Organizers

Aniko Ekart, General Chair

Aston University, UK | webpage

Anikó Ekárt is a professor of Artificial Intelligence at Aston University, Birmingham, UK. She received her PhD in Informatics at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. Her research focusses on theory and application of artificial intelligence techniques, and in particular genetic programming and evolutionary computation. Application areas include medicine, engineering, transport, education and art. Recently she has become interested in trust, fairness and ethics of AI. She led the development of the Artificial Intelligence Research and Application Centre (ACAIRA) within Aston University and is its director. The Centre is creating impactful AI solutions to pressing social, health and environmental challenges, and educating the next generation of AI leaders. She is co-investigator in the £3.4m AI.RDN+ project funded by Research England, focussing on assessing publicly available artificial intelligence tools for researchers and promoting responsible AI uptake and innovation by researchers. At the Evo* 2022 conference, the leading European event on bio-inspired AI, she was honoured with the award for outstanding contribution to Evolutionary Computation in Europe. She recently co-edited with Dr Alina Patelli the Women in AI and Sustainability book published by Springer Nature.

Nelishia Pillay, Editor-in-Chief

University of Pretoria, South Africa | webpage

Nelishia Pillay is a Professor at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She holds the Multichoice Joint-Chair in Machine Learning and SARChI Chair in Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Development. Her research areas include hyper-heuristics, automated design of machine learning and search techniques, evolutionary transfer learning, combinatorial optimization, genetic programming, genetic algorithms and deep learning for and more generally machine learning and optimization for sustainable development. These are the focus areas of the NICOG (Nature-Inspired Computing Optimization) research group which she has established.

Szymon Łukasik, Local Chair

AGH University of Science and Technology | webpage

Piotr Kowalski, Local Chair

AGH University of Science and Technology

Tea Tušar, Proceedings

Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia | webpage

Tea Tušar is a senior research associate at the Department of Intelligent Systems of the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She was awarded the PhD degree in Information and Communication Technologies by the Jozef Stefan International Postgraduate School for her work on visualizing solution sets in multiobjective optimization. She has completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at Inria Lille in France where she worked on benchmarking multiobjective optimizers. Her research interests include evolutionary algorithms for singleobjective and multiobjective optimization with emphasis on visualizing and benchmarking their results and applying them to real-world problems.

Stephan Winkler, Publicity

Department of Medical and Bioinformatics at University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Austria

After studying computer science at University Linz, Stephan Winkler joined University of Applied Siences Upper Austria at Hagenberg. Since 2009, he is professor at the Department of Medical and Bioinformatics; since 2011 he serves as head of the Bioinformatics Research group and head of the Department of Data & Life Sciences since 2019. Furthermore, Stephan Winkler serves as Scientific Head of Softwarepark Hagenberg since 2022. Stephan is founding member of Heuristic and Evolutionary Algorithms Laboratory, the research group developing and maintaining HeuristicLab.

Marcella Scoczynski Ribeiro Martins, Digital Media

Federal University of Technology - Paraná, Brazil | webpage

Marcella Scoczynski is an Assistant Professor at Federal University of Technology - Parana UTFPR, Brazil. She has done her PhD on Computer Engineering at Federal University of Technology - Parana UTFPR, Brazil. Her thesis has awarded at the Theses Competition during Brazilian Conference on Intelligent Systems (BRACIS 2018) and at the Theses Contest during 5th IEEE Latin American Conference on Computational Intelligence (LA-CCI 2018). Her main research interests are numerical and combinatorial optimization, evolutionary computation and metaheuristics (with a particular interest in estimation of distribution algorithms), and landscape analysis. She co-authored scientific papers in international journals and conferences.

Hirad Assimi, Digital Media

University of Adelaide, Australia | webpage

Hirad completed his B.Sc and M.Sc degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Guilan and pursued his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Adelaide. He has a keen interest in applying Evolutionary Computation to real-world complex optimisation problems, particularly within the mining and energy sectors. Currently, Hirad is a postdoctoral researcher working on the Mine Operational Vehicle Electrification project.

Nadarajen Veerapen, SIGEVO Digital Media

Université de Lille, France

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 in charge of Electronic Media Affairs for SIGEVO. He has served as Electronic Media Chair for GECCO 2020 and 2021, 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 2017-2025.

Felipe Campelo, Integrity

University of Bristol, UK

Felipe Campelo is an Associate Professor in Data Science at the University of Bristol, UK. He completed his PhD in Systems Science and Engineering from Hokkaido University, Japan (2009), and has since worked in fields such as multiobjective and robust optimisation, statistical approaches for the experimental comparison of algorithms, and applications of data science and optimisation to applications in diverse areas such as electrical power systems, transportation, and biology and bioinformatics. He currently acts as Data Science Academic Team Lead and the Academic Integrity Officer for the University of Bristol's School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology.

James McDermott, Workshops

University of Galway, Ireland | webpage

James McDermott is a senior lecturer in the School of Computer Science in the College of Science and Engineering, University of Galway, in the west of Ireland. He teaches mostly at post-grad level, in particular in programming for AI, optimisation, and deep learning. He is School Director of Research & Graduate Studies. His research is in artificial intelligence - program synthesis, metaheuristic optimisation, machine learning, and computational creativity. He previously worked and studied in Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University College Dublin, University of Limerick, and Hewlett-Packard.

Ignacio Hidalgo, Workshops

Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain

Iñaki Hidalgo is Full Professor of Computing Science at Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). He received a PhD in Physics from the same university in 2001 under the Informatics and Automation doctoral program, with a dissertation on application of evolutionary algorithms for computer architecture problems. He has published more than 150 papers in journals and international conferences, most of them related to RWA of EC. He was local chair of Gecco 2015 in Madrid and is currently co-chair of EvoApps 2022. Recently his group has been working on biomedical problems, some of them dealing with uncertainty not only of the data, but also of the model. He has successfully supervised 10 PhD theses and is currently supervising 4 PhD students.

Miguel Nicolau, Summer School

University College Dublin, Ireland | webpage

Miguel is a Lecturer in Business Analytics, in the School of Business of University College Dublin, Ireland. His research interests revolve around Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Evolutionary Computation, Business Analytics, Genetic Programming, and Real-World Applications. He is a senior member of the UCD's NCRA (Natural Computing Research & Applications) group.

Vanessa Volz, Summer School

CWI, Netherlands | webpage

Vanessa Volz is currently a tenure-track researcher in the Evolutionary Intelligence (EI) group at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She received her PhD in 2019 from TU Dortmund University for her work on surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms for game optimisation. Her current research focuses on tailoring evolutionary computation methods to specific applications by incorporating domain knowledge. She is interested both in defining effective computational representations of problems and in customising optimisation algorithms accordingly. Much of this work is carried out in the context of recurring or otherwise dynamic problems across various application domains, including games and materials science.

Manuel López-Ibáñez, Business Committee

University of Manchester, UK | webpage

Prof. López-Ibáñez is a Full Professor (Chair) of Optimisation at the Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, UK. Between 2020 and 2022, he was also a “Beatriz Galindo“ Senior Distinguished Researcher at the University of Málaga, Spain. He received the Ph.D. degree from Edinburgh Napier University, U.K., in 2009. He is Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization (https://telo.acm.org). Prof.~López-Ibáñez has published more than 100 papers in international peer-reviewed journals and conferences on topics that include stochastic local search, black-box optimization, empirical reproducibility, multi-objective and interactive optimization algorithms for continuous and combinatorial problems, and the automatic configuration and design of optimization algorithms. He is the lead developer and current maintainer of the 'irace' software package for automatic algorithm configuration (https://mlopez-ibanez.github.io/irace/), the 'eaf' package for the analysis of multi-objective optimizers (https://mlopez-ibanez.github.io/eaf/) and the 'moocore' packages for multi-objective optimization (https://github.com/multi-objective/moocore/).

Sara Silva, Business Committee

University of Lisbon, Portugal | webpage

Sara Silva is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Sciences and a member of the Computer Science and Engineering Research Centre (LASIGE) in the Univerity of Lisbon, Portugal. Her main research interests are machine learning and evolutionary computation, including interdisciplinary applications in the areas of remote sensing and bioinformatics. She is associate editor of Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization (TELO), Swarm and Evolutionary Computation (SWEVO), and Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (GPEM). In 2015 she was Editor-in-Chief of GECCO, and in 2017 and 2018 she was chair of its Genetic Programming track. In 2018 she received the EvoStar Award for Outstanding Contribution to Evolutionary Computation in Europe. In 2023 she was General Chair of GECCO. She created the MATLAB Genetic Programming Toolbox (GPLAB) and co-authored the Springer book Lectures on Intelligent Systems.