attended and provided significant value to attendees. Apart from the technical program, there were two special sessions presenting a pre-recorded Virtual Tour on Kraków with live commentary of professional tour guide, followed by live Q&A discussion. Throughout the congress certain socializing and networking opportunities were provided for the On the first day of the conference there were 24 tutorials and two workshops offering a great opportunity to disseminate in-depth information on specific areas of evolutionary computation. In order to maximize the educational and research training benefits, all tutorials were made available free-ofcharge to all attendees. FIGURE 5 Special session dedicated to Virtual Tour on Kraków presented by Ms. Janina Naskalska Babik, professional tour guide. attendees on the CONFLUX Virtual Conference Platform. CONFLUX served as the main hub for all activities, allowing participants to access all live sessions, all pre-recorded content ondemand, and interact with fellow attendees and presenters through posting of public and private questions and messages. We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere gratitude to everyone who has contributed for making IEEE CEC 2021 a success. In particular we wish to acknowledge great support of our Program Co-Chairs Yew Soon Ong and Hemant Singh who ensured high scientific standards of the conference and additionally supported us in many other aspects. FIGURE 6 Program Co-Chair Hemant Singh chairing the Best Paper Award session. NOVEMBER 2021 | IEEE COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE MAGAZINE 7