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Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines - Call for Papers: Special issue on Trust, Trustworthiness, and Evolvable Systems

This special issue will focus on the trustworthiness of evolvable systems, and how trust comes into play in how we interact with them. 

Some researchers and practitioners might consider it to be appropriate to apply evolutionary methods without worrying about trust, on the assumption that those who are making policy decisions about applications (in companies, governments, or other areas of AI) will handle trust-related concerns. In this special issue we are opening up a discussion on the perspective that, as with privacy-by-design, these facets might be best not considered as afterthoughts, but as part of the core design process, and therefore an important concern to researchers and practitioners in evolvable systems.    

We are therefore inviting papers that explore and contribute to the discussion on questions such as:

  • How do people make trustworthiness judgments about systems that evolve or have been evolved?
  • What are the features of evolvable systems that make trusting them a challenge?
  • What are the challenges in achieving trustworthy evolvable systems? How might we achieve trustworthiness-by-design in evolvable systems?
  • How can trust in evolvable systems be re-established, once lost?
  • Since these evolvable systems are socio-technical in nature (i.e. we live with them, now, and will continue to do so), what does that tell us about trust and about evolution?
  • Noting that there will likely be similar but also quite different challenges in considering systems that continuously evolve, (e.g. through their interactions with people) and solutions that are the result of an evolutionary process, how should we approach these challenges?

The scope of these questions includes both evolution for modelling “real” evolvable systems (e.g. evolutionary game theory) and designing “artificial” evolvable systems (e.g. evolutionary computation). We are interested in exploring to what extent, and how, trust and trustworthiness are relevant in evolutionary social robotics, evolutionary optimisation, evolutionary design, evolutionary game theory, and evolutionary socio-technical systems.

Key Dates

  • Submission Deadline: 1 September 2021
  • Reviews: 1 November 2021
  • Revision Deadline:15 January 2022
  • Final Acceptance Notification: 28 February 2022

Guest Editors

  • Anikó Ekárt, Aston University, Birmingham, UK (a.ekart@aston.ac.uk)
  • Peter R. Lewis, Aston University, Birmingham, UK (p.lewis@aston.ac.uk)

Author instructions

Authors are encouraged to submit high-quality, original work that has neither appeared in, nor is under consideration by other journals. All papers will be reviewed following standard reviewing procedures for the Journal. Papers must be prepared in accordance with the Journal guidelines: www.springer.com/10710 (this opens in a new tab).

Submit manuscripts to: http://GENP.edmgr.com (this opens in a new tab)  Select “Trust, Trustworthiness, and Evolvable Systems” as the article type or when asked if the article is for a special issue.

Springer provides a host of information about publishing in a Springer Journal on our Journal Author Resources (this opens in a new tab) page, including  FAQs (this opens in a new tab)Tutorials (this opens in a new tab)along with Help and Support. (this opens in a new tab)

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