On October 24, 2018, I gave my research talk Automating Scientific Research in Optimization at the Computational Intelligence research group of Prof. Dr. Oliver Kramer at the Department of Computing Science, School of Computing Science, Business Administration, Economics, and Law of the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in Oldenburg, Germany.
The Computational Intelligence group contributes research on many topics centered around evolution strategies and deep learning. Prof. Kramer is particularly focused on recurrent, convolutional, as well as large-scale neural networks, often in relationship with optimization methods such as evolutionary algorithms or swarm intelligence approaches. Other fields the group works on are dynamic and multi-objective optimization, scheduling, and machine learning for optimization or marine time series.
After having worked with Prof. Kramer on two papers remotely, I was very excited and happy to finally meet him in person. It was also very nice to present our work, which uses machine learning to analyze optimization algorithm performance, in front of a group that, too, combines machine learning and optimization. My talk was well-received and led to very nice discussions afterwards. I also had the chance to attend two Master's thesis presentations, which were both very interesting. What impressed a lot was the high enthusiasm for their subject that all of the team members of Prof. Kramer showed – enthusiasm which leads to excellent results.