Adam Viktorin was born in the Czech Republic in 1989 and went to the Faculty of Applied Informatics at Tomas Bata University in Zlín, where he studied Computer and Communication Systems and obtained his MSc degree in 2015. He obtained his Ph.D. at the same University in 2021 with the thesis topic: Control Parameter Adaptation in Differential Evolution. Among his professional interests are the development and analysis of adaptive strategies for Differential Evolution in the area of numerical optimization and the application of such algorithms to real-world problems.

Roman Senkerik was born in Zlin, the Czech Republic, in 1981. He received an MSc degree in technical cybernetics from the Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Faculty of applied informatics in 2004, the Ph.D. degree also in technical Cybernetics, in 2008, from the same university, and Assoc. prof. Degree in Informatics from VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, in 2013.

From 2008 to 2013 he was a Research Assistant and Lecturer with the Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Faculty of applied informatics. Since 2014 he is an Associate Professor and since 2017 Head of the A.I.Lab https://ailab.fai.utb.cz/ with the Department of Informatics and Artificial Intelligence, Tomas Bata University in Zlin. He is the author of more than 40 journal papers, 250 conference papers, and several book chapters as well as editorial notes. His research interests are the development of evolutionary algorithms, their modifications and benchmarking, soft computing methods, and their interdisciplinary applications in optimization and cyber-security, machine learning, neuro-evolution, data science, the theory of chaos, and complex systems. He is a recognized reviewer for many leading journals in computer science/computational intelligence. He was a part of the organizing teams for special sessions/workshops/symposiums at GECCO, IEEE WCCI, CEC, or SSCI events.

Assoc. prof Michal Pluhacek received his Ph.D. degree in Information Technologies in 2016 with the dissertation topic: Modern method of development and modifications of evolutionary computational techniques. He became an assoc. prof. in 2023 after successfully defending his habilitation thesis on the topic „Inner Dynamics of Evolutionary Computation Techniques: Meaning for Practice.“ He currently works as a senior researcher at the Regional Research Centre CEBIA-Tech of Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Czech Republic. He is the author of many journal and conference papers on Particle Swarm Optimization and related topics. His research focus includes swarm intelligence theory and applications and artificial intelligence in general. In 2019, he finished six-months long research stay at New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA, focusing on swarm intelligence and swarm robotics. Recently, he is focusing his research on the interconnection of evolutionary computing and the large language models. More info: https://ailab.fai.utb.cz/our-team/

Niki van Stein received her PhD degree in Computer Science in 2018, from the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University, The Netherlands. From 2018 until 2021 she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at LIACS, Leiden University and she is currently an Assistant Professor at LIACS. Her research interests lie in explainable AI for EC and ML, surrogate-assisted optimisation and surrogate-assisted neural architecture search, usually applied to complex industrial applications.

Thomas Bäck is Full Professor of Computer Science at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University, The Netherlands, where he is head of the Natural Computing group since 2002. He received his PhD (adviser: Hans-Paul Schwefel) in computer science from Dortmund University, Germany, in 1994, and then worked for the Informatik Centrum Dortmund (ICD) as department leader of the Center for Applied Systems Analysis. From 2000 - 2009, Thomas was Managing Director of NuTech Solutions GmbH and CTO of NuTech Solutions, Inc. He gained ample experience in solving real-life problems in optimization and data mining through working with global enterprises such as BMW, Beiersdorf, Daimler, Ford, Honda, and many others. Thomas Bäck has more than 350 publications on natural computing, as well as two books on evolutionary algorithms: Evolutionary Algorithms in Theory and Practice (1996), Contemporary Evolution Strategies (2013). He is co-editor of the Handbook of Evolutionary Computation, and most recently, the Handbook of Natural Computing. He is also editorial board member and associate editor of a number of journals on evolutionary and natural computing. Thomas received the best dissertation award from the German Society of Computer Science (Gesellschaft für Informatik, GI) in 1995 and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award in 2015.

Lars Kotthoff is Derecho Professor, presidential faculty fellow at Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, School of Computing, University of Wyoming. His research combines artificial intelligence and machine learning to build robust systems with state-of-the-art performance. I develop techniques to induce models of how algorithms for solving computationally difficult problems behave in practice. Such models allow to select the best algorithm and choose the best parameter configuration for solving a given problem. He leads the Meta-Algorithmics, Learning and Large-scale Empirical Testing (MALLET) lab and direct the Artificially Intelligent Manufacturing center (AIM) at the University of Wyoming.