- Written by: Thomas Weise
Today, on 2023-04-17, I attended the 2023 "Charming City Hefei Tour" of the Central Media Interview Team [2023“魅力城市合肥行”央媒采访团] followed by the Hefei Foreign Expert Research Symposium [合肥市外国专家调研座谈活动] in the Hefei Municipal Government Conference Center [合肥市政府会议中心], together with twelve experts from nine different countries who work in Hefei. The first event was hosted by the Director of Hefei Science and Technology Bureau, Mr. Jin FAN [范进，合肥市科技局局长], who opened it with a short opening introduction. This was followed by a warm welcome speech by Mr. Fei YUAN, Member of the Standing Committee of the Hefei Municipal Committee [袁飞，合肥市委常委], who emphasized on the importance of internationalization and the impressive progress that our city Hefei has made during the past decade. The second speaker was Mrs. Qingqun XU, Chief Editor of "International Talent Exchange" and "Expert Work Newsletter" of the Foreign Talent Research Center of the Ministry of Science and Technology [徐庆群，科技部国外人才研究中心《国际人才交流》《专家工作通讯》总编辑], who had already visited our city with her team back in 2019. She, too, emphasized the importance of international experts. She also praised Hefei for its good work in increasing the internationalization.
In the following two sessions, presided over by Mr. Daqun LIANG, the Director-general of the Hefei Municipal Bureau of Foreign Experts [梁大群 ，市科技局党组成员、外专局局长], the international experts commented on their experiences in Hefei and noted potential fields of improvements. It was interesting to see that basically all experts, me in included, had nothing but positive words and praise for our city. The general agreement is that life in Hefei and the working conditions are outstanding. Indeed, several experts noted that it is a pity that our city’s achievements and the good environment that it offers are not well-known abroad and recommended that they should be advertised more both at home and abroad. I believe that the meeting was quite successful: All foreign experts were keen to contribute ideas and suggestions (so much that most of us exceeded our allotted talking time) and the governmental representatives were receptive and really appreciated the openness and constructiveness of the comments.
- Written by: Thomas Weise
The Institute of Applied Optimization welcomes Dr. Bing AI [艾兵博士], who today has officially joined our team as researcher. Before joining our institute, he finished his PhD research at the School of Computer Science and Engineering [计算机科学与工程学院] of Southeast University [东南大学] in Nanjing [南京], Jiangsu [江苏], China [中国]. Dr. AI is an expert in Multi-Objective Optimization, Game Theory, Multi-Agent Path Finding and Reinforcement Learning.
It is really great that Dr. AI has chosen to join our team. His expertise will help to make the optimization side of our team even stronger and we are very much looking forward to working with him on interesting and challenging research topics.
- Written by: Thomas Weise
Reproducibility in optimization, machine learning, and artificial intelligence is an important issue. Today, on 2023-04-13, the paper
Ege de Bruin, Sarah L. Thomson, and Daan van den Berg. Frequency Fitness Assignment on JSSP: A Critical Review. In Proceedings of the 26th European Conference on Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications'23), Held as Part of EvoStar'23, April 12-14, 2023, Brno, Czech Republic, pages 351-363. ISBN: 978-3-031-30228-2. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-30229-9_23
was presented by Mr. Ege de Bruin at the EvoStar 2023 conference in Brno, Czech Republic. In this work, de Bruin, von den Berg, and Thomson independently reproduce our experiments from the paper
Thomas Weise, Xinlu Li, Yan Chen, and Zhize Wu. Solving Job Shop Scheduling Problems Without Using a Bias for Good Solutions. In Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion (GECCO'21 Companion), July 10-14, 2021, Lille, France. ACM, New York, NY, USA. ISBN 978-1-4503-8351-6. doi:10.1145/3449726.3463124 / slides / video presentation
They confirm our findings with high precision. Learning about the efforts made us very happy, as it not just shows that our work on Frequency Fitness Assignment (recently presented here and here) is interesting for others, but also that our results can be reproduced by re-implementing our algorithms using a different programming language on a different hardware platform. We deeply and sincerely thank the authors of going through this effort.
- Written by: Thomas Weise
Today, on 2023-04-06, I gave the invited talk Frequency Fitness Assignment (FFA) [频率适应度分配] at the group workshop of the Chair of AI and Aerodynamics led by Prof. Dr. Bernd R. NOACK at the Harbin Institute of Technology in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China [哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）]. The workshop had two sessions and featured eleven more highly interesting presentations, each outlining another exciting approach to aerodynamics and control. It was very cool to see the enormous progress that research has made in this field. Drones and air taxis will certainly have a huge and transformative impact on our society in the near future — and the talks clearly showed that optimization, machine learning, and AI will play an important role in both their design and control. It was a great honor to be invited by Prof. Noack to join this event and to have a chance to show our research there.
The talk on FFA is also available on our website, as slides pdf, as pre-packaged forty-minute video, and as a fifty-minute live recording from the workshop.
- Written by: Thomas Weise
Today, I presented the keynote speech Frequency Fitness Assignment [频率适应度分配] on 2023-03-25 at the 2023 International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Machine Vision and Intelligent Algorithms (PRMVIA) conference. The conference took place online and was very well attended, very well organized, and had an exciting program that offered several interesting talks and workshops. The keynote focuses on Frequency Fitness Assignment (FFA), an algorithm module that can be plugged into existing optimization algorithms. FFA prevents premature convergence to local optima and makes algorithms invariant under all injective transformations of the objective function value. This interesting feature is explained in comparison to the invariance properties of the (1+1) EA, Simulated Annealing, and Genetic Algorithms. Several results of FFA are presented. The talk is also available on our website, both as slides pdf and as forty-minute video.
Read more: Prof. Weise gives Keynote Speech "Frequency Fitness Assignment" (频率适应度分配) at the 2023...
- Prof. Weise Attends the Fifteenth Sino German Seminar on Applied Higher Education [15. Deutsch-Chinesisches Symposium zur Anwendungsorientierten Hochschulausbildung, 第五届中德应用型高等教育研讨会暨]
- Prof. Weise Attends the Hefei National Day Tea Party for People from All Walks of Life [合肥市各界人士迎国庆茶话会]
- Cooperation Agreement Signed between Hefei University and the DHIK, a Consortium of German Universities
- Welcome to Dr. Pei XU