This volume presents the proceedings of a workshop on evolutionary models and strategies and another workshop on parallel processing, logic, organization, and technology, both held in Germany in 1989. In the search for new concepts relevant for parallel and distributed processing, the workshop on parallel processing included papers on aspects of space and time, representations of systems, non-Boolean logics, metrics, dynamics and structure, and superposition and uncertainties. The point was stressed that distributed representations of information may share features with quantum physics, such as the superposition principle and the uncertainty relations. Much of the volume contains material on general parallel processing machines, neural networks, and system-theoretic aspects. The material on evolutionary strategies is included because these strategies will yield important and powerful applications for parallel processing machines, and open the wayto new problem classes to be treated by computers.

The challenges in ecosystem science encompass a broadening and strengthening of interdisciplinary ties, the transfer of knowledge of the ecosystem across scales, and the inclusion of anthropogenic impacts and human behavior into ecosystem, landscape, and regional models. The volume addresses these points within the context of studies in major ecosystem types viewed as the building blocks of central European landscapes. The research is evaluated to increase the understanding of the processes in order to unite ecosystem science with resource management. The comparison embraces coastal lowland forests, associated wetlands and lakes, agricultural land use, and montane and alpine forests. Techniques for upscaling focus on process modelling at stand and landscape scales and the use of remote sensing for landscape-level model parameterization and testing. The case studies demonstrate ways for ecosystem scientists, managers, and social scientists to cooperate.

Artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms both are areas of research which have their origins in mathematical models constructed in order to gain understanding of important natural processes. By focussing on the process models rather than the processes themselves, significant new computational techniques have evolved which have found application in a large number of diverse fields. This diversity is reflected in the topics which are subjects of the contributions to this volume. There are contributions reporting successful applications of the technology to the solution of industrial/commercial problems. This may well reflect the maturity of the technology, notably in the sense that 'real' users of modelling/prediction techniques are prepared to accept neural networks as a valid paradigm. Theoretical issues also receive attention, notably in connection with the radial basis function neural network. Contributions in the field of genetic algorithms reflect the wide range of current applications, including, for example, portfolio selection, filter design, frequency assignment, tuning of nonlinear PID controllers. These techniques are also used extensively for combinatorial optimisation problems.

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are metaheuristics that learn from natural collective behavior and are applied to solve optimization problems in domains such as scheduling, engineering, bioinformatics, and finance. Such applications demand acceptable solutions with high-speed execution using finite computational resources. Therefore, there have been many attempts to develop platforms for running parallel EAs using multicore machines, massively parallel cluster machines, or grid computing environments. Recent advances in general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) have opened up this possibility for parallel EAs, and this is the first book dedicated to this exciting development. The three chapters of Part I are tutorials, representing a comprehensive introduction to the approach, explaining the characteristics of the hardware used, and presenting a representative project to develop a platform for automatic parallelization of evolutionary computing (EC) on GPGPUs. The 10 chapters in Part II focus on how to consider key EC approaches in the light of this advanced computational technique, in particular addressing generic local search, tabu search, genetic algorithms, differential evolution, swarm optimization, ant colony optimization, systolic genetic search, genetic programming, and multiobjective optimization. The 6 chapters in Part III present successful results from real-world problems in data mining, bioinformatics, drug discovery, crystallography, artificial chemistries, and sudoku. Although the parallelism of EAs is suited to the single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD)-based GPU, there are many issues to be resolved in design and implementation, and a key feature of the contributions is the practical engineering advice offered. This book will be of value to researchers, practitioners, and graduate students in the areas of evolutionary computation and scientific computing.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Applied Parallel and Scientific Computing, PARA 2012, held in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2012. The 35 revised full papers presented were selected from numerous submissions and are organized in five technical sessions covering the topics of advances in HPC applications, parallel algorithms, performance analyses and optimization, application of parallel computing in industry and engineering, and HPC interval methods. In addition, three of the topical minisymposia are described by a corresponding overview article on the minisymposia topic. In order to cover the state-of-the-art of the field, at the end of the book a set of abstracts describe some of the conference talks not elaborated into full articles.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Simulated Evolution and Learning, SEAL 2012, held in Hanoi, Vietnam, in December 2012. The 50 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 91 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on evolutionary algorithms, theoretical developments, swarm intelligence, data mining, learning methodologies, and real-world applications.

This two-volume set LNCS 13398 and LNCS 13399 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2022, held in Dortmund, Germany, in September 2022. The 87 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The conference presents a study of computing methods derived from natural models. Amorphous Computing, Artificial Life, Artificial Ant Systems, Artificial Immune Systems, Artificial Neural Networks, Cellular Automata, Evolutionary Computation, Swarm Computing, Self-Organizing Systems, Chemical Computation, Molecular Computation, Quantum Computation, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence approaches using Natural Computing methods are just some of the topics covered in this field.