We are pleased to announce that Michael Affenzeller and Stefan Wagner will chair the Evolutionary Computation Software Systems (EvoSoft) Workshop at the GECCO 2012 conference. Stefan Wagner is the the project manager and head developer of the HeuristicLab optimization environment. The workshop will help to identify common efforts in the development of evolutionary computation software systems and will be a great platform to discuss cooperation potentials and synergies between different research groups.

GECCO 2012 will take place in Philadelphia, USA, from July 07-11, 2012.

• Submission deadline...

Back in September Gabriel Kronberger posted about financial analysis in the HeuristicLab Blog and showed some preliminary results for modelling the European interest rate swap yield with genetic programming. After many months of algorithm tweaking and refinement he presented the completed analysis and generated prognosis models to scientific peers at the ERCIM11 conference in London last weekend. ERCIM11 was organized by the London School of Economics, Queen Mary University of London and Birkbeck University of London.

Michael Affenzeller spent the better part of last week at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. He was invited by Carmen Paz Suárez Araujo, the university’s vice head of internationalization, to hold a guest lecture in her PhD seminar and discuss future collaboration opportunities between our research groups.

Carmen Paz and her group conduct research in the area of artificial neural networks (ANN) with a special focus on (bio-)medical applications and hybrid algorithmic variants. We found that their research on modeling Alzheimer's Disease and related forms of dementia via ANN...