HeuristicLab 3.3.8 is out now. You can download it from http://dev.heuristiclab.com/download.

Among others, HeuristicLab 3.3.8 contains the following new features:
* Scatter Search
* Relevant Alleles Preserving GA (RAPGA)
* Symbolic Time-Series Prognosis
* Neighborhood Component Analysis
* Ensemble Modeling
* LM-BFGS
* Gaussian Process Regression and Least-Squares Classification
* Job Shop Scheduling
* Linux support based on Mono

Michael Affenzeller and Stefan Wagner are going to attend this years GPTP 2013 workshop which takes place at the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The GPTP workshop is a small invite-only event and offers a good opportunity to discuss in depth important challenges and approaches in the field of genetic programming. Prof. Affenzeller will give a keynote talk on symbolic regression and Prof. Wagner will hold a HeuristicLab tutorial showing some of the useful data analysis and genetic programming features built into HL.

HEAL members Stefan Wagner, Erik Pitzer, Gabriel Kronberger, Stephan Hutterer and Andreas Beham have been attending Evo* 2013 to present their work and discuss the state of metaheuristic methods, optimization problems, and industry-relevant applications.

EvoStar comprises of five co-located conferences run each spring at different locations throughout Europe. These events arose out of workshops originally developed by EvoNet, the Network of Excellence in Evolutionary Computing, established by the Information Societies Technology Programme of the European Commission, and they represent a continuity of research collaboration stretching back nearly 20 years.

We hope to meet again at next year's Evo* in Baeza, Spain.

HEAL researcher Monika Kofler is leaving for Australia where she will be staying for the next year. We would like to thank Monika for the great time that she has already been with us and the many hours that she has devoted to establish and grow our group. We wish her an enjoyable and successful time down under! Monika is determined to complete her thesis and deepen the ties with the University of Technology, Sydney.

We are very happy to announce that follow HEAL member Erik Pitzer has successfully defended his PhD thesis last week and will be awarded the title Doctor Technicae from the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. Erik has been an active and esteemed HeuristicLab developer for many years, even before he officially joined our group. We want to use this opportunity to thank him for his valuable contributions to HeuristicLab persistence, the optimization knowledge base, simulation optimization and - of course - fitness landscape analysis. Erik's thesis on "Applied Fitness Landscape Analysis" was not just an isolated research topic but led to many cross-project collaborations within our group and with other universities. The whole team congratulates whole-heartedly to this success!

Many members of our university are currently in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, to attend the Fourteenth International Conference on Computer Aided Systems Theory (Eurocast 2013). The Eurocast conference is organized bi-annually by a Spanish-Austrian group of esteemed researchers around Roberto Moreno-Díaz (Las Palmas), Franz Pichler (Linz) and Alexis Quesada Arencibia (Las Palmas).

Since 2007, HEAL head Michael Affenzeller co-organizes a workshop on metaheuristic problem solving with Günther Raidl (Technical University Vienna) and Witold Jacak. The conference started today, yet we were already up for a special treat: A plenary talk by Rudolf E. Kálmán, famous father of the Kalman-Bucy Filter. We can definitely look forward to an exciting week!