Gabriel Kronberger received the title Prof. (FH) for his achievements in teaching and research yesterday during a ceremony at the Landhaus in Linz. We would like to congratulate him whole-heartedly!

Michael Affenzeller's invited talk on symbolic regression and genetic programming has been very well received by the participants of the prestigious GPTP-workshop (Genetic Programming in Theory and Practice) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Stefan Wagner got a chance to give a live demonstration of our latest version of the HeuristicLab software and it's features for symbolic regression and genetic programming.

Following the talk, many interesting discussions revolved around research topics that we have been working on in the last years, also within the Josef Ressel center "Heureka!". In particular, our developments to improve the applicability of symbolic regression to real-worlds problems hit a nerve of with many participants and led to many insightful discussions. We are looking forward to next year's workshop!

Stephan Winkler spent some days at the Department of Physics and Mathematics of the University of Alcalá de Henares. Together with Prof. Bonifacio Castaño he worked on prognosis models for stocks, indices and trading rules optimization implemented in HeuristicLab; in cooperation with Prof. J. Rafael Sendra he also researched on the optimization of polynomials using evolutionary algorithms. We look forward to seeing the results of this work in the future in the form of joint research articles and project proposals!

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.