CFP: EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION IN MEDICINE

[Moshe Sipper]

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                        SECOND CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
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     Special Issue of the Journal "Artificial Intelligence in Medicine"
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                        (Published by Elsevier)

              Theme: EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION IN MEDICINE
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     Guest-Editors: Eytan Ruppin, James A. Reggia, and Moshe Sipper

                    Tel-Aviv U.,  Univ. Maryland,  EPFL -- Lausanne


  BACKGROUND

  The idea of applying the biological principle of natural evolution to
  artificial systems, introduced more than four decades ago, has seen
  impressive growth in the past few years. Usually grouped under the
  term "evolutionary algorithms" or "evolutionary computation,"
  we find the domains of genetic algorithms, evolution strategies,
  evolutionary programming, and genetic programming.  Central to all
  these different methodologies is the idea of solving problems by
  evolving an initially random population of possible solutions, through
  the application of "genetic" operators, such that in time increasingly "fit"
  (i.e., better) solutions emerge.  Evolutionary algorithms have been
  successfully applied to numerous problems from different domains,
  including optimization, automatic programming, machine learning, and
  economics.  As evolutionary computation studies have advanced during the 
  last several years, there has been an increasing interest in
  adopting them to investigate a wide range of domains in medicine, ranging
  from the modeling of the immune system to epidemiological studies of disease
  spread, population genetics, and more generally, as optimization and
  classification tools for improved diagnosis and decision-making systems
  in medicine.

  OBJECTIVES OF THE SPECIAL ISSUE

  The objective of this special issue on evolutionary computation in medicine
  is to report on the recent studies in this field. The main goal is to
  increase the awareness of the  AI medical community to this research,
  currently primarily carried out by members of the evolutionary computation 
  community. By bringing together a series of evolutionary computation
  papers we strive to produce a contemporary overview 
  of the kinds of problems and solutions that this growing research field 
  has generated, and to point to promising future avenues of research.
  The papers are expected to cover one or more of the following 
  three primary themes:
  
  -- Using evolutionary algorithms to study and model basic questions 
     in medical research.

  -- Applications of evolutionary computation algorithms to medical
     diagnosis and management, with emphasis on a systematic comparison of
     the latter with other existing methods. 
    
  -- Methodological issues involved in applying evolutionary computation
     to study problems in medicine, including
     obtaining sufficient data and normalizing it, methods for reducing
     the search space dimension, choices between different evolutionary
     computation techniques, and testing and validating the results.

  
  TIMELINE

  All submitted manuscripts will be subject to a rigorous review 
  process. The special issue will include five (5) papers of 15-20 pages
  each, plus an editorial. A double issue will be considered in the
  case of sufficient papers worthy of publication.
  Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance
  with the journal "submission guidelines," which are available on request,
  and may also be retrieved from http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/aimed.

  February 15, 1999       Submission of tentative title and brief abstract 
                          to declare intention to submit paper. This
                          should be done electronically, to: 
                             
                          ruppin at math.tau.ac.il.

  March 15, 1999          Receipt of full papers. Three copies of a manuscript
                          should be sent to:

                          Eytan Ruppin
                          Department of Computer Science
                          School of Mathematics
                          Tel-Aviv University
                          Tel-Aviv, Israel, 69978.
                          
  August 1, 1999          Notification of acceptance

  October 1, 1999         Receipt of final version of manuscripts

  Mid  2000               Publication of AIM special issue