In November, 2004, I was elected Chair of the ACM's new Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (SIGEVO), which began operation in January, 2005. My term as chair expired in June, 2007, but I continue to serve on the executive committee, having been elected to a second term for 2009-2015 and a third term for 2016-2021. Please bookmark the SIGEVO web pages for many new developments concerning this important society. I had formerly been serving as chair, since 2001, of its predecessor organization, the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation. I had been a member of the ISGEC's Executive Board since its formation, following a term as a member of the Executive Board of the International Society for Genetic Algorithms, one of the predecessor organizations of ISGEC. In 2004, I was elected a Senior Fellow of the ISGEC (see story at Fellow Press Release and photos at ISGEC Fellows Page. Through 2005, ISGEC was the sponsor of the annual GECCO (Genetic and Evolutionary Computation COnference) and of the biennial Foundations of Genetic Algorithms (FOGA) Workshop (see ISGEC web page for the current conference pages). They are now sponsored by ACM SIGEVO. ISGEC was also the key supporter of the journals Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press) and Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (Springer). I was Vice-Chair of GECCO-2000 (Las Vegas, July 8-12, 2000) and was General Chair of GECCO-2001, San Francisco, CA, July 7-11, 2001). I am working with co-organizers to plan the first SIGEVO-sponsored conference in Asia, the GEC Summit, for May of 2009.
In June, 1996, under sponsorship of ISGA and the Case Center, I organized the first conference on evolutionary computation to be held in the former Soviet Union, at the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences. This conference, the First International Conference on Evolutionary Computation and its Applications (EVCA'96), drew 20 Western experts together with about 50 scientists from the Former Soviet Union.
I was general co-chair of the first ACM SIGEVO-sponsored conference in Asia, the International Summit on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GEC Summit), in Shanghai, June, 2009. Over 380 papers were submitted for review for presentation at the conference, and over 100 appear in the conference's proceedings, in the ACM Digital Library. A set of tutorials was presented by leading Western experts, and the meeting also introduced those experts to the rapidly growing evolutionary computation research community in China and other Asian countries.
MSU's GARAGe was proud to be the host of ICGA-97 -- the Seventh International Conference on Genetic Algorithms, July 19-23, 1997, here in East Lansing. For information about that, see the ICGA web page. I served as General Chair of the 7th ICGA.
For information about internationally oriented professional activities, please see the International section.