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                                 Call for Papers

          Workshop on AUTOMATICALLY CONFIGURABLE ALGORITHMIC FRAMEWORKS

                            to be held as part of the
          Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2015)
                         July 11-15, 2015, Madrid, Spain
                             organized by ACM SIGEVO

                 http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~fmascia/gecco2015_acaf
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The Workshop on "Automatically Configurable Algorithmic Frameworks" aims at
bringing together researchers, developers and end users of algorithmic
frameworks for solving optimization problems. The focus of the workshop will be
on the design, analysis and automatic configuration of such frameworks.

The proliferation of metaheuristics, including many types of local searches,
evolutionary algorithms, and swarm intelligence approaches, has given rise to
software frameworks that aim at generalizing and hybridizing diverse techniques
by combining components from different optimization algorithms. Examples of
such frameworks are PaGMO, ParadisEO, Shark, SATenstein, jMetal and the MOACO
framework. These frameworks are usually characterized by a large number of
parameters that allow selecting and configuring the behavior of specific
algorithmic components. A parameter configuration is, hence, an instantiation
of a particular optimization algorithm fine-tuned to a specific application
scenario.  Inevitably, the performance of the frameworks strongly depends on
their parameter settings and manually tuning such parameters is a hard and
tedious task for the algorithm designer. Moreover, the ability of the framework
to generate novel algorithm designs will depend on its flexibility when
combining algorithmic components.  Automatic configuration techniques
(parameter tuning) allow the algorithm designers to focus on the design of new
algorithmic components, and on how to combine them into a flexible
framework. The final algorithm design decisions will be taken by the automatic
configuration technique that will search in the algorithmic design space
defined by the framework for the best algorithm for the problem at hand.

The automatic configuration of algorithmic frameworks poses challenges in terms
of generalization of algorithmic components, identification of key components
to be tuned, algorithmic configuration methods, different types of abstraction
(top-down versus bottom-up), and automatic design approaches.

We invite researchers to submit their original and unpublished works on the
aforementioned challenges. In particular, we will welcome:

* Novel ideas on how to design, extend and analyze metaheuristics frameworks in
   order to enable automatic configuration and design.

* Proposals for new algorithmic frameworks designed to be automatically
   configured.

* Theoretical studies that propose generalized models of metaheuristics to be
   implemented in (new) flexible frameworks.

* Studies that analyze and evaluate the conceptual models underpinning existing
   frameworks.

* Experimental studies that compare the capabilities of existing frameworks to
   produce state-of-the-art algorithms for challenging optimization problems in
   an automatic fashion.


Important dates
---------------

    April 3, 2015	Submission deadline
   April 20, 2015	Notification of acceptance
      May 4, 2015	Submission of camera-ready
July 11-15, 2015	GECCO 2015 Conference


Submission Details
------------------

We invite submissions of papers in PDF format, not exceeding 8 pages, and 
formatted following the preparation instructions for GECCO 2015 full papers:

     http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2015/papers.html#instructions

The review process of the workshop is not double-blind, thus papers should not 
be anonymous but contain full authorship details.

Papers should be submitted directly to both <[log in to unmask]> and
<[log in to unmask]>. All accepted papers will be presented at
the workshop and appear in the GECCO Conference Companion Proceedings
published by ACM.


Workshop Schedule
-----------------

The schedule will be announced at the workshop website:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~fmascia/gecco2015_acaf


Organizers
----------

Franco Mascia <[log in to unmask]>
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~fmascia/

Manuel Lopez-Ibanez <[log in to unmask]>
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~manuel/