GECCO'08 in Atlanta

The annual Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO'08) was held last week in Atlanta. This is one of my favorite conferences of the year. This is one of the few conferences where you can find a nice mix of computer scientists, engineers, economists, biologists etc. that are all interested in learning what they can from each other in order to solve complex problems such as time series prediction in financial markets and the detection and characterization of gene-gene interactions.

This year I organized and chaired the 2nd annual Workshop on Open-Source Software for Applied Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (SoftGEC'08). The workshop was very well attended (~30 people) and there was an excellent discussion about the advantages of various open-source licenses. Please see the 2008 SoftGEC web page for the list of speakers.

I also gave the GECCO Advanced Tutorial on Bioinformatics. This was also very well attended (~40 people) which is indicative of the growing interest in the intersection between biology and computer science. I will be giving this tutorial next year at GECCO'09 in Montreal.

Dr. Clare Bates Congdon and I chaired the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology track again this year. We had many excellent contributed papers and talks including an invited session with several bioinformatics faculty from the School of Biology at Georgia Tech. This was a huge hit. I have stepped down from chairing this track after several years of service.

I am already looking forward to GECCO'09 in Montreal. The paper submission deadline is January 14th. See the call for papers here. Hope to see you in July of 2009!