Book excerpt: This LNCS volume contains the papers presented at the First Swarm, Evolutionary and Memetic Computing Conference (SEMCCO 2010) held during December 16–– 18, 2010 at SRM University, Chennai, in India. SEMCCO 2010 marked the beginning of a prestigious international conference series that aims at bringing together researchers from academia and industry to report and review the latest progress in the cutting-edge research on swarm, evolutionary, and memetic computing, to explore new application areas, to design new bio-inspired algorithms for solving specific hard optimization problems, and finally to create awareness on these domains to a wider audience of practitioners. SEMCCO 2010 received 225 paper submissions from 20 countries across the globe. After a rigorous peer-review process involving 610 reviews in total, 90 fu- length articles were accepted for oral presentation at the conference. This corresponds to an acceptance rate of 40% and is intended for maintaining the high standards of the conference proceedings. The papers included in this LNCS volume cover a wide range of topics in swarm, evolutionary, and memetic computing algorithms and their real-world applications in problems selected from diverse domains of science and engineering.