[GECCO CFP] ACM GECCO Workshop CfP [Deadline: April 14, 2023]: NeuroEvolution at Work @GECCO 2023

[Antonio Della Cioppa]

Dear Colleagues,
we would like to inform you about the forthcoming ACM Workshop on NeuroEvolution at Work within GECCO 2023, to be held in Lisbon, PT, July15-19, 2023.

Note that GECCO 2023 will be held in hybrid mode, with all events facilitating online participation. More details about this will be provided soon together with how workshop discussions will occur.


SCOPE AND TOPICS OF INTEREST

In the last years, inspired by the fact that natural brains themselves are the products of an evolutionary process, the quest for evolving and optimizing artificial neural networks
through evolutionary computation has enabled researchers to successfully apply neuroevolution to many domains such as strategy games, robotics, big data, and so on.
The reason behind this success lies in important capabilities that are typically unavailable to traditional approaches, including evolving neural network building blocks,
hyperparameters, architectures, and even the algorithms for learning themselves (meta-learning).
Although promising, the use of neuroevolution poses important problems and challenges for its future development.
Firstly, many of its paradigms suffer from a lack of parameter-space diversity, meaning a failure to provide diversity in the behaviors generated by the different networks.
Moreover, harnessing neuroevolution to optimize deep neural networks requires noticeable computational power and, consequently, the investigation of new trends in enhancing computational performance.

NEWK at Work workshop aims:

- to bring together researchers working in the fields of deep learning, evolutionary computation, and optimization to exchange new ideas about potential directions for future research;
- to create a forum of excellence on neuroevolution that will help interested researchers from various areas, ranging from computer scientists and engineers on the one hand to application-devoted
researchers on the other hand, to gain a high-level view of the current state of the art.
Since an increasing trend to neuroevolution in the next years seems likely to be observed, not only will a workshop on this topic be of immediate relevance to get insight into future trends, but it will also provide a common ground to encourage novel paradigms and applications. Therefore, researchers putting emphasis on neuroevolution issues in their work are encouraged to submit their work. This event is also ideal for informal contacts, exchanging ideas, and discussions with fellow researchers.

The scope of the workshop is to receive high-quality contributions on topics related to neuroevolution, ranging from theoretical works to innovative applications in the context of (but not limited to):

- theoretical and experimental studies involving neuroevolution on machine learning in general, and on deep and reinforcement learning in particular
- development of innovative neuroevolution paradigms
- parallel and distributed neuroevolution methods
- new search operators for neuroevolution
- hybrid methods for neuroevolution
- surrogate models for fitness estimation in neuroevolution
- adopt evolutionary multi-objective and many-objective optimisation techniques in neuroevolution
- propose new benchmark problems for neuroevolution
- applications of neuroevolution to Artificial Intelligence agents and to real-world problems.

More detailed information, together with a more comprehensive list of application domains, is available at:
www.newk2023.icar.cnr.it


SUBMISSION AND IMPORTANT DATES

- Paper Submission deadline: April 14, 2023
- Notification of paper acceptance: May 3, 2023
- Camera ready submission: May 10, 2023
- Author registration deadline: May 10, 2023
- Conference dates: July 15-19, 2023

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Authors must submit their papers using the GECCO submission site at https://ssl.linklings.net/conferences/gecco.
Submissions should adhere to the ACM SIG guidelines as GECCO’s full papers:
Papers Submission Instructions.
Each paper submitted will be rigorously evaluated in a double-blind review process.
The evaluation will ensure high interest and expertise of the reviewers.
Review criteria include significance of the work, technical soundness, novelty, clarity, writing quality, and sufficiency of information to permit replication, if applicable.
All accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

ORGANIZERS
Ivanoe De Falco, ICAR-CNR, ITALY
Antonio Della Cioppa, University of Salerno, ITALY
Edgar Galvan, Maynooth University, IRELAND
Ernesto Tarantino, ICAR-CNR, ITALY
Umberto Scafuri, ICAR-CNR, ITALY
Mengjie Zhang, Victoria University of Wellington, NEW ZEALAND


This email was sent on behalf of NEWK chairs. Apologies for multiple postings.