Gary Fogel Gives Opening Keynote Lecture at the 2003 Congress on Evolutionary Computation in Canberra, Australia

Canberra, Austrailia - Dr. Gary Fogel, Vice President of Natural Selection, Inc.^®, gave the opening keynote lecture at the 2003 Congress on Evolutionary Computation, held at the Rydges Lakeside hotel in Canberra, Australia. Dr. Fogel’s keynote address, titled “Applications of Evolutionary Computation in Bioinformatics,” provided a broad overview of the problems that pharmaceutical researchers face currently, along with the potential applications of evolutionary computation that may be expected to address those problems. Approximately 400 people were in attendance at the conference, which was sponsored by the IEEE Neural Networks Society, IEAUST (an Australian organization of engineers), the Evolutionary Programming Society, and the Institute of Electrical Engineers (U.K.). In all, 389 papers were presented during the four-day meeting, representing every continent in the world with the exception of Antarctica. “The last five years have witnessed a tremendous increase in the use of evolutionary for biological problems. This was evidenced at CEC03 with approximately 15% of the papers having direct relevance to biology. It was quite exciting to provide the keynote address at this time of rapidly increasing interest in bioinformatics” said Dr. Fogel.

In addition to Gary Fogel’s keynote lecture, he also organized and co-chaired special sessions on evolutionary computation and bioinformatics, and Dr. David Fogel, CEO of Natural Selection, Inc., organized and co-chaired special sessions on evolutionary computation and games. David Fogel, who is also a member of the executive committee of the IEEE Neural Networks Society, offered: “This was perhaps the largest Congress on Evolutionary Computation since the conference started in 1999 in Washington D.C. and a great follow-up to last year’s meeting which took place in Honolulu as part of the 2002 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence. The conference organizers deserve a great deal of credit for putting together such an excellent program of superior technical quality. I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to participate in this event and share some our company’s most-recent research with the computational intelligence community.”

Gary Fogel will serve as the program chairman for next year’s Congress on Evolutionary Computation in Portland, Oregon to be held June 19-23, 2004 (www.cec2004.org) as well as general chair for the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology in La Jolla, California (www.cibcb.org) to be held October 7-8, 2004.