Bioinformatics has never been as popular as it is today. The genomics revolution is generating so much data in such rapid succession that it has become difficult for biologists to decipher. In particular, there are many problems in biology that are too large to solve with standard methods. Researchers in evolutionary computation (EC) have turned their attention to these problems. They understand the power of EC to rapidly search very large and complex spaces and return reasonable solutions. While these researchers are increasingly interested in problems from the biological sciences, EC and its problem-solving capabilities are generally not yet understood or applied in the biology community.

This book offers a definitive resource to bridge the computer science and biology communities. Gary Fogel and David Corne, well-known representatives of these fields, introduce biology and bioinformatics to computer scientists, and evolutionary computation to biologists and computer scientists unfamiliar with these techniques. The fourteen chapters that follow are written by leading computer scientists and biologists who examine successful applications of evolutionary computation to various problems in the biological sciences.
* Describes applications of EC to bioinformatics in a wide variety of areas including DNA sequencing, protein folding, gene and protein classification, drug targeting, drug design, data mining of biological databases, and biodata visualization.
* Offers industrial and academic researchers in computer science, biology, and bioinformatics an important resource for applying evolutionary computation.
* Includes a detailed appendix of biological data resources.

Evolutionary computation (EC) techniques are e?cient nature-inspired pl- ning and optimization methods based on the principles of natural evolution and genetics. Due to their e?ciency and the simple underlying principles, these methods can be used for a large number of problems in the context of problem solving, optimization, andmachinelearning. Alargeandcontinuouslyincreasing number of researchers and practitioners make use of EC techniques in many - plication domains. The book at hand presents a careful selection of relevant EC applications combined with thorough examinations of techniques for a successful application of EC. The presented papers illustrate the current state of the art in the application of EC and should help and inspire researchers and practitioners to develop e?cient EC methods for design and problem solving. All papers in this book were presented during EvoWorkshops 2005, which was a varying collection of workshops on application-oriented aspects of EC. Since 1999, the format of the EvoWorkshops has proved to be very successful and well representative of the advances in the application of EC. Consequently, over the last few years, EvoWorkshops has become one of the major events addressing the application of EC. In contrast to other large conferences in the EC ?eld, the EvoWorkshops focus solely on application aspects of EC and are an important link between EC research and the application of EC in a large variety of di?erent domain

Evolutionary Computation (EC) deals with problem solving, optimization, and machine learning techniques inspired by principles of natural evolution and - netics. Just from this basic de?nition, it is clear that one of the main features of theresearchcommunityinvolvedinthestudyofitstheoryandinitsapplications is multidisciplinarity. For this reason, EC has been able to draw the attention of an ever-increasing number of researchers and practitioners in several ?elds. In its 6-year-long activity, EvoNet, the European Network of Excellence in Evolutionary Computing, has been the natural reference and incubator for that multifaceted community. EvoNet has provided logistic and material support for thosewhowerealreadyinvolvedinECbut, inthe?rstplace, ithashadacritical role in favoring the signi?cant growth of the EC community and its interactions with longer-established ones. The main instrument that has made this possible has been the series of events, ?rst organized in 1998, that have spanned over both theoretical and practical aspects of EC. Ever since 1999, the present format, in which the EvoWorkshops, a collection of workshops on the most application-oriented aspects of EC, act as satellites of a core event, has proven to be very successful and very representative of the multi-disciplinarity of EC. Up to 2003, the core was represented by EuroGP, the main European event dedicated to Genetic Programming. EuroGP has been joined as the main event in 2004 by EvoCOP, formerly part of EvoWorkshops, which has become the European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimizatio

  This book constitutes the joint refereed proceedings of six workshops, EvoWorkshops 2003, held together with EuroGP 2003 in Essex, UK in April 2003. The 63 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 109 submissions. In accordance with the six workshops covered , the papers are organized in topical sections on bioinformatics, combinatorial optimization, image analysis and signal processing, evolutionary music and art, evolutionary robotics, and scheduling and timetabling.