GECCO '09: 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 18percent 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 41,4percent. In addition, 137 submissions (25,8percent) 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.