Alan Freitas, Associate Professor at the Computing Department - UFOP, and students Thiago Macedo and Rodolfo Ayala received the 2019 Best Article Award for Genetic Algorithms at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) held in Prague in July of this year.

GECCO is the major conference in the field of genetic and evolutionary computing, joining the International Conference on Genetic Algorithms (ICGA) and the Annual Genetic Programming Conference (GP). Since 1999, the event has exhibited and awarded works related to robotics, digital entertainment technologies, genetic programming, evolutionary hardware, among other themes.

The award-winning article, "Multi-heap Constraint Handling in Gray Box Evolutionary Algorithms", deals with evolutionary computation, research area that suggests intelligent mathematical strategies for known computing problems.

Professor Alan says he is honored with the award once it highlights his article as a reference. "Evolutionary computing tends to be taught in undergraduate courses as a compulsory subject and as an elective one. It means that by 2020 our contribution to the area will likely be in the didactic materials around the world," he says.

The article is available at the digital library of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Source: UFOP's website