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Dear colleagues,

We are running two competitions this year in the major EC conferences (WCCI, GECCO). Submission deadline is still open for both venues *01 July 2016*.

We highly encourage participation in both competitions. A common platform is used to compare different algorithms with various evaluation measures.

More details can be found bellow:

*WCCI 2016: Competition on Niching Methods for Multimodal Optimization*
Web: http://www.epitropakis.co.uk/cec16-niching/competition/
DEADLINE: *01 July 2016*

The aim of the competition is to provide a common platform that encourages fair and easy comparisons across different niching algorithms. The competition allows participants to run their own niching algorithms on 20 benchmark multimodal functions with different characteristics and levels of difficulty.

*GECCO 2016 Competition on Niching Methods for Multimodal Optimization*
Web: http://www.epitropakis.co.uk/gecco2016/
DEADLINE: *01 July 2016*

In this instance of the competition, we continue the successful 2013 and 2015 competitions and rely on an unchanged problem set and similar measures. However, we try out two new aspects regarding the evaluation criteria of the participants:

+ we are including information on the resources (time, function evaluations) needed to find the global optima, not only the fraction of successes within a given time period (number of evaluations), and
+ we take into account the size of the final solution set, and reward small sets that mostly consist of the sought optima only.
Overview

The competitions are supported by the newly established IEEE CIS Task force on Multi-modal Optimization (http://www.epitropakis.co.uk/ieee-mmo/)

We are looking forward for your participation!

From the organizers, Michael.