The IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC) is one of the largest conferences within evolutionary computation (EC), the other conferences of similar importance being Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN) and EvoStar (which comprises EuroGP, EvoApplications, EvoCOP, and EvoMUSART).

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IEEE CEC, which is organized by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society began in 1994 as the IEEE Symposium on Evolutionary Computation held in Orlando, Florida. In 1995 the conference name changed to IEEE International Conference on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE ICEC) and it was held with this title through 1998. In 1999, the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, in combination with the Evolutionary Programming Society which operated the annual Evolutionary Programming Conference (1992-1999) and the IET (IEE) which operated the International Conference on Genetic Algorithms in Engineering Systems, Innovations and Applications (1995-1999) combined to co-sponsor the newly named IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, and this title continues to the present.^[1] In even years it is associated with the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (IEEE WCCI), the flagship conference of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. The conference covers most subtopics of EC, such as evolutionary robotics, multiobjective optimization, evolvable hardware, theory of evolutionary computation, and evolutionary design. Papers can also be found that deal with topics that are related to rather than part of EC, such ant colony optimization, swarm intelligence, and quantum computing.

The conference usually attracts several hundreds of attendees, as well as hundreds of papers.^[2]