Professor Hidayuki Takagi  (http://www.design.kyushu-u.ac.jp/~takagi) will be presenting a Keynote talk at the ACDM08 Conference and given the interest in highly interactive evolutionary computation and user-centred intelligent systems in general we wish to hold an associated special session and a subsequent discussion session in this area.

Interactive evolutionary computing, in the main, relates to partial or complete human evaluation of the fitness of solutions generated from evolutionary search. This has been introduced where quantitative evaluation is difficult if not impossible to achieve.  Examples of application include graphic arts and animation; food engineering; hazard icon design and ergonomic furniture design.  Such applications rely upon a human-centred, subjective evaluation of the fitness of a particular design, image, taste etc as opposed to an evaluation developed from some analytic model.

Partial human interaction that complements quantitative machine-based solution evaluation is also in evidence. For instance, the user addition of new constraints in order to generate solutions that are fully satisfactory within evolutionary scheduling system or the introduction of designer-generated design solutions into selected evolving generations.

Another interactive aspect relates to the manner in which solutions can provide information to the user which supports a better understanding of the problem domain whilst helping to identify best direction for future investigation especially when operating within poorly defined problem domains.  This supports development of the problem representation in an iterative, interactive design and decision-making environments and a range of computational intelligence techniques can provide significant utility.  Such human-centric approaches generate and succinctly present information appertaining to complex relationships between the variables, objectives and constraints that define a developing / evolving design or decision space.This aspect is now leading to the development of people-centred computational environments for early-stage design and decision-making that utilise various forms of computational intelligence (www.ip-cc.org.uk)

Short papers relating to user-centric computational intelligence processes across the design and decision-making spectrum are invited. Authors will have an opportunity during the session to present the primary aspects of their research for discussion. The aim is to provide a discussive forum as opposed to the straightforward presentation of rigorous, results-oriented papers with little time for debate. Hence speculative papers are welcome in addition to more results-oriented papers describing work in progress. Participants will have the opportunity to present their work / ideas within the context of a discussive forum and must therefore be willing to accept questions and comments during their presentation.

Further reduced student registration plus possible assistance towards travel and subsistence costs will be available to post-grad students and recently graduated post-doc researchers who contribute to this session which is partially sponsored by the UK EPSRC Network in People-centred Computational Environments for Design and Decision-making (www.ip-cc.org.uk).

Submitted abstracts should be no longer than two pages (A4) at 10pt Times New Roman typeface. Please include author's names, addresses (email included) and affiliation. Margins of 20mm should be maintained all round but overall format is flexible in the first instance.
All preliminary abstracts should be submitted electronically in pdf or MS Word format.  Accepted paper abstracts will receive a layout guide for the preparation of final camera-ready papers.
All papers reviewed and accepted for the session will be published in the Conference proceedings.

Important dates:

Submission of  2 page (A4) abstracts:                12th March '08