- Written by: Thomas Weise
On December 10, 2018, Prof. Dr. Thomas Weise received the "Second Hefei Economic and Technological Development Area Friendship Award" [第二届合肥经济技术开发区友谊奖] from the Administration Committee of the Hefei Economic and Technological Development Area [合肥经济技术开发区管理委员会]. The award was granted to eight international experts as a token of appreciation for their support and friendly cooperation for the social and economic development of the Hefei Economic and Technological Development Area (HEDTA) [经济技术开发区] in which our university is located. This award shows that the work of our team is recognized by our local government. It also shows how international and growing in importance the HEDTA is, as recipients from six different countries and three sectors (industry, research, and education) were honored.
- Written by: Thomas Weise
at the 2019 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC'19)
June 10-13, 2019 in Wellington, New Zealand
http://iao.hfuu.edu.cn/beado19
The Special Session on Benchmarking of Evolutionary Algorithms for Discrete Optimization (BEADO), a part of the 2019 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC'19), is cordially inviting the submission of original and unpublished research papers.
Evolutionary Computation (EC) is a huge and expanding field, attracting more and more interests from both academia and industry. It includes a wide and ever-growing variety of optimization algorithms, which, in turn, are applied to an even wider and faster growing range of different problem domains, including discrete optimization. For the discrete domain 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 EAs for decades, while its potential has not been fully explored.
Here you can download the BEADO Special Session Call for Papers (CfP) in PDF format and here as plain text file.
The goal of this special session is to solicit original works on the research in benchmarking: Works which contribute to the domain of benchmarking of discrete algorithms from the field of Evolutionary Computation, by adding new theoretical or practical knowledge. Papers which only apply benchmarking are not in the scope of the special session.
This special session wants to bring together experts on benchmarking, evolutionary computation algorithms, and discrete optimization. It provides a common forum for them to exchange findings, to explore new paradigms for performance comparison, and to discuss issues such as
- modelling of algorithm behaviors and performance
- visualizations of algorithm behaviors and performance
- statistics for performance comparison (robust statistics, PCA, ANOVA, statistical tests, ROC, …)
- evaluation of real-world goals such as algorithm robustness, and reliability
- theoretical results for algorithm performance comparison
- comparison of theoretical and empirical results
- new benchmark problems
- the comparison of algorithms in “non-traditional” scenarios such as
- multi- or many-objective domains
- parallel implementations, e.g., using GGPUs, MPI, CUDA, clusters, or running in clouds
- large-scale problems or problems where objective function evaluations are costly
- dynamic problems or where the objective functions involve randomized simulations or noise
- comparative surveys with new ideas on
- dos and don'ts, i.e., best and worst practices, for algorithm performance comparison
- tools for experiment execution, result collection, and algorithm comparison
- benchmark sets for certain problem domains and their mutual advantages and weaknesses
- Written by: Thomas Weise
On November 26, 2018, our university was visited by a delegation from the German province Saxony [萨克森自由州], which, to a large degree, was composed of professors from the Chemnitz University of Technology [Technische Universität Chemnitz] (TUC) from Chemnitz [开姆尼茨], Germany. This made me personally very happy, since Chemnitz is my hometown, I received my Master's degree from that university, and visited it to give research talks in 2017 and 2018.
The delegation was led by Dr. Peter Homilius, the vice-directory of the Economic Development Corporation (WFS) Saxony and Prof. Dr. Maximilian Eibl, the vice-president of the TUC and chair of Media Informatics in my old faculty there, the Faculty of Computer Science. Further members of the delegation were Prof. Dr. Egon Müller from the Department of Factory Planning and Factory Management and the Chemnitz Automotive Institute (CATI) at TUC, Prof. Dr. Andreas Schubert, chair of Micromanufacturing Technology, Mr. Claus-Peter Held (CATI), Dr. Frank Löschmann, director of the SisTeam company, as well as Mr. Huaidong Wu and Mr. Chao Ying (SisTeam).
Saxony is a province in the eastern part of Germany. Its capital is Dresden city, but the most industrialized city has always been Chemnitz, which, historically, is one of the cradles of industrialization of Germany. This area is also named as one of the top-20 innovative regions of Europe. The TU Chemnitz has more than 180 years of history and is the motor of innovation in that area. Automation, engineering, lightweight material engineering, automotive industries, the constant improvement of existing technologies, the improvement of production efficiency, research on new materials – the TU Chemnitz is highly competitive in all of these fields. For instance, it also holds the MERGE excellence cluster for multifunctional lightweight structure technologies. All of these fields are important to fill concepts such as Industry 4.0 and Made in China 2025 with life. There were many fruitful discussions with the aim to establish collaborations between the TUC and our uni, centered around such important topics as smart production and the education of engineers. The delegation was impressed with the application-oriented education that our university has developed by adopting German approaches to the Chinese environment. As a result of our talks, I am convinced that our unis will establish successful, long-lasting, and highly productive collaborations.
- Written by: Thomas Weise
Today and yesterday I attended the meeting "Research and Teaching in China" organized by the DAAD, the [Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst], i.e., the German Academic Exchange Service [德国学术交流中心] in the German Embassy in Beijing. This meeting was well-attended by probably over 50 German researchers who live, work, study, and teach in China. The event was organized as two half-day meetings, which stroke a perfect balance between presentations and opportunities for personal discussions. It allowed us to exchange thoughts, experiences, and impressions and to discuss topics such as research funding and career planning in China. The meeting also showed that there is a very thriving and growing community of German researchers in China, many of which live here for a long time and are well-integrated into the society. These scientists contribute research in many diverse areas such as architecture, chemistry, biology, city planning, computer science, operations research, mathematics, medicine, archeology, as well as law studies and history. It was a really nice meeting and I hope that many such meetings will follow. (The second meeting was held in June 2019 in Shanghai.)
- Written by: Thomas Weise
Today, our partners from the Enterprise Application Development (EAD) group have presented our collaboration at the Project Funding Conference of the Saxon Parliament [Landtagsmittel-Projektekonferenz] at the University of Applied Sciences Zittau/Görlitz (HZG, Hochschule Zittau/Görlitz) with a cool poster. The EAD group is led by Prof. Dr. Jörg Lässig at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the HZG in Görlitz, Germany. We have a long and successful collaboration which has led to many research results. Just one year ago, Prof. Lässig and Mr. Ullrich from the EAD have visited us after Prof. Weise visited them in July. We used this visit to work on our joint topic, namely the Rigorous Performance Analysis of Algorithms. Additionally, Prof. Lässig gave a very cool short lecture on Understanding Quantum Computing. Their short stay here further directly led to two publications at the GECCO'2018 conference and to the joint organization of the International Workshop on Benchmarking of Computational Intelligence Algorithms (BOCIA) workshop this year. The poster presented at the conference also strongly refers to our joint research on Automating Scientific Research in Optimization.
- Welcome to Guest Researcher Prof. Dr. Rolf H. Möhring from the TU Berlin [2018/11]
- Our paper "An Improved Generic Bet-and-Run Strategy with Performance Prediction for Stochastic Local Search" has been accepted at AAAI 2019
- Welcome to Senior Lecturer Xinlu Li
- Research Talk "Automating Scientific Research in Optimization" by Prof. Thomas Weise at the Goethe University of Frankfurt in Frankfurt, Germany