutionary computation, machine learning, computational neuroscience, and evolutionary developmental systems, with their application to data-driven optimization and decision-making, self-organizing swarm robotic systems, and bioinformatics. He has (co)authored over 200 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers and has been granted eight patents on evolutionary optimization. Dr Jin is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COGNITIVE AND DEVELOPMENTAL SYSTEMS and Complex & Intelligent Systems. He was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer (2013-2015) and Vice President for Technical Activities of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (2014-2015). He was the recipient of the Best Paper Award of the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and the 2014 IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine Outstanding Paper Award. He is a Fellow of IEEE.

Tinkle Chugh

Dr Tinkle Chugh is a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Exeter. He is the Associate Editor of the Complex and Intelligent Systems journal. Between Feb 2018 and June 2020, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the BIG data methods for improving windstorm FOOTprint prediction project funded by Natural Environment Research Council UK. He obtained his PhD degree in Mathematical Information Technology in 2017 from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His thesis was a part of the Decision Support for Complex Multiobjective Optimization Problems project, where he collaborated with Finland Distinguished Professor (FiDiPro) Yaochu Jin from the University of Surrey, UK. His research interests are machine learning, data-driven optimization, evolutionary computation, and decision-making.

Roman Senkerik

Roman Senkerik was born in Zlin, the Czech Republic, in 1981. He received an MSc degree in technical cybernetics from the Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Faculty of applied informatics in 2004, the Ph.D. degree also in technical Cybernetics, in 2008, from the same university, and Assoc. prof. Degree in Informatics from VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, in 2013.

From 2008 to 2013 he was a Research Assistant and Lecturer with the Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Faculty of applied informatics. Since 2014 he is an Associate Professor and since 2017 Head of the A.I.Lab https://ailab.fai.utb.cz/ with the Department of Informatics and Artificial Intelligence, Tomas Bata University in Zlin. He is the author of more than 40 journal papers, 250 conference papers, and several book chapters as well as editorial notes. His research interests are the development of evolutionary algorithms, their modifications and benchmarking, soft computing methods, and their interdisciplinary applications in optimization and cyber-security, machine learning, neuro-evolution, data science, the theory of chaos, and complex systems. He is a recognized reviewer for many leading journals in computer science/computational intelligence. He was a part of the organizing teams for special sessions/workshops/symposiums at GECCO, IEEE WCCI, CEC, or SSCI events.

Ivan Zelinka

Ivan Zelinka (born in 1965, ivanzelinka.eu) is currently associated with the Technical University of Ostrava (VSB-TU), Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He graduated consequently at the Technical University in Brno (1995 - MSc.), UTB in Zlin (2001 - Ph.D.) and again at Technical University in Brno (2004 - Assoc. Prof.) and VSB-TU (2010 - Professor). Prof. Zelinka is the responsible supervisor/co-supervisor of several research projects focused on unconventional control of complex systems, security of mobile devices and communication and Laboratory of parallel computing amongst the others. He was also working on numerous grants and two EU projects as a member of the team (FP5 - RESTORM) and supervisor (FP7 - PROMOEVO) of the Czech team. He is also head of research team NAVY http://navy.cs.vsb.cz/. His research interests are computational intelligence, cyber-security, development of evolutionary algorithms, applications of the theory of chaos, controlling of complex systems. Prof. Zelinka was awarded Siemens Award for his Ph.D. thesis, as well as by journal Software news for his book about artificial intelligence. He is a member of the British Computer Society, Machine Intelligence Research Labs (MIR Labs), IEEE (committee of Czech section of Computational Intelligence), a few international program committees of various conferences, and several well respected journals.

Pavel Kromer

Pavel Krömer graduated in Computer Science from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (FEECS) of VSB-Technical University of Ostrava (VSB-TUO). He worked as an analyst, developer, and trainer in the private sector between 2005 and 2010. Since 2010, he has been with the Department of Computer Science, FEECS VSB-TUO. In 2014, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta. In 2015, he was awarded the title Assoc. Professor of Computer Science. He was a Researcher at the IT4Innovations (National Supercomputing Center) between 2011 and 2016 and has been a member of its scientific council since February 2017. Since September 1, 2017, he has been the Vice Dean for International Cooperation at FEECS. Since 2018, he is a Senior Member of the IEEE. In his research, he focuses on computational intelligence, information retrieval, data mining, machine learning, soft computing, and real-world applications of intelligent methods. He was the principal contributor to a broad range of research projects with results published in high-impact international journals such as Soft Computing (Springer), and others published by Elsevier, Oxford University Press, and Wiley. In this field, he has contributed to a number of major conferences organized by the IEEE and ACM. He has been a reviewer for Information Sciences, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Swarm and Evolutionary Computation, Neurocomputing, Scientific Reports, and other scientific journals. He also acts as a project reviewer for the Research Agency (Slovakia), National Science Centre (Poland), National Research Foundation (South Africa), and the European Commission (DG CONNECT, REA).

Swagatam Das

Swagatam Das received the B. E. Tel. E., M. E. Tel. E (Control Engineering specialization) and Ph. D. degrees, all from Jadavpur University, India, in 2003, 2005, and 2009 respectively. Swagatam Das is currently serving as an associate professor at the Electronics and Communication Sciences Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India. His research interests include evolutionary computing, deep learning and non convex optimization in general. Dr. Das has published more than 300 research articles in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences. He is the founding co-editor-in-chief of Swarm and Evolutionary Computation, an international journal from Elsevier. He has also served as or is serving as the associate editors of the IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, Pattern Recognition (Elsevier),Neurocomputing (Elsevier),Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (Elsevier), and Information Sciences (Elsevier). He is a founding Section Editor of Springer Nature Computer Science journal since 2019. Dr. Das has 18000+ Google Scholar citations and an H-index of 63 till date. He has been associated with the international program committees of several regular international conferences including IEEE CEC, IEEE SSCI, SEAL, GECCO, AAAI, and SEMCCO. He has acted as guest editors for special issues in journals like IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation and IEEE Transactions on SMC, Part C. He is the recipient of the 2012 Young Engineer Award from the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE). He is also the recipient of the 2015 Thomson Reuters Research Excellence India Citation Award as the highest cited researcher from India in Engineering and Computer Science category between 2010 to 2014.

Gabriel Kronberger

Gabriel Kronberger is professor at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria and has been working on algorithms for symbolic regression since more than 15 years. From 2018 until 2022 he lead the Josef Ressel Center for Symbolic Regression (https://symreg.at), a five-year project focused on developing symbolic regression methods and applications in collaboration with several Austrian company partners. His current research interests are symbolic regression for scientific machine learning and industrial applications. Gabriel has (co-)authored more than 100 publications (SCOPUS) and has been a member of the Program Committee for the GECCO Genetic Programming track since 2016.

William La Cava

William La Cava is an Assistant Professor in the Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He received his PhD from UMass Amherst with a focus on interpretable modeling of dynamical systems. Prior to joining CHIP, he was a post-doctoral fellow and research associate in the Institute for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Steven Gustafson

Steven Gustafson received his PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, and shortly thereafter was awarded IEEE Intelligent System's "AI's 10 to Watch" for his work in algorithms that discover algorithms. For 10+ years at GE's corporate R&D center he was a leader in AI, successful technical lab manager, all while inventing and deploying state-of-the-art AI systems for almost every GE business, from GE Capital to NBC Universal and GE Aviation. He has over 50 publications, 13 patents, was a co-founder and Technical Editor in Chief of the Memetic Computing Journal. Steven has chaired various conferences and workshops, including the first Symbolic Regression and Modeling (SRM) Workshop at GECCO 2009 and subsequent workshops from 2010 to 2014. As the Chief Scientist at Maana, a Knowledge Platform software company, he invented and architected new AutoML and NLP techniques with publications in AAAI and IJCAI. Steven is currently the CTO of Noonum, an investment intelligence company, that is pushing the state-of-the-art of large scale knowledge graph, NLP and machine learning decision support systems.