Five Cercia staff, Drs. Hisashi Handa, Jin Li, Andy Pryke, Thorsten Schnier and Xin Yao, attended the IEEE 2005 Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC’05) in Edinburgh, UK, on 2-5 September 2005. Thorsten and Andy chaired the Special Session on Evolutionary Computation Applications in Business. Hisashi and Jin presented their papers on route optimistion for gritting trucks and financial forecasting, respectively. Xin gave a tutorial on evolutionary computation theory and an invited speech at the Future Directions of Evolutionary Computation Workshop. Many conference delegates expressed their interests in collaborating with Cercia and the MSc in Natural Computation programme at Birmingham.