Biography
Anna's bio
Born in Valencia (Spain), Anna Esparcia-Alcázar obtained a degree in Ingenieria Industrial from the Universitat Politècnica de València. After working as a lecturer in Control Engineering at the Departamento de Ingeniería de Sistemas, Computadores y Automática (currently DISA), in 1995 she joined the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering of the University of Glasgow, where she obtained a PhD (Thesis: "Genetic Programming for Adaptive Digital Signal Processing") and also worked as a Research Assistant.
In 1998 Dr. Esparcia-Alcázar joined the Industrial Control Centre (currently Institute for Energy and Environment) at the University of Strathclyde as a Research Fellow working on the CONVEX project, a joint project with the University of Glasgow, British Aerospace and Stirling Dynamics Ltd.
From January 2000 till August 2002 she worked for Barcelona-based GTD- Ingenieria de Sistemas y Software Industrial, Advanced Logistics Group and Pivetal Sistemas (currently Cortex).
From September 2002 till September 2010 Dr. Esparcia-Alcázar was with the Instituto Tecnológico de Informática (ITI) at the Universidad Politécnica de València, where she was Coordinator of the Complex Adaptive Systems Group. From October 2010 till October 2011 she was Associate Lecturer at the Department of Systems Engineering and Automation (DISA) at the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia
From October 2010 to March 2015 she was Head of R&D at S2 Grupo, where she was the Technical Manager and Coordinator of FP7 project MUSES, (October 2012 -September 2015). Between May 2015 and September 2017 she was with the Software Production Methods Centre (PROS) of the Universitat Politècnica de València.
Since October 2016 she is Associate Professor at the Systems Engineering and Control Department (DISA) of the UPV
She is Senior Member of the IEEE since 2009 and served as an elect member of the Executive Committee of SIGEVO, the Special Interest Group of the ACM on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation, in the period 2009-2015.
She is actively involved in the organisation of the main conferences in Genetic and Evolutionary computation; this includes/has included the following roles:
General chair of GECCO 2015
Local organiser of Evo* 2007 held in Valencia, Spain, and curator of "ArtEscapes - Variations of life in the media arts", the art exhibition associated to it.
Coordinator of the EvoApplications conference in 2013 and 2014. Within it, she has launched and co-chaired the following tracks: EvoNUM - European workshop on Bio-inspired algorithms for continuous parameter optimisation (2008- present, with Anikó Ekárt and Petr Posik), EvoGAMES - Evolutionary Computation in Games (2009, with Mike Preuss), EvoRISK - Computational Intelligence for Risk Management, Security and Defence Applications (2012 - 2016, with Sara Silva and Nur Zincir-Heywood) and EvoSET - Evolutionary Computation in Software Engineering and Testing (2017-2018, with Sara Silva)
Co-chair of the Real-World Applications (RWA) track at GECCO (with Boris Naujoks in 2017 and with Thomas Bartz-Beielstein in 2018).
Co-chair of SecDef, the Workshop on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation in Defense, Security and Risk Managemet within GECCO, in 2014 (with Frank W. Moore) and 2017 (with Gunes Kayacik, Frank W. Moore and Nur Zincir-Heywood)
Workshops Chair of GECCO 2009, held in Montreal, Canada,
Co-chair (with Anikó Ekárt) of EuroGP 2010,13th European Conference on Genetic Programming,
Chair of EvoCompetitions, held as part of Evo* 2010 in Istanbul, Turkey,
Publicity Chair of Evo* 2008, held in Naples, Italy.
Co-chair (with Francisco Fernandez) of the Computational Intelligence in Games track at the MAEB 2010 conference, held in Valencia, Spain, as part of CEDI 2010, the Spanish Computer Science Conference.
Proceedings Co-chair (with Mike Preuss) of CIG 2012, the IEEE Computational Intelligence In Games conference, held in Granada, Spain.
She was co-founder in 2014 and is currently Vice-President of the Society for the promotion of Evolutionary Computation in Europe, SPECIES, which supports the Evo* conferences.
In April 2015 she received the Award for Outstanding Contribution in Evolutionary Computation,
Since January 2017 she is part of the editorial board of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines.