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Where is evolutionary computation going? A temporal analysis of the EC community

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Abstract

Studying an evolving complex system and drawing some conclusions from it is an integral part of nature-inspired computing; being a part of that complex system, some insight can also be gained from our knowledge of it. In this paper we study the evolution of the evolutionary computation co-authorship network using social network analysis tools, with the aim of extracting some conclusions on its mechanisms. In order to do this, we first examine the evolution of macroscopic properties of the EC co-authorship graph, and then we look at its community structure and its corresponding change along time. The EC network is shown to be in a strongly expansive phase, exhibiting distinctive growth patterns, both at the macroscopic and the mesoscopic level.

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Notes

  1. http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/∼ley/db/

  2. To give an idea of the breadth of the search, the initial seed contains 2,967 authors, and the final network comprises 6,555 authors.

  3. Volatility figures for recent years have to be interpreted as upper bounds, since the time window for considering that an author has left the field gets narrower as we approach current year.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported in part by MCyT projects TIC2003-09481-C04-04, and TIN2005-08818-C04-01. Thanks are due to Mark Newman for providing us with his code for the calculation of edge betweenness.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Lenguajes y Ciencias de la Computación, ETSI Informática, Universidad de Málaga, Campus de Teatinos, 29071, Malaga, Spain

    Carlos Cotta

  2. Dept. Arquitectura y Tecnología de Computadores, ETSI Informática y Telecomunicaciones, University of Granada, C/ Daniel Saucedo Aranda, s/n, Granada, 18071, Spain

    Juan-Julián Merelo

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  1. Carlos Cotta
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Correspondence to Carlos Cotta.

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Cotta, C., Merelo, JJ. Where is evolutionary computation going? A temporal analysis of the EC community. Genet Program Evolvable Mach 8, 239–253 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-007-9031-0

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