GECCO'11 Preface

These proceedings contain the papers presented at the 13th Annual Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2011), held in Dublin, Ireland, July 12-16, 2011.

This year, we received 686 submissions, the highest number of submissions since GECCO was born in 1999, of which 261 were accepted as full eight-page publication with 25 minute oral presentation during the conference. This corresponds to an acceptance rate of 38%, the lowest so far since 1999. In addition, 136 submissions (20%) were accepted for poster presentation with two-page abstracts in the proceedings.

GECCO adheres to the "one conference, many mini-conferences" philosophy. This year, there were seventeen separate tracks that operated independently from each other. Fifteen of these tracks are longstanding GECCO features. Two "New Frontiers Tracks (NFT)" were selected from several proposals we received from the community. The purpose of the NFTs is to push the envelope and encourage our community to widen its horizons and seek new, perhaps interdisciplinary, challenges and opportunities. Thus, this GECCO includes a new track on Digital Entertainment Technologies and Arts and the Self-* Search NFT. All tracks had two track chairs and individual program committees. To ensure an unbiased reviewing process, all reviews were conducted double blind; no authors' names were revealed to the reviewers (or vice versa). About 560 researchers participated in the reviewing process. We want to thank them for all their hard work reviewing a record number of papers. Their work is absolutely vital to ensure the high quality of the conference and its long-term sustainability.

The 17 track chairs deserve special thanks for their efforts in assembling their program committees, performing the paper assignments, and finally making the difficult acceptance or rejection decisions:

In addition to the presentation of the papers contained in these proceedings, GECCO-2011 also included 31 free tutorials, 12 workshops (involving 92 papers), the "Humies" awards for human-competitive results, the new GECCO Industrial Challenge, 2 sessions on Evolutionary Computation in Practice, and 5 competitions..

Special thanks are due to Irene Ward, Jill Skuba, Mark Montague, Lisa Tolles, April Mosqus, Stephanie Sabal, Ann Lane, and Donna Cappo whose work, help, and guidance were invaluable for getting all the non-scientific issues right. We also want to thank the ACM SIGEVO chair, business committee, and treasurer for their help, guidance, and advice. Last but not least, we want to thank the numerous researchers and practitioners, who submitted their work to GECCO-2011, presented a tutorial, organized a workshop, or helped in any other way to make the conference a success.