I ?rst met Jingqiao when he had just commenced his PhD research in evolutionary algorithms with Arthur Sanderson at Rensselaer. Jingqiao's goals then were the investigation and development of a novel class of se- adaptivedi?erentialevolutionalgorithms,later calledJADE. I had remarked to Jingqiao then that Arthur always appreciated strong theoretical foun- tions in his research, so Jingqiao's prior mathematically rigorous work in communications systems would be very useful experience. Later in 2007, whenJingqiaohadcompletedmostofthetheoreticalandinitialexperimental work on JADE, I invited him to spend a year at GE Global Research where he applied his developments to several interesting and important real-world problems. Most evolutionary algorithm conferences usually have their share of in- vative algorithm oriented papers which seek to best the state of the art - gorithms. The best algorithms of a time-frame create a foundation for a new generationof innovativealgorithms, and so on, fostering a meta-evolutionary search for superior evolutionary algorithms.
In the past two decades, during whichinterest andresearchin evolutionaryalgorithmshavegrownworldwide by leaps and bounds, engaging the curiosity of researchers and practitioners frommanydiversescienceandtechnologycommunities,developingstand-out algorithms is getting progressively harder.