Quantum Computing is considered as the next frontier in computing, and it is attracting a lot of attention from the current scientific community. This kind of computation provides to researchers with a revolutionary paradigm for addressing complex optimization problems with a significant advantage. Today, two main Quantum Computing paradigms coexist: the annealing-based and the gate-model quantum computers. Anyway, although high expectations are pinned on this field, Quantum Computing is still in an incipient stage of development. For this reason, related researchers and practitioners are conceiving novel and sophisticated approaches to overcome current QC limitations. In this aspect, evolutionary computation has emerged as one of these promising approaches, which is being fostered by researchers on quantum technology by means of, for example, hybrid quantum-classical evolutionary techniques.
The EVO-QUANTUM special session, to be held during IEEE SSCI 2022, aims at fostering discussions around the latest findings and research achievements, as well as the exchange of novel ideas in the joint of Quantum Computing and Evolutionary Computation paradigms. In addition to that, works related to quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithms will be also considered. In a nutshell, they consist on a class of classical evolutionary algorithms inspired by concepts and principles of quantum mechanics such as standing waves, interference, coherence, and the "qubit" paradigm, but which are created to be run in a classical computer. The aim of this special session in Computational Intelligence towards soil and water management is to gather and focus high quality research papers that advance monitoring, analyzing and forecasting vital parameters of soil and water, provide new insights and nourish new innovation in this growing field by means of advanced Computational Intelligence based techniques.