CSSB 2013 - First International Workshop on Computational Synthesis of Systems from Building Blocks (CSSB2013)

First International Workshop on Computational Synthesis of Systems from Building Blocks (CSSB2013) at GECCO 2013, July 6, 2013, Amsterdam, Netherland
Automated computational synthesis of circuit systems, mechatronic systems, control systems, optical systems, antennas, materials, and other structures by evolutionary algorithms such as genetic programming have attracted significant interest in the past decades. There is a core common element to these problems: a set of building blocks need to be selected, tuned and assembled into a system with a particular target behavior. Candidate systems are evaluated by a simulator such as Pspice, Matlab, Dymola, Modelica, NetSim, Ansys, or VASP.
Despite significant interest, we have not seen broad industrial application of computational synthesis of systems. This is due to at least two reasons: limited computational resources / scalability of the search algorithms, and questionable trustworthiness / reliability of the synthesized designs. But there is hope: it has become easier to access large computational resources (e.g. Amazon Web Services), and recent research has uncovered techniques for synthesizing trustworthy and reliable systems. It is desirable for the evolutionary computation community to develop techniques for industrially relevant synthesis of systems.
This workshop invites leading researchers and engineers interested in computational synthesis of systems to discuss realizing real-world applications. We welcome people from the different application domains. We are especially interested in papers on:
1) Techniques to exploit massive computational resources for computational synthesis of systems. This includes parallel evolutionary algorithm models and open-source softwares based on MPI, TCP, Hadoop, etc. It could be based on current popular GP package such as open-beagle, ECJ, or GPLab.
2) Techniques to improve the trustworthiness, reliability, or overall quality of search results. This may include the degree of open-endedness, how the building blocks library is constructed, how constraints are modeled, and how multiple objectives and constraints are handled.
3) Solving problems from different application domains such as computational synthesis of analog / mixed-signal circuits, custom digital circuits, mechatronic systems, controllers, materials, proteins, and so on. Novel commercial or open-source simulators that are used by design community. Suggestion of computational synthesis problems from building blocks.
4) Improvements in scalability and quality of results via novel algorithms for computational synthesis. This may include improvements in topology search, parameter search, fitness approximation, module discovery and reuse, and computationally intensive simulation.
5) Benchmark problems for computational synthesis of systems. We welcome engineering design community to pose challenging design synthesis problems.