The Virtual Creatures Competition

The Virtual Creatures Competition will be held in the competition session at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. The contest's purpose is to highlight progress in virtual creatures research and showcase evolutionary computation's ability to craft interesting well-adapted creatures with evolved morphologies and controllers. Video entries demonstrating evolved virtual creatures will be judged by technical achievement, aesthetic appeal, innovation, and perceptual animacy (perceived aliveness).

Organizers:
Joel Lehman
Dan Lessin

Submission deadline:
June 12, 2013

Official Webpage:
www.cs.utexas.edu/~joel/virtual_creatures_contest/

The Evolutionary Art, Design, and Creativity Competition

The Evolutionary Art, Design, and Creativity Competition at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference showcases the power of evolutionary computation through human-quality artistic works or creativity enhancing experiences generated by or with the assistance of evolution. Entries can be music, images, sculptures, videos, or interactive online experiences, but are not limited to these forms of expression; the goal is that the submissions exhibit some form of independent creativity through genetic and evolutionary computation.

Organizers:
Alan Dorin
Amy K. Hoover

Submission deadline:
June 19, 2014

Official Webpage:
http://eadcc.eecs.ucf.edu

Windfarm Layout Optimization Competition

Wind farm design has long been a favored application across artificial life due to its complexity, the wake capture of a field being a difficult value to optimize analytically, and its pertinence to the world of alternative energy. We propose the following competition to create a basis of comparison for the existing algorithms and to encourage both new ways to solve the wind optimization problem and a new mindset for the optimization goal.

Organizers:
Sylvain Cussat-Blanc
Dennis Wilson
Kalyan Veeramachaneni

Submission deadline:
June 1, 2014

Webpage:
www.irit.fr/wind-competition

Permutation-based Combinatorial Optimization Problems

This is the first year that the Competition on Permutation-based Combinatorial Optimization Problems is held at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. This competition is designed with the objective of providing a first overview of the current state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms for solving permutation-based optimization problems. In this sense, we will accept population-based approaches as well as local search-based proposals. In order to evaluate the submitted algorithms, we propose a wide benchmark of instances from well known problems as well as artificially generated instances.

Organizers:
Leticia Hernando
Josu Ceberio
Alexander Mendiburu
Jose A. Lozano

Submission deadline:
June 1, 2014

Official Webpage:
www.sc.ehu.es/ccwbayes/Competition_GECCO2014

Industrial Challenge

Water covers 71% of the Earth's surface and is vital for all known forms of life. The protection of the surface water is a generally recognised political aim. The Aggerverband, a special legal Watercompany based in Gummersbach, is operating 32 sewage treatment plants purifying the wastewater of about 350,000 inhabitants in the area of 'Bergisches Land' near Cologne. For this year's GECCO Industrial Challenge the Aggerverband kindly provides data from these sensors. Goal of the GECCO 2014 Industrial Challenge is to analyze the data to develop accurate forecasting methods that allow the prediction of the emergence of ammonia.

Organizers:
Martina Friese
Andreas Fischbach
Oliver Flasch
Olaf Mersmann
Thomas Bartz-Beielstein
Klaus Walbeck

Submission Deadline:
June 22, 2014

Official Webpage:
www.spotseven.de/gecco-challenge/gecco-challenge-2014/