- Written by: Thomas Weise
Today, on 2024-02-06, I had the great honor of being invited to take part in the Spring Festival celebration [春节团拜会] of our city Hefei [合肥市]. In this event, in which I also took part in 2018 and 2020, people from literally all walks and stages of life take part to celebrate the new year. On my table alone, there were seated a religious man, a member of an ethnic minority, politicians, a policeman, a school principal, businessmen, a fire fighter, a scientist, a model worker, a driver, and me, if I remember correctly. There were 55 tables, so the event represented a very broad spectrum of the Chinese society coming together.
The meeting, presided by the Major of Hefei, Mr. Yunfeng LUO [市长罗云峰] started with a warm welcome speech of the Party Secretary of our City, Mr. Aihua YU [市委书记虞爱华], who emphasized that achievements of our city in the past years. After this inspiring introduction, the actual celebration program started with an opening group dance performed by the Anhui Women and Children's Activity Center of Hefei Song and Dance Troupe [合肥市歌舞团安徽省妇女儿童活动中心]. While the dance was very nice, I especially liked the endearing and impressive performance of the children. The dance was followed by a comedic act by the Hefei Quyi Troupe [合肥市曲艺团] — while my Chinese is insufficient to understand the comedic nuances, I did enjoy the bit on how everybody is taking photos and selfies all the time — and did make photos of it, of course. I could not agree more with third performance, the song "Hefei Invites You" [合肥请您来] presented by Xiaojie GU [顾小洁] and the Hefei Song and Dance Troupe [合肥市歌舞团]. Then, the team of the Lujiang County Cultural Museum [庐江县文化馆] gave their cultural heritage-based presentation "闹花船," which does not translate well to English, but which was indeed very nice. While it certainly represented a very traditional Chinese art, it did not feel dated at all. Maybe the presenters did combine it with modern elements and updated it, or maybe I am just too uncultured to realize that traditional opera-ish presentations never feel dated anyway — but I did really like it. Even more modern was the presentation of the Hefei Song and Dance Troupe [合肥市歌舞团] who used traditional folk music instruments to play their very catchy song "春风堆绣图" whose title again does not translate very well to English. This was followed by an incredibly impressive physical performance, the "Shoulder Ballet" [肩上芭蕾] by Wentong Yang [杨文通] and Wanxia Tan [谭婉霞] of the Linquan County Hero Acrobatic Art School [临泉县豪杰杂技艺术学校]. All acts of this afternoon were incredible, with perfect craftsmanship, choreographies, tunes, timing, and you could just feel the countless hours, days, and years of practice and work that all the artists put into their, well, art. Nevertheless, if I had to pick a favorite, then it might would be the opera performances, Lu Opera "Looking at the Appearance" [庐剧《瞧相》] and Huangmei Opera "Making Flower Lanterns" [黄梅戏《闹花灯》]. Finally, the great show ended with the song and dance "Spring Blossoms" by Yunlong Zhuang [庄云龙] and Niangnian Wang [王思念] with the Hefei Song and Dance Troupe [合肥市歌舞团], again an outstanding performance.
Photos
Programme in Chinese
- 原创开场组舞《龙翔瑞雪迎春来》 表演:张 磊、宣寅寅、范超一、种瑶瑶、李春燕等 演出单位:合肥市歌舞团安徽省妇女儿童活动中心
- 原创曲艺表演唱《暖心那些事儿》 表演:孙铭泽(一级演员、中国曲艺“牡丹奖”获得者) 张盛迪、程鸿征、皮 婷、张翼飞 演出单位:合肥市曲艺团
- 情景歌曲《合肥请您来》 演唱:顾小洁 表演:合肥市歌舞团
- 非遗小调《闹花船》 表演: 王本荣、姚中能、王 平、何显聪等 演出单位:庐江县文化馆
- 民乐合奏《春风堆绣图》 表演:李 华、费莉莉、黄 洁、王 燕、陶博文、黄维伟 演出单位:合肥市歌舞团
- 杂技《肩上芭蕾》(安徽省民间杂技艺术节金奖节目) 表演: 杨文通、谭婉霞 演出单位:临泉县豪杰杂技艺术学校
- 庐剧《瞧相》\黄梅戏《闹花灯》 庐剧表演:牛 静、滕 亚、杨 敏、李海燕、朱傲雪等 黄梅戏表演:张小威(一级演员)、魏瑜遥(一级演员) 徐镭洋、朱维芳
- 歌舞《春暖花开》 演唱:庄云龙(中国音乐“金钟奖”获得者)、王思念 演出单位:合肥市歌舞团
- Written by: Thomas Weise
Today, "First Hefei-VU-Napier Zoomposium on FFA and Optimization" took place online, thanks to the fabulous organization ability of Mr. Daan van den Berg of the VU Amsterdam, who organized this workshop together with Prof. Thomas Weise We had seven really interesting talks and very nice discussions. First, our students Mr. Xiang CAO [曹翔] and Mr. Jiayang CHEN [陈嘉阳] introduced their initial works on the The Traveling Tournament Problem and the The Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP), respectively. Then, Lecturer Mrs. Dr. Sarah THOMSON of the Edinburgh Napier University picked up on the QAP and showed her results on FFA on the Quadratic Assignment Problem: First Results and Ideas. After a short break, our student Mr. Rui ZHAO [赵睿] gave a talk on his results on the Two-Dimensional Bin Packing Problem, followed by the analysis of Mr. Jonathan KOUTSTAAL (VU and UvA Universities) on Using Frequency Fitness Assignment in Protein Folding. After yet another short break, our student Mr. Tianyu LIANG [梁天宇] showed his work on Solving the Traveling Salesperson Problem using Frequency Fitness Assignment, which recently got accepted by the Soft Computing Journal. The symposium concluded by Mrs. Iris PIJNING (VU and UvA Universities) and her presentation on FFA for Job Shop Scheduling Problem with More and More Jobs and More and More Machines.
Screenshots
Frequency Fitness Assignment
As a small aside: Several of these talks were related to Frequency Fitness Assignment (FFA, see here and here), a technique developed by our team and published here, here, here, and here, for example. It is nice to see that other researchers have become interested in FFA.
- 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
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