Proceedings are now available at arxiv

The deadline has been extended until May 5th, 2011 This implies an extension in the notification of acceptances in works submitted after the first deadline.

Introduction

The first International Workshop on Distributed Evolutionary Computation in Informal Environments is a half-day workshop that will be held in conjunction with CEC2011. Its main intention is to gather all people that work on distributed evolutionary computation in informal environments: non-cluster, non-grid, for instance. More explanations below.

Topics included in this workshop

Informal computing includes ways of creating computing systems which are not fixed or bound to an organization, such as:

• Parasitic or stealth computing: using computing resources without explicit authorization from the user, for instance by visiting a web page.
• Volunteer computing: the user submits resources to a pool explicitly, by running a program o visiting a web site.
• Freeriding computing: using computing resources which are free or available, to a certain extent, in the network; for instance, using Google Apps or resources such as Wolfram-Alpha. Similar to parasitic computing, except that the provider of those resources knows, but does not care (up to a certain extent).
• Ubiquitous computing: using computing power available in user devices such as mobile phones or other appliances.

Using these (and similar) kinds of computing presents its own challenges, since neither the topology nor the availability of a particular node is known; computing nodes will have different performances and capabilities (and the connection to them will too) so that evolutionary computing paradigms will have to be adapted to them to take full advantage of the system without losing the essence of evolutionary algorithm. Thus, the main topics of the workshop are (but will not be limited to):

• Performance prediction and analysis
• New computing paradigms
• Practical applications
• Implementations