******************************************************************************* 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 ******************************************************************************* 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/