From October 20 to 25, 2019, our Profs. Möhring and Weise took part in the Dagstuhl Seminar 19431 with the topic Theory of Randomized Optimization Heuristics, organized by Dr. Carola Doerr (Sorbonne University, Paris, France), Carlos M. Fonseca (University of Coimbra, Portugal), Tobias Friedrich, (Hasso-Plattner-Institut, Potsdam, Germany), and Xin Yao (Southern University of Science and Technology, China). Dagstuhl Seminars are invitation-based meetings taking place in Schloss Dagstuhl, a castle located slightly remotely near the city of Wadern, Germany. The remote location is intentional: Here, researchers can meet for, say, five days, to have in-depth discussions without distractions. This is what Dagstuhl Seminars are, and we were very happy and felt honoured to be invited to attend the seminar on theory on randomized optimization heuristics. Not only did the seminar give us the chance to catch up with old friends and plan future collaborations, there we also very interesting and fruitful research discussions. I (Thomas Weise) was particularly happy to see that the topic of benchmarking and algorithm configuration also becomes more and more interesting for theoreticians. I also learned a lot about the progress that theory on optimization has made the past few years. In summary, the seminar was a very very nice event which indeed brought us one or two steps forward in our research. Many thanks to the organizers for doing such a great job!

P.S. This was a very highly productive meeting. Here, the foundations for two works were laid, as shown below. The first work is as a joint efforts of a larger group of international researchers and the second one is by our IAO team:

  • Thomas Bartz-Beielstein, Carola Doerr, Jakob Bossek, Sowmya Chandrasekaran, Tome Eftimov, Andreas Fischbach, Pascal Kerschke, Manuel López-Ibáñez, Katherine M. Malan, Jason H. Moore, Boris Naujoks, Patryk Orzechowski, Vanessa Volz, Markus Wagner, Thomas Weise. Benchmarking in Optimization: Best Practice and Open Issues. Technical report available at arXiv:2007.03488v1 [cs.NE] 7 Jul 2020.
    pdf / pdf@arxiv
  • Thomas Weise, Zhize Wu, Xinlu Li, and Yan Chen. Frequency Fitness Assignment: Making Optimization Algorithms Invariant under Bijective Transformations of the Objective Function Value. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation in January 2020. Preprint available at arXiv:2001.01416v3 [cs.NE] 17 Jun 2020.
    pdf / paper@arxiv / experimental results and source code data set @ doi:10.5281/zenodo.3899474

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