Call for Papers
IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation
Special Issue on
Evolving Developmental Systems
 
     (http://www.soft-computing.de/TEVC_EDS_CFP.pdf)

AIMS and SCOPE

Computational modeling of biological development has received increasing 
interest in evolutionary computation, artificial life and computational 
systems biology. In the evolutionary computation community, evolutionary 
algorithms using an indirect coding or generative coding are believed to 
be more scalable in evolving highly complex systems, compared to those 
using a direct coding. The scalability of such developmental systems can 
mainly be attributed to the fact that the genetic information in the 
genotype can be reused more than once during the developmental process and 
that many constraints, particularly environmental constraints, can be 
incorporated in the phenotype without explicit encoding. On the other 
hand, due to the nonlinear nature of the genotype-phenotype mapping of 
such indirect or generative representations, the efficiency of 
evolutionary search may seriously degrade. 

A large body of research work on computational developmental systems has 
also originated from the need to modeling the early development of the 
body plan and nervous systems in artificial life research. Developmental 
models in different research may have quite different abstraction-levels 
of biological development, ranging from a set of re-writing rules to gene 
regulatory network model including metabolic reactions. In particular, 
developmental models based on the early morphogenesis of multi-cellular 
organisms have shown several attractive properties such as 
self-organization and self-repair. These systems have been applied 
successfully to solving engineering problems such as circuit design and 
multi-robot systems. With the recent rapid advances in systems biology and 
bioinformatics, understanding of developmental processes in biology has 
been enhanced greatly, which will definitely promote research on 
developmental systems in evolutionary computation and artificial life.

THEMES
 
This special issue aims to promote a strong interdisciplinary integration 
of expertise from researchers in evolutionary computation, artificial life 
as well as computational biology. Topics include but are not limited to:   

Scalable evolutionary algorithms using indirect or generative encoding
Evolution of body plans and / or nervous systems using a developmental 
approach
Self-organizing systems based on genetic and cellular mechanisms
Developmental approaches to engineering design, e.g., circuits design and 
structural design
Analysis of evolvability and robustness of developmental systems
Evolving gene regulatory networks
Benchmarking evolutionary developmental systems 

SUBMISSIONS

Manuscripts should be prepared according to the Information for Authors 
section of the journal found at http://ieee-cis.org/pubs/tec/authors/ and 
submissions should be done through the journal website: 
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tevc-ieee/ clearly marking “EDS Special 
Issue Paper” as comments to the Editor-in-Chief.

Submitted papers will be reviewed by at least three different expert 
reviewers. Submission of a manuscript implies that it is the authors’ 
original unpublished work and is not being submitted for possible 
publication elsewhere.

IMPORTANT DATES

March 31, 2010: Submission deadline 
July 31, 2010: Notification of the first round review 
September 30, 2010: Revision due 
November 30, 2010: Final notice of acceptance / reject 
January 3, 2011: Final manuscript due 

Please pass this information on to interested colleagues. For further 
information, contact one of the following guest editors.

GUEST EDITORS
 
Dr. Yaochu Jin
Honda Research Institute Europe
Carl-Legien-Str. 30
63073 Offenbach, Germany
yaochu.jin@honda-ri.de

Prof. Andy Tyrrell
Department of Electronics
University of York
amt@ohm.york.ac.uk