- Written by: Thomas Weise
2021 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2021)
June 28-July 1, 2021 in Kraków, Poland
http://iao.hfuu.edu.cn/bocia21
The Special Session on Benchmarking of Computational Intelligence Algorithms (BOCIA), as part of the 2021 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2021), took place on June 30, 2021 at 10am. Here you can download the BOCIA Special Session Call for Papers (CfP) in PDF format and here as plain text file.
Computational Intelligence (CI), including Evolutionary Computation, Optimization, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence, is a huge and expanding field which is rapidly gaining importance, attracting more and more interests from both academia and industry. It includes a wide and ever-growing variety of optimization and machine learning algorithms, which, in turn, are applied to an even wider and faster growing range of different problem domains. For all of these domains and application scenarios, we want to pick the best algorithms. Actually, we want to do more, we want to improve upon the best algorithm. This requires a deep understanding of the problem at hand, the performance of the algorithms we have for that problem, the features that make instances of the problem hard for these algorithms, and the parameter settings for which the algorithms perform the best. Such knowledge can only be obtained empirically, by collecting data from experiments, by analyzing this data statistically, and by mining new information from it. Benchmarking is the engine driving research in the fields of Computational Intelligence for decades, while its potential has not been fully explored.
The goal of this special session was to solicit original works on the research in benchmarking: Works which contribute to the domain of benchmarking of algorithms from all fields of Computational Intelligence, by adding new theoretical or practical knowledge. Papers which only apply benchmarking are not in the scope of the special session.
This special session was technically supported by the IEEE CIS Task Force on Benchmarking.
Read more: Special Session on Benchmarking of Computational Intelligence Algorithms (BOCIA'21)
- Written by: Thomas Weise
In the afternoon of September 22, 2020, the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Holiday Celebration for Foreign Experts [2020年度在皖高层次外国专家迎中秋庆国庆活动] of our province Anhui [安徽] took place at the Anhui Museum of Innovation [安徽创新馆]. The event was co-organized by the Department of Science and Technology of the Province Anhui [安徽省科学技术厅], the Hefei Municipal Bureau of Science and Technology [合肥市科学技术局], the Public Relations Department of the Provincial Party Committee [安徽省委宣传部], and the museum itself. More than 30 foreign experts from more than 10 different countries attended this event – a very high number given the current international COVID-19 pandemic. Together with Mr. Lei HONG [洪磊] of our International Office, I attended this event as representatives of our Hefei University [合肥学院].
- Written by: Thomas Weise
On September 15, 2020, Prof. Weise introduced the team of our Institute of Applied Optimization (IAO) [应用优化研究所] to the fresh graduate students of our the School of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data [人工智能与大数据学院]. Each of our team members follows a different research direction within the overall field of Computational Intelligence, Optimization, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. Within the framework of our research, we can offer science-centric graduate student supervision. The presentation of our group's work has been received well, and several graduate students will join our team soon. We are looking forward to welcome them!
Read more: Institute of Applied Optimization Introduced to Fresh Graduate Students
- Written by: Thomas Weise
On July 8 (Cancún time, July 9 in Chinese time), our Good Benchmarking Practices for Evolutionary Computation (BENCHMARK@GECCO) workshop took place as part of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) in form of an online meeting. It was a great success and more than 70 international researchers from all over the world took part in it. There were many discussions and talks, which will have a lasting impact and which probably have started quite some new efforts in our community. It is clear that all of us strive for improving the way metaheuristic algorithms and optimization problems are investigated. Good research requires sound and reproducible experimentation. Our report Benchmarking in Optimization: Best Practice and Open Issues, published on July 7 on Arxiv, was one step into that direction. Together with the input from the workshop, it will further be improved. Other community efforts discussed in this workshop include the benchmarking network and the IOHprofiler. All-in-all, many questions and topics have been raised, so we now have lots of exciting work to do to answer, research, and implement them.
- Written by: Thomas Weise
Today, on January 21st, 2020, I attended the 2020 Hefei City Spring Festival Get-Together [2020合肥市春节团拜会] organized by the Hefei Municipal Committee of the CPC Hefei Municipal People's Government [中共合肥市委合肥市人民政府]. This was second time for me to attend this event (2018 was my first one, but I was unlucky to miss the one in 2019 due to a conference). I was looking forward to this year's event and I was certainly not disappointed. The event began with short welcome speeches by the representatives of the city government. Then, like in 2018, fantastic performances were given by different artist groups, including teams from the Hefei Luju Theatre [合肥市庐剧院] and the Hefei Song and Dance Troupe [合肥市歌舞团]. There were great singers, graceful dances, and a wonderful comedy act. Every single performance was perfect and you could really feel how much effort the artists put into them. I very much hope to get a chance to attend the event again next year.
Read more: Prof. Weise attends the 2020 Hefei City Spring Festival Get-Together [2020合肥市春节团拜会]
- Prof. Weise and Mrs. Zhou attend New Year's Party for the Friends of the Hefei Foreign Affairs Office
- Prof. Weise attends the 2020 Tea Party for High-Level Talents and Symposium for Newly Elected Academicians [2020年高层次人才迎春茶话会暨新当选院士座谈会] of Anhui
- Foreign Experts meet with President Prof. Dr. Chunmei WU
- Research Talk: Human Action Recognition using Zero Shot Learning by Mr. Kaiqiang HUANG [2020-01-06]