Answering Hamming

The story goes that while working at Bell Labs in the 1950s, the mathematician and computer scientist Richard Hamming would ask colleagues, "what's the most important problem in your field?" ... and then follow up with, "so, why aren't you working on it?" Both questions have many possible answers, even for just one person at one time, but they are certainly provocative, tough and uncomfortable. In the talk, I will reflect on my personal answers at various times, some answers for evolutionary computation (EC) and evolutionary multiobjective optimization (EMO) more broadly, and for adjacent fields to EC/EMO as well as for industrial research & innovation. My particular answers (or anyone's) are almost certainly not as important as the effort behind them to grapple with the questions.