2020 IEEE International Conference
on Evolvable Systems (ICES)
From Biology to Hardware (and back!)

December 1 to 4, 2020, Canberra, Australia

Important Dates

  • Special Session Proposal - April 1, 2020
  • Paper Submission - August 7, 2020
  • Notification of Authors - September 4, 2020
  • Final Submission - September 18, 2020

The IEEE International Conference on Evolvable Systems (IEEE ICES) has been held, uninterrupted, since 1995 and in 2013 evolved from ICES to IEEE ICES. Following on from the successes in previous years, ICES will continue to be part of the successful IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence, providing the possibility for increased interaction between ICES and the other symposiums and workshops.

Evolvable systems encompass understanding, modelling and application of biologically inspired mechanisms to physical systems. Application areas for bio-inspired algorithms include the creation of novel physical devices/systems, novel or optimised designs for physical systems and for the achievement of adaptive physical systems. Having showcased examples from analogue and digital electronics, antennas, MEMS chips, optical systems as well as quantum circuits in the past, the IEEE ICES has become the leading conference for showcasing techniques and applications of evolvable systems.

ICES 2020 Call for Papers

IEEE SSCI 2020 Conference Homepage

Topics include but are not limited to:

Evolvable Systems Techniques:

  • Intrinsic/Extrinsic/Mixtrinsic Evolution
  • On-chip Bio-inspired Approaches
  • Autonomous Systems
  • Self-reconfigurable and Adaptive Systems
  • Novel Evolvable Hardware Architectures (e.g. FPGAs, FPAAs)
  • Self-repairing, Fault-tolerant Systems
  • Self-monitoring and Self-testing
  • Electronic Circuit Synthesis and Optimization
  • Artificial Immune Systems
  • Artificial Generative Development
  • Formal Hardware Models
  • Bio-inspired Modeling

Evolvable Systems Applications:

  • Intrinsic Fault-tolerance
  • Sensor Design
  • Antenna Design
  • Hardware System Optimization
  • Analogue & Digital Electronic Design Optimization (Topology & Parameters)
  • Evolutionary Robotics
  • Autonomic and Organic Computing
  • DNA Computing
  • MEMS and Nanotechnology
  • Quantum Computing
  • Machine Vision
  • Medical Diagnosis
  • Mechanical Design Optimization (Bridges, Buildings, Spacecraft, Machines, Lenses, Solar Cells)

Special Sessions

Evolutionary Systems for Semiconductor Design, Simulation and Fabrication

Over the past 30 years, electronic devices have rapidly improved in performance and function density enabled by smart design and fabrication techniques that have allowed the continuous shrinking of technology sizes (Moores Law). However, with these advances new problems have appeared. Intrinsic device variations become prevalent and fabrication yields decrease; the complexity of designs make standard design and test procedures less effective; the unreliability of fundamental components means designs have to take this into account for their final implementations etc.

Fundamental components of electronics systems need to be produced within this complex, unreliable, ever changing environment. Evolutionary methods have been shown to provide novel and competitive results within this field.

This Special Session focuses on how evolutionary systems can assist with these fundamental issues. It covers a diverse range of research areas, including but not limited to: device modeling, fabrication and measurement; place and route schemes; implementations with potential reconfigurable options to alleviate post-fabrication issues; fault-tolerant implementations. These might be applied to digital, analogue or mixed-signal systems.

The special session is organized by (please email for further information):

Andy Tyrrell, University of York, UK, Email: andy.tyrrell@york.ac.uk

Martin Trefzer, University of York, UK, Email: martin.trefzer@york.ac.uk

Evolutionary Robotics

Evolutionary Robotics (ER) targets to apply evolutionary computation algorithms to automatically design the control and/or mechanical body of both real and simulated autonomous robots.

Topics of interest for the Evolutionary Robotics special session include (but are not restricted to):

  • Evolution of robot learning and adaptation.
  • Evolution of communication, cooperation and competition between robots.
  • Co-evolution of robot morphology and robot control giving rise to self-designing, self-reconfigurable, self-repairing and self-reproducing robots.
  • Evolution of robot systems aimed at real-world applications as in aerial robotics, space exploration, industry, search and rescue, robot companions, entertainment and games.
  • Evolution of controllers on board real robots while being in operation.
  • The use of evolution for artistic exploration including robots.
  • Evolution applied to shrink the reality-gap between simulation and real performance of robots.

The special session is organized by (please email for further information):

Kyrre Glette, University of Oslo, Norway, Email: kyrrehg@ifi.uio.no

Jim Torresen, University of Oslo, Norway, Email: jimtoer@ifi.uio.no

Evolutionary Substrates for Artificial Intelligence and Unconventional Computing

As we approach the miniaturisation limits of conventional electronics, alternatives to silicon transistors -- the building blocks of the multitude of today’s electronic devices -- are being hotly pursued. Unconventional computing exploits unconventional material substrates within which to perform computation. Practical unconventional computing devices can comprise multiple unconventional substrates, each performing the part of the overall computation that it does best.

For example, a bacterial system may be combined with an optical system to solve the `wiring problem' of composing components, or a reaction-diffusion chemical system may be combined with a microfluidic droplet system to provide a range of contexts for the reactions. In even the simplest cases, an unconventional substrate is often combined with a conventional digital computer, for example carbon nanotubes in an evolutionary algorithm loop controlled by a traditional PC.

Bio-inspired algorithms and unconventional computing approaches have been widely used in the design and optimization of physical systems represented by unconventional substrates. The aim of the special session is to bring together a wide variety of researchers who use bio-inspired algorithms or principles to engineer or optimize physical systems. Many of these researchers are facing similar problems in their particular systems and the workshop aims to bring these people together to share experiences and to allow exchange of ideas and techniques.

The special session is organized by (please email for further information):

Stefano Nichele, University of Oslo, Norway, Email: Stefano.Nichele@hioa.no

Martin Trefzer, University of York, UK, Email: martin.trefzer@york.ac.uk

Please forward your special session proposals to Conference Co-Chairs.

Conference Co-Chairs

Andy M Tyrrell (andy.tyrrell@york.ac.uk)

Martin A Trefzer (martin.trefzer@york.ac.uk)

Provisional Program Committee

Andrew Adamatzky, University of the West of England, UK
Simon Bale, University of York, UK
Peter Bentley, University College London, UK
Michal Bidlo, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic
Stefano Cagnoni, University of Parma, Italy
Rolf Drechsler, University of Bremen, Germany
R. Tim Edwards, Multigig Inc., USA
Gusz Eiben, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Stuart J. Flockton, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
John Gallagher, Wright State University, USA
Kyrre Glette, University of Oslo, Norway
Garrison Greenwood, Portland State University, USA
Pauline C Haddow, NTNU, Norway
David M. Halliday, University of York, UK
James Hereford, Murray State University, USA
Arturo Hernandez-Aguirre, Centro de Investigacion en Matematicas, Mexico
Peter Jamieson, Miami University, USA
Tatiana Kalganova, Brunel University, UK
Paul Kaufmann, University of Paderborn, Germany
Krzystof Kepa, National University of Ireland, Ireland
Didier Keymeulen, JPL, USA
Gul Khan, NWFP UET Peshawar, Pakistan
Julian Miller, University of York, UK
J Manuel Moreno Arostegui, Technical University of Catalunya, Spain
Jean-Marc Philippe, CEA LIST, France
Lukas Sekanina, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic
Stephen Smith, University of York, UK
Adrian Stoica, JPL, USA
Gianluca Tempesti, University of York, UK
Christof Teuscher, Portland State University, USA
Jon Timmis, University of York, UK
Jim Torresen, University of Oslo, Norway
Martin Trefzer, University of York, UK
Gunnar Tufte, NTNU, Norway
Andy M. Tyrrell, University of York, UK
Andres Upegui, HEIG-VD Switzerland
Zdenek Vasicek, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic
James Walker, University of York, UK
Alan Winfield, University of the West of England, UK
Xin Yao, University of Birmingham, UK
Sanyou Zeng, China University of Geoscience, China