Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who attended GI 2016! It was a great workshop! So many great papers and ideas and discussions; it feels like there are some really exciting times to come in GI.

Congratulations to Unai Garciarena and Roberto Santana for winning the best paper award and to Markus Wagner for winning the best presentation award !

Photos from the event are now available on the website.

Speed Session

We’re running a slightly experimental “speed session” this year, starting at 1710.

People will be given the opportunity to stand up and talk for 2-3 minutes about an idea; a question; an observation; a problem with GI; a difficulty they’re experiencing in their research; an opportunity to collaborate, etc. etc.

Hopefully this will be a fun way to end the workshop and also spark conversations that will extend into cafes, bars, restaurants, and the rest of the conference.

Slides are entirely optional – just turn up ready to give a quick pitch!

This Year’s Keynote Details!

What Can GI Learn From Static Analysis?

Westley Weimer, University of Virginia

In this keynote we argue that Genetic Improvement is necessarily a dynamic
analysis. Using that lens, it is fruitful to look at the popular
approach of combining concrete and symbolic (concolic) execution in
program analysis, which improves static analyses by adding dynamic
elements. Can GI adopt these lessons in reverse, improving a dynamic
analysis by adding static elements? We argue that the answer is “yes”,
and use recent work in GI for graphics shaders, test cases and program
repair to highlight how representations, mutation operators and fitness
functions may benefit from static elements. We conclude with another take
on where GI is as a subfield, comparing it to previous surges in popularity
for alias analysis and fault localization, and draw conclusions for GI
going forward.

Social Event for All Speakers

We are happy to announce that there will be a social event for all speakers at the workshop, to be held at 1930 on Wednesday 20th July (after the workshop) at YaYa’s Denver. Full directions can be found here.

Funding Opportunity For Students

We will offer up to 5 scholarships to cover registration costs for GECCO and all associated workshops for students whose work is accepted to the GI workshop. Priority will be given based on the student’s need and submission quality.

Students applying for a scholarship should submit a first-author regular paper to the workshop (up to 8 pages long). Moreover, their supervisor should send a one-paragraph note of recommendation to geneticimprovementofsoftware@gmail.com listing:
– the student’s area of work.
– the supervisor’s support of the student’s application.

Thanks to the kind folks at GrammaTech for their support of these scholarships!

Social Event

We’re delighted to announce that speakers at GI 2016 will be invited to a social event. Here are the speakers from last year having lunch in Madrid:

Discuss your PhD work with Senior Academics

At GI 2016 we will be offering one-on-one time for PhD students to talk to senior members of the field. This is a great opportunity to discuss your work and career with academic researchers experienced in GI, GP, and Evolutionary Computation, including: Wolfgang Banzhaf, Gabriela Ochoa, Chris Simons, Westley Weimer, and John Woodward.

Keynote Announcement

We are happy to announce that Westley Weimer, an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, will give a keynote at GI-2016. His work has led to over eight thousand citations and several awards, including two ‘Humies’ for his work on using Genetic Improvement for bug fixing.

Call For Papers

The GI 2016 CFP is now available as a PDF and online. The submission date is April 3rd.

What is GI 2016?

GI 2016 is an international  workshop on the improvement of software (for example, bug-fixing or execution time optimisation) using heuristic search and related techniques. The workshop will be held at GECCO 2016 in Denver, Colorado, and builds upon the great success of last year’s workshop, GI 2015. GECCO runs from July 20th to July 24th 2016.

Journal Special Issue

One of the GI 2015 organisers, Justyna Petke, is organising a special issue of the GPEM journal  on GI! Here’s the CFP. See also the PDF from Springer.