Riccardo Poli - A Field Guide to Genetic Programming

The authors are experts in genetic programming with long and distinguished track records, and over 50 years of combined experience in both theory and practice in GP, with collaborations extending over a decade.

Riccardo Poli is a Professor in the Department of Computing and Electronic Systems at Essex. He started his academic career as an electronic engineer doing a PhD in biomedical image analysis to later become an expert in the field of EC. He has published around 240 refereed papers and a book (Langdon and Poli, 2002) on the theory and applications of genetic programming, evolutionary algorithms, particle swarm optimisation, biomedical engineering, brain-computer interfaces, neural networks, image/signal processing, biology and psychology. He is a Fellow of the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (2003), a recipient of the EvoStar award for outstanding contributions to this field (2007), and an ACM SIGEVO executive board member (20072013). He was co-founder and co-chair of the European Conference on GP (19982000, 2003). He was general chair (2004), track chair (2002, 2007), business committee member (2005), and competition chair (2006) of ACMs Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, co-chair of the Foundations of Genetic Algorithms Workshop (2002) and technical chair of the International Workshop on Ant Colony Optimisation and Swarm Intelligence (2006). He is an associate editor of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines , Evolutionary Computation and the International Journal of Computational Intelligence Research . He is an advisory board member of the Journal on Artificial Evolution and Applications and an editorial board member of Swarm Intelligence . He is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College, an EU expert evaluator and a grant-proposal referee for Irish, Swiss and Italian funding bodies.

W. B. Langdon was research officer for the Central Electricity Research Laboratories and project manager and technical coordinator for Logica before becoming a prolific, internationally recognised researcher (working at UCL, Birmingham, CWI and Essex). He has written two books, edited six more, and published over 80 papers in international conferences and journals. He is the resource review editor for Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines and a member of the editorial board of Evolutionary Computation . He has been a co-organiser of eight international conferences and workshops, and has given nine tutorials at international conferences. He was elected ISGEC Fellow for his contributions to EC. Dr Langdon has extensive experience designing and implementing GP systems, and is a leader in both the empirical and theoretical analysis of evolutionary systems. He also has broad experience both in industry and academic settings in biomedical engineering, drug design, and bioinformatics.

Nicholas F. McPhee is a Full Professor in Computer Science in the Division of Science and Mathematics, University of Minnesota, Morris. He is an associate editor of the Journal on Artificial Evolution and Applications , an editorial board member of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines , and has served on the program committees for dozens of international events. He has extensive expertise in the design of GP systems, and in the theoretical analysis of their behaviours. His joint work with Poli on the theoretical analysis of GP (McPhee and Poli, 2001; Poli and McPhee, 2001) received the best paper award at the 2001 European Conference on Genetic Programming, and several of his other foundational studies continue to be widely cited. He has also worked closely with biologists on a number of projects, building individual-based models to illuminate genetic interactions and changes in the genotypic and phenotypic diversity of populations.