Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) was the host venue for the Symposium on Evolutionary Computing and Applied Artificial Intelligence AI last week. The Symposium was co-sponsored by SUSTech’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the SUSTech Artificial Intelligence Institute (SAINT) and the Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Computational Intelligence. More than 100 experts and scholars from home and abroad attended the symposium, in which they discussed theories of evolutionary computing and future applications for AI.

Evolutionary computing is an essential field within AI and is a group-oriented and randomized search technique. The method simulates the evolutionary process of organisms in nature, which has been successful in large-scale problem solving, machine learning, self-adaptive control, artificial life, neural networks, and economic predictions.  Many scholars have been studying and applying evolutionary computing in a variety of fields such as physics and mathematics. It is hoped that evolutionary computing will play a critical and positive role in society in the future.

The attending scholars discussed wide-ranging topics such as “Simple yet Effective Many Objective Optimization Algorithms”, “Construct, Merge, Solve & Adapt: A Hybrid Approach with a Resemblance to Evolutionary Algorithms”, and “Evolutionary Many-Objective Optimization.” There were also two panel discussions about “Successful industrial applications of Evolutionary Computing” and “Challenges in basic research on Evolutionary Computing”.

This is the first symposium in the field of evolutionary computing organized by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. It provides a platform for scholars to discuss these issues, while promoting academic exchanges and cooperation between universities at home and abroad.