Open Source Software for Evolutionary Computation (EvoOSS) Workshop at ​GECCO 2024

Description & Topics

Evolutionary computation (EC) methods are applied in many different domains. Therefore, soundly engineered, reusable, flexible, user-friendly, interoperable, and open software for EC is needed more than ever to bridge the gap between theoretical research and practical application. However, due to the heterogeneity of application domains and the large number of EC methods, the development of such software is both, time consuming and complex. Consequently, many EC researchers implement custom, highly specialized, closed source and often throw-away software which focuses on a specific research question and is used only once to produce results for the next paper. It is not yet standard in the EC community that the software used to produce the presented results is also made available as open source software in each publication, let alone that this software is also engineered in such a way that others can easily base their research work on it or apply it in practice. This significantly hinders the comparability and reproducibility of research results in the field.

This workshop promotes the development and dissemination of open source software for evolutionary computation and provides a platform for EC researchers to present their latest open source software libraries, frameworks, and tools for the development, analysis, and application of evolutionary algorithms.

Please note that submissions to this workshop will only be accepted if they describe open source software for EC that has already been released and is publically available. The URL to the source code repository must be included in the paper. Therefore, contributions to this workshop have not to be submitted in anonymized form, as the identity of the authors is usually very easy to determine from the repository.

Important Dates

Submission deadline:	April 8th, 2024 (strict!)
Notification of acceptance:	May 3rd, 2024
Camera-ready submission:	May 10th, 2024
Hybrid workshop at ​GECCO 2024:	July 14th or 15th, 2024

Submission Guidelines

Authors have to submit their papers until April 8th, 2024 using the ​GECCO submission system. After login, authors need to select the "Workshop Paper" submission form and "Workshop Open Source Software for Evolutionary Computation" to submit their work to the EvoOSS Workshop.

All workshop papers must not exceed 8 pages and have to fulfill the preparation instructions for GECCO'24 full papers. Papers submitted to the EvoOSS workshop do not have to be anonymized. Detailed formatting instructions for authors are listed ​here.

Workshop Chairs

​Stefan Wagner, Austria
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. Stefan 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, Austria
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.