GEC

These proceedings contain the papers presented at the 2009 World Summit on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (2009 GEC Summit), held in Shanghai, China, June 12-14, 2009.

2009 GEC Summit is sponsored and organized by ACM SIGEVO, the Special Interest Group for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, sponsor of the annual GECCO conferences. The 2009 GEC Summit will feature the latest research and demonstrated successes in this dynamic area, including new approaches and breakthrough applications to problems in biology, medicine, engineering design, agriculture, logistics, traffic, security, scheduling, military affairs, and other fields. It maintains an impressive record of both submission totals and acceptance rate. This year there were 372 papers submitted, with 153 accepted as full papers, giving an acceptance rate of 41%. This acceptance rate represents a healthy selection pressure in order to preserve the quality of the conference, and even though the proceedings are not bound by physical limits on the number of accepted papers, the organizers have decided to keep the acceptance rate at the lower end. The 2009 GEC Summit has adopted electronic proceedings, and we are confident that our attendees will be pleased with this format, as it greatly facilitates the keeping of all conference materials and automated searching for topics of interest. The proceedings will appear in the ACM Digital Library, making them available to the world.

The 2009 GEC Summit used a strict paper review system. To reduce any bias that reviewers might have, all reviews were conducted double blind. No author's names were included in the reviewed papers. Each paper had at least 4 reviewers while each reviewer had at least 5 papers to review. About 403 researchers participated in the review process. Their work is much appreciated and is absolutely vital for the quality of the conference.

In addition to the presentation of the papers contained in these proceedings, the 2009 GEC Summit also includes free tutorials. Registered participants may attend any of the 100-minute tutorials, presented by some of the world's leading experts in evolutionary computation. Tutorials are distributed throughout the three days of the conference, allowing each participant to decide, at most time slots, to attend either a tutorial or one of several sessions in which accepted papers are presented. Tutorials are grouped into introductory level, advanced, and specialized tutorials. In general, introductory tutorials in a given area will be scheduled ahead of the advanced tutorials, allowing the interested participant to attend them both in order.