I am Prof. Dr. Thomas Weise [汤卫思], the director of the Institute of Applied Optimization [应用优化研究所] of the School of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data [人工智能与大数据学院] of the Hefei University [合肥大学]. Before founding this institute, I was a computer scientist at the USTC-Birmingham Joint Research Institute in Intelligent Computation and Its Applications (UBRI) belonging to the School of Computer Science and Technology (SCST) of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) [中国科学技术大学] for seven years. I received my doctorate in 2009 at the Distributed Systems Group of the University of Kassel in Germany.

For more than a decade, I have worked on research in the field of optimization, mainly centered around Evolutionary Computation (EC) but also with various problem-specific local search (LS) methods and hybrid algorithms of EC and LS. My research is centered on the questions: "How can we help partners in the industry and in research to discover and solve their optimization problem, to make them more efficient?" and "How can we find out which optimization algorithm perform well, on which problem, and why (without investing much work)?"

Besides this, I am also the author of the open source bookbuildeR tool chain for automatic building, updating, and publishing of (online) e-books by using free continuous integration services and of the books "An Introduction to Optimization Algorithms" (created and regularly updated with that toolkit) and the (older) book "Global Optimization Algorithms - Theory and Application," which has been cited more than 850 times according to Google Scholar.