Introduction

The 13th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN XIII) will be organized by the Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia, and held at the Ljubljana Exhibition and Convention Centre on September 13-17, 2014. This biennial conference aims to bring together researchers and practitioners in the field of Natural Computing.

Natural Computing is the study of computational systems that use ideas and get inspiration from natural systems, including biological, ecological, physical, chemical, and social systems. It is a fast-growing interdisciplinary field in which a range of techniques and methods are studied for dealing with large, complex, and dynamic problems with various sources of potential uncertainties.

PPSN 2014 will be a showcase of a wide range of topics in Natural Computing including, but not restricted to: Evolutionary Computation, Neural Computation, Molecular Computation, Quantum Computation, Artificial Life, Swarm Intelligence, Artificial Ant Systems, Artificial Immune Systems, Self-Organizing Systems, Emergent Behavior, and Applications to Real-World Problems.

PPSN 2014 will also feature workshops and tutorials covering advanced topics in the field of natural computing.

All accepted papers will be presented during poster sessions and will be included in the proceedings. Following the tradition of PPSN, we plan to publish the proceedings in the Series Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) by Springer.

The PPSN conference series started 1990 in Dortmund.