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- FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS - FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS - ---------------------------------------------------------- FIRST ANNUAL WORKSHOP ON METAHEURISTIC DESIGN PATTERNS (MetaDeeP-2014) to be held as part of the 2014 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2014) Vancouver, BC, Canada, July 12-16, 2014 Organized by ACM SIGEVO http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2014/ PAPER SUBMISSION DEADLINE: March 28th, 2014 Workshop URL: http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~jsw/metaheuristic-design-patterns/MDPWorkshop2014.htm ---------------------------------------------------------- You've (presumably) received this email because you're interested in EC and/or metaheuristics in general: * Do you have an idea about how metaheuristics could be better hybridized or generated? * Have you observed some commonality (e.g. across frameworks or methodologies) that is not yet widely recognized? * Are you frustrated when researchers don’t follow best practices that are well-understood in your field? If so, then you should attend MetaDeeP 2014 – the first Workshop on Metaheuristic Design Patterns. ---------------------------------------------------------- Why Design Patterns? ---------------------------------------------------------- Over the last 20 years, Evolutionary Computation (and meta- and hyper- heuristics in general) has flourished, spawning an enormous variety of algorithms, operators and representations.The history of science and mathematics demonstrates that such proliferation is inevitable in a growing field, but that in order to progress non-incrementally it is periodically necessary to obtain a unifying perspective. Existing EC/metaheuristic frameworks provide a certain level of abstraction, but these are not generally sufficient to capture higher-level or cross-cutting concerns such as the automatic design of metaheuristics "in the large" (c.f. Dijkstra on software componentization). The "Design Patterns" revolution in 1994 was successful in addressing analogous issues in the software industry. The default level of discourse among practitioners was consequently significantly increased, and today “factory method” or “chain of responsibility” are software engineers’ lingua franca, immensely facilitating communication and design of software systems. The workshop organizers strongly believe that the EC/metaheuristics community needs and deserves a corresponding breakthrough. The domain of metaheuristics has good mathematical and conceptual foundations, so nothing precludes the creation of a coherent and useful set of concepts to help move metaheuristics up an abstraction level. For instance, hyper-heuristics can be considered as the well-known composite pattern as applied to metaheuristics. Framing recurring methodological and algorithmic themes in terms of such Metaheuristic Design Patterns (MDP) has been advocated in a recent lecture [1] and several papers [2,3]; similar desires have also been expressed elsewhere [4]. This workshop provides a forum for those interested in contributing to the MDP vision and/or willing to demonstrate its usefulness in practical and theoretical studies. ---------------------------------------------------------- Topics and Themes ---------------------------------------------------------- The workshop welcomes original submissions on all applications of design patterns to metaheuristics, which include (but are not limited to) the following topics and themes: - Applications of existing design patterns (e.g. from [5]) to metaheuristics. Some examples are given in [1,4] and on the Workshop website. - New metaheuristic design patterns: algorithms and methodologies that might be expected to be widely applicable but which have not yet been documented at the appropriate level of abstraction. - Automation of metaheuristic design via patterns. There is a wealth of pattern literature in the (Search-Based) Software Engineering community related to software automation. Much of this is directly applicable to metaheuristic design. - Pattern languages for metaheuristics. See [4] for the definitive example. Further details (and examples) are available at the Workshop website: http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~jsw/metaheuristic-design-patterns/MDPWorkshop2014.htm ---------------------------------------------------------- References ---------------------------------------------------------- [1] Jerry Swan. Metaheuristic Design Patterns. Available at http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~jsw/. [2] Krzysztof Krawiec and Jerry Swan, Pattern-guided Genetic Programming. GECCO 2013. [3] John R. Woodward and Jerry Swan, The automatic generation of mutation operators for Genetic Algorithms, GECCO 2012. [4] Natalio Krasnogor. Handbook of Natural Computation, chapter “Memetic Algorithms”. Natural Computing. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2009. [5] Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Addison-Wesley Boston, USA. 1995. ---------------------------------------------------------- Paper Submission ---------------------------------------------------------- Submitted papers should follow the ACM format, and should be between 2 and 4 pages in length. Please see "GECCO 2014 information for authors" for further details. However, note that the review process of the workshop is not double-blind and hence, authors' information should appear in the paper. All accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and appear in the GECCO workshop volume. Proceedings of the workshop will be published on CD-ROM, and distributed at the conference. Papers should be submitted by 28 March, 2014 in PDF format to: [jerry.swan -at- cs.stir.ac.uk] containing the subject line "Metaheuristic Design Patterns Workshop". ---------------------------------------------------------- Important Dates ---------------------------------------------------------- * Paper submission deadline: 28 March, 2014 * Notification of acceptance: April 15, 2014 * Camera-Ready Accepted Papers Due: April 25, 2014 * GECCO-2014: July 12-16, 2014 ---------------------------------------------------------- Workshop Chairs ---------------------------------------------------------- Jerry Swan - University of Stirling, United Kingdom. jsw –at- cs.stir.ac.uk John Clark - University of York, United Kingdom. john.clark -at- cs.york.ac.uk Krzysztof Krawiec - Poznan University of Technology, Poland. krawiec –at- cs.put.poznan.pl Chris Simons - University of the West of England, United Kingdom. chris.simons -at- uwe.ac.uk John Woodward - University of Stirling, United Kingdom. jrw –at- cs.stir.ac.uk ---------------------------------------------------------- The traditional apologies are made in the event of cross-posting. For more details, please visit the workshop website at: http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~jsw/metaheuristic-design-patterns/MDPWorkshop2014.htm ---------------------------------------------------------- GECCO is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (SIGEVO). SIG Services: 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY, 10121, USA, 1-800-342-6626 1-800-342-6626 (USA and Canada) or +212-626-0500 (Global). ----------------------------------------------------------