On October 10, 2018, I gave the research talk Automating Scientific Research in Optimization at the Computational Intelligence Group of Prof. Dr. Sanaz Mostaghim at the Institute of Intelligent Cooperating Systems, Faculty of Computer Science of the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg (OVGU, Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg).
The Computational Intelligence Group has a long and very successful tradition in the field of Computational Intelligence, both in theoretical research as well as in practical application. They focus on the fields of swarm intelligence and swarm robotics. The group also contributes excellent research on Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs), multi-objective optimization and decision making, artificial life, and evolutionary robotics. Multi-objective decision making is a very important branch of optimization, since most problems in the real world present themselves as trade-offs between different goals, e.g., cost vs. speed, cost vs. quality. Multi-objective EAs are currently among the best methods to tackle such problems. Swarm intelligence and swarm robotics play a bigger and bigger role, e.g., in logistics as well as in traffic planning. Since I work in the domain of EAs for more than dozen years now, and our presented benchmarking method directly applies there, this gave us a good starting point for interesting discussions.
I had a nice visit to the group last year, too, and back then was hosted by Prof. Dr. Rudolf Kruse, who now has become an emeritus member but still attended my talk this time. It was a real pleasure to visit this research group again and see the great work that Prof. Mostaghim is doing. I am very thankful for their hospitality.
