IMPORTANT DATES
• Abstract submission: 15 April 2020 AoE
• Paper submission: 22 April 2020 AoE
• Author notification: 28 May 2020
• Camera ready: 22 June 2020
• Tutorials/Workshops: 5 – 6 September 2020
• Conference: 7 – 9 September 2020

The Sixteenth International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN XVI) will be held in Leiden, The Netherlands on September 5-9, 2020.

PPSN was originally designed to bring together researchers and practitioners in the field of Natural Computing, the study of computing approaches which are gleaned from natural models. Today, the conference series has evolved and welcomes works on all types of iterative optimization heuristics. Notably, we also welcome submissions on connections between search heuristics and machine learning or other artificial intelligence approaches.

Submissions covering the entire spectrum of work, ranging from rigorously derived mathematical results to carefully crafted empirical studies, are invited.

Following PPSN’s unique tradition, all accepted papers will be presented during poster sessions and will be included in the proceedings. The proceedings will be published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series by Springer.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
• All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference.
• PPSN2020 proceedings will be published in by Springer LNCS; page limit is 12 pages excluding references via EasyChair. 
• The LNCS template can be downloaded here.  
• Authors’ names need not be blinded for the reviewing process.

BEST PAPER AWARD
The best paper presented at PPSN 2020 will be distinguished with a €1000 Best Paper Award sponsored by Springer.

PRE-PRINT POLICY
Prior versions of the Contribution published on non-commercial pre-print servers like ArXiv/CoRR and HAL can remain on these servers and/or can be updated with Author’s accepted version. The final published version (in pdf or html/xml format) cannot be used for this purpose. Acknowledgment needs to be given to the final publication and a link must be inserted to the published Contribution on the Publisher’s website, by inserting the DOI number of the article in the following sentence: “The final authenticated publication is available online at https://doi.org/[insert DOI]”. More information about the Conference Proceedings Guidelines is available at https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines.

RELEVANT LINKS
Please find more information about: 

PPSN programm committee: https://ppsn2020.liacs.leidenuniv.nl/program-committee/
Tutorials: https://ppsn2020.liacs.leidenuniv.nl/tutorials/
Workshops: https://ppsn2020.liacs.leidenuniv.nl/workshops/
Competitions: https://ppsn2020.liacs.leidenuniv.nl/competitions/
Student workshop: https://ppsn2020.liacs.leidenuniv.nl/student-workshop/

PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIRS
Should you have any questions about submissions to PPSN, please do not hesitate to get in touch with the program chairs:
Carola Doerr, Sorbonne University, CNRS, Paris, France 
Michael Emmerich, Leiden University, The Netherlands
Heike Trautmann, University of Münster, German

IMPORTANT DATES
• Proposal submission due: 13 November 2019
• Notification of acceptance: 27 November 2019
• Tutorials/Workshops: 5 – 6 September 2020
• Conference: 7 – 9 September 2020

SCOPE
The PPSN 2020 Organising Committee invites proposals for workshops to be held in conjunction with PPSN 2020. The workshops are intended to be forums for presenting and discussing, for example, new emerging approaches or critical reflections within a subfield. They provide an excellent opportunity to meet people with similar interests, to be exposed to cutting-edge research and to exchange ideas in an informal setting. The organisers of an accepted workshop are responsible for its coordination, publicity (e.g., for sending out call for papers/abstracts), and maintaining a webpage providing a list of accepted talks. Paper submission and reviewing is however planned to run via easychair in separate tracks that will largely be coordinated by workshop organizers. 

Moreover, organisers can decide between half-day and full-day workshops. The workshop format is also up to the organisers. However, we encourage to facilitate interactive sessions. We suggest to solicit concept papers or abstracts of not more than a few pages’ length, instead of full papers.

SUBMISSION DETAILS
Prospective workshop organisers are invited to submit a plain-text workshop proposal by email to:
aesparcia@ieee.org

The proposal should include:
• Title of the workshop
• Brief description of the workshop topics
• Potential target participants and audience
• Roughly approximated number of participants
• Rough estimate of the number of talks
• Contact details and a short CV of the organiser(s)

WORKSHOPS CHAIR:
Anna I Esparcia-Alcázar, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain

IMPORTANT DATES
• Proposal submission due: 13 November 2019
• Notification of acceptance: 27 November 2019
• Tutorials/Workshops: 5 – 6 September 2020
• Conference: 7 – 9 September 2020

SCOPE
The PPSN 2020 Organizing Committee invites proposals for tutorials to be held in conjunction with PPSN 2020. The tutorial topic should enjoy broad interest within the community, ranging from an established or emerging research topic within the field itself, or a related field, to an interesting application area. The proposed topic should facilitate a gentle introduction to the research area, but it should also cover the most important contributions in depth. The planned duration of each tutorial is 90 minutes.

SUBMISSION DETAILS
Prospective tutorials’ organizers are invited to submit a proposal by email to: 
ofersh@telhai.ac.il, with a message header following this format: TPPSN: [tutorial’s title]

The proposal should include:
• An abstract (of no more than 400 words)
• A tutorial description, featuring its syllabus
• Contact details and a short vitae of the organizer(s)
• Potential target participants and audience

TUTORIAL CHAIR:
Ofer M. Shir, Computer Science Department, Tel-Hai College, Upper Galilee, Israel

IMPORTANT DATES
• Proposal submission due: 13 November 2019
• Notification of acceptance: 27 November 2019
• Tutorials/Workshops: 5 – 6 September 2020
• Conference: 7 – 9 September 2020

SCOPE
The PPSN 2020 Organizing Committee invites proposals for competitions to be held in conjunction with PPSN 2020. This is the first time competitions are part of the PPSN and we expect that they provide new, interesting insights on methods and problems. 

Your competition should target questions that are of interest for the PPSN community. This includes established as well as emerging topics within the field itself, but also related fields and application areas. A connection to optimisation benchmarks or game problems is welcome but not necessary.

SUBMISSION DETAILS
Prospective competition organisers are invited to submit a proposal by email. Please use the following format:

● To: vanessa@modl.ai
● Title: Comp-PPSN [Competition Title]
● Content: Please include
    ○ A short description (of no more than 400 words)
    ○ Targeted research question(s)
    ○ Evaluation measure and ranking strategy
    ○ A link to the competition page/code
    ○ Short description of any sample (baseline) solutions and their performance in comparison to the state-of-the-art
    ○ Any other relevant information

COMPETITION CHAIR:
Vanessa Volz, Queen Mary University London, UK

Please note that as usual, tutorial presenters get a refund on their conference fee. In contrast to previous PPSN conferences, we also want to reward workshop organizers for their hard work. Thus, each tutorial and each workshop earn (independent of the number of organizers) half a conference fee waiver, meaning, that the conference fee for one of the organizers is reduced to 50%. You can also split this onto two people so that they each get 25% discount.