The IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC) is one of the largest and most important 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).
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.