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Proceedings of the 11th Annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation

These proceedings contain the papers presented at the 11th Annual Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2009), held in Montreal, Canada, July 8-12, 2009. 
 
After 2007, when GECCO was held in London, UK, this is the second time GECCO has been held outside the U.S. The generally high number of submissions of previous events has been maintained: 531 papers have been submitted for review, which is an increase of about 18% when compared to last year. Of these 531 papers, 220 were accepted as eight-page publications and 25 minutes presentations at the conference, yielding an acceptance ratio of 41,4%. In addition, 137 submissions (25,8%) have been accepted for poster presentations with two-page abstracts included in the proceedings. Last year, GECCO successfully moved over to electronic proceedings, and we continued with this publishing strategy as it greatly facilitates the handling of all conference materials. 
 
GECCO has lived up to its motto of one conference, many mini-conferences. This year, there were 15 separate tracks that operated independently from each other. Each track had its own track chair(s) and individual program committee. A member of one track's program committee was not allowed to simultaneously be a member of another track's committee. To reduce any bias reviewers might have, all reviews were conducted double blind, no authors' names were included in the reviewed papers. About 600 researchers participated in the reviewing process. We want to thank them for all their work, which is highly appreciated and absolutely vital for the quality of the conference. 
 
Track chairs have been asked to not accept more than 50% of their submissions as full papers. An appropriate acceptance rate is important in order to preserve the quality of the conference. Even though we were not bound by strong physical or environmental limitations on the number of accepted papers, we strove to keep our acceptance rate at the lower end. The scientific quality of the conference as well as that of the proceedings also is ensured by principles laid down in the GECCO by-laws of SIGEVO: (i) The GECCO conference shall be a broad-based conference encompassing the whole field of genetic and evolutionary computation. (ii) Papers will be published and presented as part of the main conference proceedings only after being peer reviewed. No invited papers shall be published (except for those of up to three invited plenary speakers). (iii) The peer review process shall be conducted consistent with the principle of division of powers performed by a multiplicity of independent program committees, each with expertise in the area of the paper being reviewed. (iv) The determination of the policy for the peer review process for each of the conference's independent program committees and the reviewing of papers for each program committee shall be performed by persons who occupy their positions by virtue of meeting objective and explicitly stated qualifications based on their previous scientific research activity or applications activity. (v) Emerging areas within the field of genetic and evolutionary computation shall be actively encouraged and incorporated in the activities of the conference by providing a semi-automatic method for their inclusion into the activities of the conference (with some procedural flexibility being extended to such emerging new areas). (vi) The percentage of submitted papers that are accepted as regular papers (i.e., papers other than poster papers) shall not exceed 50%. 
 
In addition to the presentation of the papers contained in these proceedings, GECCO-2009 also included free tutorials, workshops, a series of sessions on Evolutionary Computation in Practice, various competitions, late-breaking papers, and a job shop.