Abstract
We introduce the special issue on Evolutionary Computation (EC) reporting a non-exhaustive list of topics which have recently attracted much interest from the EC community, with particular regard to the ones dealt with by the papers included in this issue: EC research, hybrid neuro-evolutionary systems and synergies between EC and complex systems. In addition, we introduce a more technological emerging topic: the parallel implementation of evolutionary and Swarm Intelligence algorithms on graphics processor units (GPUs), by which new applications of evolutionary algorithms have been made possible, even in real-time environments.