Aim and Scope

Computational modeling of biological development has received increasing interests in evolutionary computation, artificial life and computational systems biology. In the evolutionary computation community, evolutionary algorithms using an indirect coding or generative coding are believed to be more scalable in evolving highly complex systems, compared to those using a direct coding. A variety number of models for neural and morphological development have been proposed, ranging from a set of re-writing rules to gene regulatory network models including metabolic reactions. Meanwhile, all developmental models must be evolved to perform a particular function, which are known as evolutionary developmental systems (EDS).

Evolution of developmental models is of great interest not only to efficient optimization of large-scale systems, but also to the understanding of the evolution of the body plan and neural control in living systems. This special session aims to promote cross-disciplinary research in evolutionary computation, artificial life, computational neuroscience and computational systems biology. Topics of the special session include but are not limited to:
• Evolutionary algorithms using indirect or generative encoding
• Evolution of computational models for morphological development
• Computational models of neural development and neural plasticity
• Artificial embryogeny
• Developmental approach to reservoir computing
• Co-evolution of neural control and body plan
• Morphogenetic robotics and evolutionary developmental robotics
• Gene regulatory network based tissue-like self-organization
• Analysis of evolvability and robustness of developmental systems
• Evolutionary synthesis of regulatory dynamics
• Evolutionary and developmental approaches to engineering design

Paper Submission

Special session papers should be submitted electronically through the IEEE CEC 2013 main website. Please choose "Evolutionary Developmental Systems" as the topic of your paper in submission.

Organizers

• Yaochu Jin
  Department of Computing
  University of Surrey
  Guildford, UK
  Email: yaochu.jin@surrey.ac.uk


• Yongsheng Ding
  College of Information Sciences and Technology
  Donghua University
  Shanghai, China
  Email: ysding@dhu.edu.cn

Program Committee (tentative)

• Josh Bogard
  University of Vermont, USA
• Keith Downing
  NTNU, Norway
• Rene Doursat
  Complex Systems Institute,France
• Pauline C Haddow
  NTNU, Norway
• Johannes Knabe
  University of Hertfordshire, UK
• Taras Kowaliw
  CNRS, France
• Bob McKay
  Seoul National University, Korea
• Julian Miller
  University of York, UK
• Daniel Roggen
  ETH, Switzerland
• James Sharpe
  CRG, Spain
• Ken Stanley
  University of Central Florida, USA
• Martin Trefzer
  University of York, UK
• Andy Tyrrell
  University of York, UK
• Gunnar Tufte
  NTNU, Norway
• Borys Wrobel
  Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland