to be held as part of the

   2011 GENETIC AND EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION CONFERENCE (GECCO-2011)

                  July 12-16, 2011 (Tuesday-Saturday)
                       Dublin, Ireland
                       Organized by ACM SIGEVO
                       www.sigevo.org/GECCO-2011/

PAPER SUBMISSION DEADLINE FOR WORKSHOP: April 7, 2011

Workshop URL: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/ecomass/

Evolutionary computation (EC) and multi-agent systems and simulation (MASS) both involve populations of agents. EC is a learning technique by which a population of individual agents adapt according to the selection pressures exerted by an environment; MASS seeks to understand how to coordinate the actions of a population of (possibly selfish) autonomous agents that share an environment so that some outcome is achieved. Both EC and MASS have top-down and bottom-up features. For example, some aspects of multi-agent system engineering (e.g., mechanism design) are concerned with how top-down structure can constrain or influence individual decisions. Similarly, most work in EC is concerned with how to engineer selective pressures to drive the evolution of individual behavior towards some desired goal. Multi-agent
simulation (also called agent-based modeling) addresses the bottom-up issue of how collective behavior emerges from individual action.
Likewise, the study of evolutionary dynamics within EC (for example in coevolution) often considers how population-level phenomena emerge from individual-level interactions. Thus, at a high level, we may view EC and MASS as examining and utilizing analogous processes. It is therefore natural to consider how knowledge gained within EC may be relevant to MASS, and vice versa; indeed, applications and techniques from one field have often made use of technologies and algorithms from the other field.
Studying EC and MASS in combination is warranted and has the potential to contribute to both fields.

The goal of this workshop is to facilitate the examination and
development of techniques at the intersection of evolutionary
computation and multi-agent systems and simulation.

The ECoMASS workshop welcomes original submissions in the theory and practice on all aspects of Evolutionary Computation and Multi-Agent Systems and Simulation, which include (but are not limited to) the following topics and themes:

-Multi-agent systems and agent-based models utilizing evolutionary
computation
-Optimization of multi-agent systems and agent-based models using
evolutionary computation
-Evolutionary computation models which rely not on explicit fitness
functions but rather implicit fitness functions defined by the
relationship to other individuals / agents
-Applications utilizing MASS and EC in combination
-Biological agent-based models (usually called individual-based
models) involving evolution
-Evolution of cooperation and altruism
-Genotypic representation of the complex phenotypic strategies of MASS
-Evolutionary learning within MASS (including Baldwinian learning and phenotypic plasticity)
-Emergence and feedbacks
-Open-ended strategy spaces and evolution
-Adaptive individuals within evolving populations

*Paper Submission
Each accepted paper will be presented orally at the workshop and
distributed in the workshop proceedings to all GECCO attendees.
Authors should follow the format of the GECCO manuscript style; refer to http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2011/ for details. Manuscripts should not exceed 8 pages. Papers should be submitted by 7 April, 2011 in PostScript or PDF format to: wrand@umd.edu or
forrest@u.northwestern.edu

*Important Dates
Paper submission deadline: 7 April, 2011
Notification of acceptance: 14 April, 2011
Final Papers Due: 26 April, 2011
Registration Deadline: 2 May, 2011

*Workshop Chairs
Bill Rand, University of Maryland
Forrest Stonedahl, Northwestern University

*Program Committee of ECoMASS 2011
Rick Riolo, University of Michigan
Matt Knudson, Carnegie Mellon University
Jim Reggia, University of Maryland
Michael North, Argonne National Laboratory
Robert G. Reynolds, Wayne State University
Tina Yu, Memorial University of Newfoundland

GECCO is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (SIGEVO). SIG Services: 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY, 10121, USA, 1-800-342-6626 (USA and Canada) or +212-626-0500 (Global).