Postscript to ICGA97

We had over 250 people registered for the conference. By our count, we had 108 people from outside of the U.S.A, representing 26 countries, attend ICGA97 making this conference one with a distinct international flavor. 116 authors attended the conference, along with over 90 students. Also, due to generous support from NRL and ISGA, over $11,000 was provided as travel aid for students to attend this year's ICGA. 102 papers were available in the proceedings and most, thought not all, were presented at the conference itself. We also had 14 tutorials on the Saturday before the conference, 6 workshops during the conference and a host of BOF's during the evenings on whatever topics folks found interesting.

The keynote speakers were very well received:

• Andy Ellington . Andy gave a splendid talk about his work in "combinatorial biochemistry", especially as that relates to work in Evolutionary Computation. For example, he discussed issues on DNA computing and the difficulties such work faces given the high error rate it will encounter.
• Larry Fogel . Stuart Kauffman was scheduled to speak but was unable to attend due to some last minute schedule conflicts. Quite luckily, we were able to get Larry Fogel to come and talk to us about his work. He gave a very interesting, and entertaining, talk on his work on the Valuated State Space, as well as looks both backwards and forwards on work in Evolutionary Computation. He also gave us our first rendition of a GA theme song, the words of which I will make available here soon.
• Finally, John Holland was able to join us. He gave an overview of some of the problems in learning, how they have been addressed (going all the way back to Samuel's checkers program) and the issues we need to address as we push forward with research on Evolutionary Computation.

• Ken DeJong , of the George Mason University GAG
• Dave Goldberg, of the Univ. of Illinois IlliGAL
• Erik Goodman , of the Michigan State GARAGe

The "Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Genetic Algorithms" is available from Morgan Kaufmann Publishers , ISBN 1-55860-487-1.

If you have any comments you'd like to share mail them to me and I'll add them to a list of comments .

Thanks to everyone who worked so hard to put the conference together, especially Tim Hinds and Joyce Foley of the Case Center, and all the volunteers who helped with all the behind the scenes work. Also, many thanks to both the ICGA97 Organizing and Program committees who worked so hard to put this all together.

See you all again soon.