HEAL News

Call for papers: Workshop on Symbolic Regression and Equation Discovery

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 07:43:59 +0000

The workshop is part of this year's IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI) and the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), taking place from June 21st - 26th, 2026 in Maastricht, Netherlands.

We call for submissions of research papers of maximally 6 pages. Submissions must adhere to the WCCI/CEC submission rules and guidelines to authors.

Submission Deadline: April 24th, 2026 23:59 (anywhere on Earth) via openreview.

We look forward to your contributions. Please visit the workshop website for further details.

HEAL @ Eurocast 2026

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 08:55:32 +0000

The Eurocast conference, the 20th International Conference on Computer Aided Systems Theory, is currently taking place in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, bringing together researchers and experts to exchange insights on Computer and Systems Sciences.

Several members of the HEAL team are actively contributing to this year’s conference. They are presenting their latest research results, engaging in scientific discussions, and strengthening international collaborations.

Michael Affenzeller is serving as Program Chair. In addition, Michael Affenzeller and Stefan Wagner are hosting the "Workshop on Theory and Applications of Metaheuristic Algorithms“, and Stefan Wagner is hosting the "Workshop on Modeling, Simulation, and Optimization in Production and Logistics”.

MSE 2026 - submit your abstract now!

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 09:32:50 +0000

The Symposium on Symbolic Regression for Materials Science and Engineering (Topic D: Digital Transformation) at MSE 2026 is co-organized by HEAL member Gabriel Kronberger.

We invite you to submit your abstract to the Symposium "D05: Symbolic Regression for Materials Science and Engineering" at the MSE Congress 2026, the leading Materials Science and Engineering Congress in Germany which will be held in Darmstadt, Germany and online, from September 29th to October 1st.

For Abstract submission, only the title and a short description of a maximum of 2,500 characters are required.

Submit your abstract here!

ECCOMAS 2026 - Call for abstracts

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 15:40:18 +0000

Present your research at ECCOMAS 2026 - the 17th World Congress on Computational Mechanics (WCCM) and the 10th European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering!

We would like to invite you to present your research at the 17th World Congress on Computational Mechanics (WCCM) and the 10th European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering (ECCOMAS 2026) in our minisymposium MS233 - Advancing Computational Mechanics with Equation Discovery and Symbolic Regression. Here we will explore the application of equation discovery and symbolic regression techniques to advance the simulation, analysis, and optimization of complex mechanical systems.

The conference will be held from July 19-24, 2026 in Munich, Germany.

If you are working on related research and would like to accept our invitation, please submit an abstract to the conference organizers before the submission deadline, January 12, 2026, and select Minisymposium 233 when submitting.

We hope to see you in Munich for WCCM-ECCOMAS 2026!

Farewell to Bogdan Burlacu

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 10:18:54 +0000

We had to say goodbye to Bogdan Burlacu from the HEAL research group today. Thank you very much for your energy, friendship and support!

All the best

The HEALers

Dr. Philipp Fleck - Congratulations!

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 12:31:26 +0000

We would like to congratulate our colleague Philipp Fleck who successfully defended his PhD thesis!

Philipp has done his PhD-thesis on "Symbolic Regression for Dynamic Environments in Industrial Applications" at the Institute for Symbolic Artificial Intelligence of JKU Linz - supervised by FH-Prof. PD DI Dr. Michael Affenzeller.

Kick-off Meeting LogAid

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 07:52:30 +0000

The collaborative R&D project LogAid has officially started! During the consortium meeting, the project team outlined initial activities and defined the next steps in the research process.

LogAid focuses on AI-supported logistics optimization to support human decision-makers. By integrating machine learning and optimization algorithms, the system can optimize the use of transportation and storage spaces, reduce costs and minimize environmental impact. Moreover, the system is designed to continuously learn from user decisions and feedback, thus constantly improving and adapting its suggestions.

KickOff AI4Lab2Plant!

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 10:54:13 +0000

The cooperative R&D project AI4Lab2Plant - knowledge transfer through artificial intelligence from the laboratory to the industrial plant - has started! The project team discussed initial activities in a consortium meeting and planned further steps.

AI4Lab2Plant aims to improve the practicability of machine learning algorithms and models in an industrial environment. To this end, the consortium is investigating the feasibility using the coating process of continuous casting molds in the steel industry. By combining novel algorithms and domain knowledge, the aim is to develop prediction models for coating properties that work not only in the laboratory but also in large-scale production facilities. The methods developed are to be published as open source software, thus ensuring low-threshold access for further applications.

Project partners:

FH OÖ Forschungs & Entwicklungs GmbH
K1-MET GmbH
voestalpine Stahl GmbH

Call for Papers: EvoOSS Workshop and Symbolic Regression Workshop at GECCO 2025

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 10:48:44 +0000

At this year’s GECCO, taking place from July 14th - 18th, 2025 in Málaga (hybrid event) two workshops will be hosted by HEAL members:

Workshop on Open Source Software for Evolutionary Computation (EvoOOS Workshop) by Stefan Wagner and Michael Affenzeller, and the
Workshop on Symbolic Regression by Gabriel Kronberger.

Everyone is invited to submit a contribution!

Important Dates:

Submission opening: February 10, 2025
Submission deadline: March 26, 2025
Notification: April 28, 2025
Camera-ready: May 5, 2025
Author's mandatory registration: May 8, 2025

Open PhD positions FutureTHZ

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 09:13:10 +0000

There are five open PhD positions in the project Future Wireless THz Communication Devices and Systems (FutureTHz) in a doctoral program with TU Vienna.

The student working on the topic 5. Equation learning methods for nonlinear models for RTD oscillators will be embedded in the HEAL group in Hagenberg and supervised by Gabriel Kronberger.

Tasks:

The outcomes of the measurements of nonlinear behavior of resonant-tunneling-diode (RTD) oscillators, as well as the outcomes of the nonlinear analytic and numerical simulations are rather complex and not readily usable in the analysis and design of RTD oscillators. Therefore, the aim is to synthesize accurate models of dynamical systems directly from measurements of real components or from the outcomes of simulations by equation learning (symbolic regression) of parametric differential equation systems.
To verify accuracy of the synthesized models in the comparison with experimental data and the results of communication/ranging experiments.

Details: https://www.tuwien.at/en/doc/futurethz/phd-topics-and-supervisors
Apply here: https://jobs.tuwien.ac.at/Job/246521

AI Region Upper Austria: Two projects for HEAL

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 10:00:29 +0000

With its call “AI Region Upper Austria 2024” as part of the #upperVISION2030 strategic programme, the government of Upper Austria promotes innovative AI projects with a view to reinforcing the province’s position as a model region for artificial intelligence (AI).

A jury of experts has decided: Eleven of the 34 projects submitted to the call will receive funding. The HEAL research group was able to succeed with two submissions: "AI4Lab2Plant" and "LogAId" – Congratulations to Jan Zenisek and Johannes Karder!

AI4Lab2Plant: Process results are easy to predict in a laboratory environment, but this is often difficult in large industrial plants. The project aims to enable reliable predictions on an industrial scale.

LogAId: The aim of the project is to make logistics processes more efficient and at the same time reduce the workload on employees.

Picture: Ouijdane Guiza, Pro2Future GmbH, Henrietta Egerth, Managing Director of the Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG, State Councilor for Economics and Research Markus Achleitner, Sok-Kheng Taing, Co-Founder Dynatrace Austria. © State of Upper Austria/Denise Stinglmayr

Johannes Karder completes doctoral studies

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 09:00:03 +0000

Congratulations to our colleague Johannes Karder who successfully defended his PhD thesis!

Johannes joined HEAL in 2012, his research focuses on cooperative and integrated optimization as well as on simulation-based and surrogate-assisted optimization. He has done his PhD-thesis on "Cooperative and Integrated Optimization of Production and Logistics Systems" at the Institute for Symbolic Artificial Intelligence of JKU Linz - supervised by FH-Prof. PD DI Dr. Michael Affenzeller.

New website: symreg.at

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 10:55:33 +0000

In preparation for the upcoming release of our new Symbolic Regression book we have launched a new website for our symbolic regression projects https://symreg.at.

Additional material for the book (datasets, software, scripts) is available on the new page.

GPTP XXI

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 12:48:02 +0000

The 21st Annual Workshop on Genetic Programming Theory & Practice (GPTP) was held at the main campus of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from June 06-08, 2024. Participation is only possible on invitation. Therefore, we are pleased that HEAL members have been part each year since 2013. Again, Prof. Stephan Winkler was one of the organizers of the workshop.

Prof. Bogdan Burlacu travelled to Ann Arbor and presented the topics:

“Gradient-based Local Search in Symbolic Regression” and
“How to measure explainability and interpretability of machine learning results”

The talks were well-received and lead to interesting discussions.

EFRE Project "IPMAI" started

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 12:25:25 +0000

The official kick-off meeting of the IPMAI project took place at the Software Competence Center Hagenberg from 8 to 9 April 2024. IPMAI is a synonym for Interpretable Prescriptive Maintenance using Artificial Intelligence. Objective of this project is the development of a new artificial intelligence (AI)-based maintenance strategy for machines with gearboxes.

IPMAI's approach is of general applicability because of its AI-generated explanations innovative in terms of user acceptance and because of the use of the gearbox as a general wear indicator.

Under the lead of SCCH, we will be working on this innovative topic together with 7 other project partners from Austria and the Czech Republick over the next three years.

The consortium consists of the following organisations:

Software Competence Center Hagenberg GmbH (Leadpartner)
University of Applied Science Upper Austria, Research and Development GmbH
AC2T research GmbH
University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice
College of Polytechnics in Jihlava
Intemac Solutions, s.r.o.
CDP Center for Digital Production GmbH
Business Upper Austria – OÖ Wirtschaftsagentur GmbH
dataPartner s.r.o.

This project is co-funded by the European Union within the Interreg Austria-Czechia – programme.

HEAL @ Eurocast 2024

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 11:43:49 +0000

Our research group was strongly represented at the Eurocast -The 19th International Conference on Computer Aided Systems Theory, which took place in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, from February 25th-March 1st.

Michael Affenzeller and Stefan Wagner hosted the "Workshop on Theory and Applications of Metaheuristic Algorithms“, and and Stefan Wagner the Workshop on Modeling, Simulation, and Optimization in Production and Logistics”. The following papers were presented:

A Hybrid Cooperative Approach for Symbolic Regression by Bahareh Etaati
Comparing Constraint Evaluation Methods for Shape-constrained Regression by Christian Haider
Re-evaluation in Dynamic Tree-Search with Backtracking from Known Solutions by Philipp Fleck
Automated Inference of Domain Knowledge in Scientific Machine Learning by Florian Bachinger
Diversity Management in Evolutionary Dynamic Optimization by Bernhard Werth
Composable Evolutionary Computation by Jan Zenisek
Machine Learning Update Strategies for Real-time Production Environments by Philipp Neuhauser
Online Machine Learning for the Estimation of Process Times in Dynamic Scheduling by Michael Heckmann
Concurrent Evolution of Dynamic Single- and Dual-Crane Scheduling Scenarios by Johannes Karder
Using the Pilot Method as a Problem-Independent Metaheuristic for Multi-Objective Beam Search by Oliver Bindreiter
Incrementally Solving the Dynamic Stacking Problem by Sebastian Leitner

Find out more about the EUROCAST Conference 2024.

Presentation at COST Action ROAR-Net Meetig

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 08:35:50 +0000

As part of the EU Cost (Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action CA22137 - COST, Alexander Kinast gave a presentation on Simulation based optimization, much of which originated from our joint project Secure Prescriptive Analytics.

The COST Action ROAR-Net Meeting took place at the AGH University of Krakow, Faculty of Physics and Applied Computer Science, this week February 19th to February 21st.

The aim of this COST Action is to make randomised optimisation algorithms widely competitive in practice by identifying and reducing obstacles to their adoption at the scientific, technical, economic, and human levels.

PPSN 2024 in Hagenberg!

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 11:57:03 +0000

We are happy to announce that the

18th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving From Nature

will take place in Hagenberg from September 14th - 18th 2024!

The International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving From Nature is a biannual open forum fostering the study of natural models, iterative optimization heuristics, search heuristics, machine learning and other artificial intelligence approaches. We invite researchers and practitioners to present their work, ranging from rigorously derived mathematical results to carefully crafted empirical studies.

Important Dates:

Paper Submission deadline: 5th April, 2024
Tutorial & Workshop Submission deadline: 9th February, 2024

For more information, please visit the website https://ppsn2024.fh-ooe.at/.

GECCO 2023 @ Lisbon

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 14:30:38 +0000

Michael Affenzeller, Stefan Wagner, Michael Kommenda, Bernhard Werth, Philipp Fleck, Bogdan Burlacu, Kaifeng Yang and Johannes Karder are going to attend the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference - GECCO 2023, which takes place from July 15-19, in Lisbon, Portugal.

The GECCO Conference is one of the most important and prestigious conferences for the latest high-quality results in genetic and evolutionary computation since 1999. This year, the conference is again organized as a hybrid event.

Two workshops will be hosted by HEAL members:

Workshop on Evolutionary Computation Software Systems (EvoSoft) by Stefan Wagner and Michael Affenzeller
Symbolic Regression Workshop (SymReg) by Michael Kommenda and Gabriel Kronberger

Bernhard Werth will present the paper “Walking through the Quadratic Assignment-Instance Space: Algorithm Performance and Landscape Measures”.

Also, the Competition

Dynamic Stacking Optimization in Uncertain Environments

is organized by HEAL members.

We would be happy to meet you in Lisbon!

Research Visit in Oxford

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 09:16:55 +0000

Lukas Kammerer recently spent four weeks at the University of Oxford as part of the Balzan Fellowship. He worked together with Prof. Pedro Ferreira, Professor of Astrophysics at the Department of Physics on very similar approaches to deterministic symbolic regression.

They specifically worked on the extension of existing methods for deterministic symbolic regression and on the modelling of an efficient, differentiable emulator for the non-linear power spectrum of the matter distribution in the universe in the field of cosmology.

A highlight of the stay was the accommodation at New College, where Lukas was part of the Senior Common Room and got to share in college life.

Picture 1: Prof. Pedro Ferreira and Lukas at a zoom conference with Harry Desmond, Deaglan Bartlett and Gabriel Kronberger.

Picture 2: Lukas in front of the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford.

Interview with Gabriel Kronberger

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 12:28:25 +0000

After the successful completion of the Josef Ressel Centre for Symbolic Regression, head of the Ressel Centre Gabriel Kronberger was interviewed by the Christian Doppler Association. You can read the interview here.

Congratulations on the successful completion of the JR Centre! Could you briefly describe what you have been researching at the centre?

We have developed algorithms that can be used to learn predictive models in the form of simple formulas from data. Such models can be used in many applications for simulation, optimization, or design of systems. Together with our company partners, we have created models for battery aging, fuel cells, friction components, and plastics recycling systems.

What would you describe as the most important achievements of your JR Centre?

We were able to develop a software package that set a new benchmark for accuracy and efficiency for symbolic regression. The software is open source and has been taken up internationally by researchers at renowned universities. This has resulted in new contacts with whom we are continuing to develop the methodology beyond the JRZ.

What do you particularly appreciate about the funding model of the JR Centres?

Josef Ressel Centres and Christian Doppler Laboratories are known in Austria in academia and industry for excellent application-oriented research. The funding model of the JR Centres enables the establishment of a research focus and international networking through the 5-year term.

Prof. (FH) DI Dr. Gabriel Kronberger led the JR Centre for Symbolic Regression from its start-up in 2018 until the end of the regular term in 2022 and is employed at the FH Upper Austria Faculty of Computer Science, Communication and Media at the Hagenberg Campus.

Professor Bogdan Burlacu

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 09:07:46 +0000

Bogdan Burlacu has started his position as Professor of Data Analytics and Machine Learning on January 1st and will teach courses in several master's programs of the University of Applied Sciences, Campus Hagenberg, starting in the summer semester 2023. Congratulations from the HEAL Team!

Guest Professor Vittorio Solina in Hagenberg

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 08:53:45 +0000

Vittorio Solina, assistant professor at the University of Calabria, came to visit the Hagenberg Campus last week. During his visit he gave 3 lectures on:

"Approaches and methodologies for efficient supply chain management"
"Modeling & Simulation for supply chain management: opportunities offered by anyLogistix"
"Decision-making tools for manufacturing systems & supply chains: basic principles and applications cases"

ISM 2022 in Hagenberg

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 09:28:40 +0000

The International Conference on Industry 4.0 and Smart Manufacturing (ISM) will take place from 02 - 04 November 2022 in Hagenberg.

ISM 2022 represents a platform for knowledge exchange, the review and discussion of theoretical advances, research results, and industrial experiences, among scientists, researchers, decision makers, practitioners and students dealing with the topics of Industry 4.0 and Smart Manufacturing.

Both in-person and virtual participation options are available.

Michael Affenzeller – Keynote speech at EMSS 2022

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 09:31:01 +0000

The European Modeling & Simulation Symposium (EMSS 2022), part of I3M 2022, took place from September 19-21 in Rome, Italy and is one of the most important simulation conferences in Europe.

Dr. Michael Affenzeller gave a keynote presentation on what opportunities prescriptive analytics can bring to the simulation field. In particular, when it comes to finding a compromise between accuracy and efficiency of system descriptions in the field of simulation-based optimization, the combination of data- and knowledge-based approaches opens up new possibilities.

HEAL member Jan Zensisek presented the paper "Utilizing Interpretable Machine Learning to detect Dynamics in Energy Communities".

SYNASC 2022 in Hagenberg

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 08:47:39 +0000

The 24th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing (SYNASC 2022) is currently held at the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation in Hagenberg.

6 interesting papers have been presented at the Workshop for Symbolic Regression:

Fabrício Olivetti De França: Symbolic Regression with augmented dataset using RuleFit
Fabrício Olivetti De França: Comparison of OLS and NLS to fit Transformation-Interaction-Rational expressions
David Piringer, Bernhard Bloder and Gabriel Kronberger: Steel Phase Kinetics Modeling using Symbolic Regression
Martin Steiger, Hans-Georg Brachtendorf and Gabriel Kronberger: Identification of Discrete Non-Linear Dynamics of a Radio-Frequency Power Amplifier Circuit using Symbolic Regression
Gabriel Kronberger: Local Optimization Often is Ill-conditioned in Genetic Programming for Symbolic Regression
Wolfgang Roland, Michael Kommenda and Gerald Berger-Weber: Application of Symbolic Regression in Polymer Processing

Project completed

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 10:31:23 +0000

The FFG project with MOUNTONYX (https://www.mountonyx.com/) in the area of machine learning and data analystics for insurance has been finished successfully.

Research Visit from Brazil

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 07:39:24 +0000

We are very happy to welcome Prof. Fabrício Olivetti de França in Hagenberg! He will join the HEAL research group to work on Symbolic Regression methods until November.

Fabrício Olivetti de França is an associated professor at the Center for Mathematics, Computing and Cognition (CMCC) at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC) in Santo André, Brazil. His research currently focuses on Symbolic Regression, Evolutionary Computation and Functional Data Structures.

Within our long-standing collaboration, we have already published several papers (1, 2, 3) together. He is also one of the co-organizers of the Competition on Interpretable Symbolic Regression for Data Science and the Symbolic Regression Workshop at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) 2022 in Boston.

HeuristicLab moved to GitHub!

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 11:28:04 +0000

We are happy to announce that HeuristicLab, our open-source software framework for heuristic and evolutionary optimization, is now available on GitHub.

The repository and all issues have been migrated from our self-hosted Trac and Subversion systems and future development will continue on GitHub.

The documentation will remain on our https://dev.heuristiclab.com for now.

Kick-Off Event of the FTI Projects "SPA" and "FinCom”

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 20:19:34 +0000

The kick-off event of the two projects Secure Prescriptive Analytics and Financial Condition Monitoring took place at “Lennox” in the Linz city centre yesterday.

The evening event offered the opportunity for an interesting exchange among the project partners SCCH GmbH, RISC Software GmbH and FH OÖ F&E GmbH.

Secure Prescriptive Analytics (SPA)

In the SPA project we are researching on the development and combination of data-based as well as simulation-based modeling for the creation of optimized proposals for action. The aim is to develop a generically applicable SPA framework.

Financial Condition Monitoring (FinCom)

The FinCom project aims to significantly improve the use of data for modeling corporate financial risk. To make the data usable in the best possible and efficient way, innovative data modeling methods are used, and thus novel big-data questions are made accessible.

Both projects are funded by the state of Upper Austria as part of #upperVISION2030 and have a duration of 4 years.

GECCO 2022 @ Boston

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 11:21:36 +0000

Stefan Wagner, Michael Kommenda and Christian Haider are going to attend the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference - GECCO 2022, which takes place from July 9-13, in Boston, USA. The GECCO Conference is one of the most important and prestigious conferences for the latest high-quality results in genetic and evolutionary computation since 1999. This year, the conference is organized as a hybrid event for the first time.

Two workshops will be hosted by HEAL members:

Workshop on Evolutionary Computation Software Systems (Evosoft) by Stefan Wagner and Michael Affenzeller, July 9, 8:30 – 10:20 ET
Workshop on Symbolic Regression (SymReg) by Michael Kommenda and Gabriel Kronberger, July 09, 16:00–17:50 ET

Christian Haider will present the paper “Comparing Optimistic and Pessimistic Constraint Evaluation in Shape-constrained Symbolic Regression” on July 12th, 12:40 ET and Andreas Beham the paper “DynStack – A Benchmarking Framework for Dynamic Optimization Problems in Warehouse Operations” on July 9th, 9:35 ET.

Also, the two Competitions taking place on July 10th

Dynamic Stacking Optimization in Uncertain Environments and
Interpretable Symbolic Regression for Data Science are organized by HEAL members.

For more detailed information see the GECCO Program.

We would be happy to meet you in Boston!

GPTP 2022

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 07:02:49 +0000

HEAL members are participating in the Workshop on Genetic Programming Theory & Practice (GPTP) which is currently taking place at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Participation is only possible on invitation.

Prof. Stephan Winkler is once again member of the organizing team.

A presentation on “Symbolic Regression Potentials in Material Science” is held by Prof. Michael Affenzeller and Dr. Bogdan Burlacu. Slides

SYNASC 2022 - Call for Papers

Mon, 02 May 2022 12:00:14 +0000

The 24th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing takes place on September 12-15, 2022 in Hagenberg.

The deadline for paper submission is June 15, 2022

For more information please see: https://synasc.ro/2022/sr-2022/

Open PhD Position

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 12:32:05 +0000

We are looking for a PhD student whithin the research and training program "doc.funds.connect - Human-centered Artificial Intelligence (HCAI)", funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) .

Research Topic:

Integration of Human Expertise and a-priori Knowledge in White-box Machine Learning

Employment: 30 hours/week for up to 4 years

This PhD project builds upon and extends the interpretation of learning in AI. Interpretability and explainability are essential prerequisites for involving humans holistically in machine learning processes. For structured numerical data, genetic programming-based symbolic regression is a promising approach to learn complex nonlinear systems behavior in interpretable form. Our main goals will be the integration of knowledge from the domain (e.g. physics, chemistry, mechatronics, automotive, or macroeconomics) like (1) knowledge about correlations between features, (2) knowledge about extrapolation behavior, (3) knowledge about partial model structures (model of models) already during the learning phase.

If you would like to apply, please send the following documents to Michael Affenzeller:

Detailed CV
Publication list (if you have already published in scientific venues)
Certificates (including English translations!)
Lists of courses (and corresponding grades) taken during your studies
Some documents that demonstrate your scientific writing skills (e.g., a scientific article you published, a seminar paper, your Master's thesis)
Short statement of your research background, including a short motivation explaining why you are interested in the selected PhD topic (no more than 1 page)

HEAL @ Eurocast 2022

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 12:15:49 +0000

Our research group was strongly represented at this years Eurocast -The 18th International Conference on Computer Aided Systems Theory, which took place in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, from February 20th-25th.

An Invited plenary Lecture was held by Dr. Michael Affenzeller on “Prescriptive Analytics: Optimization meets Data- and Simulation-based Systems Modeling”.

Michael Affenzeller and Stefan Wagner hosted the "Workshop on Theory and Applications of Metaheuristic Algorithms" and the following papers were presented:

Multi-criteria Optimization of Workflow-based Assembly Tasks in Manufacturing by Florian Holzinger Slides
An Open Ended Multi-Objective Approach for Solving a Dynamic Optimization Problem in Steel Logistics by Andreas Beham Slides
Analysis and Handling of Dynamic Problem Changes in Open-Ended Optimization by Johannes Karder Slides
Measuring Features of Dynamic and Time-Linked Optimization Problems by Bernhard Werth Slides
Fitness Landscape Analysis of Dynamic Optimization Problems by Erik Pitzer Slides
Shapley Value based Variable Interaction Networks for Data Stream Analysis by Jan Zenisek Slides
Symbolic Regression with Fast Function Extraction and Nonlinear Least Squares Optimization by Lukas Kammerer Slides
Comparing Shape-Constrained Regression Algorithms for Data Validation by Florian Bachinger Slides
Improving the Flexibility of Shape-Constrained Symbolic Regression with Extended Constraints by David Piringer Slides
Shape-constrained Symbolic Regression with NSGA-III by Christian Haider Slides
Vectorial Genetic Programming - Optimizing Segments for Feature Extraction by Philipp Fleck Slides
Identifying Differential Equations to predict Blood Glucose using Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Systems by David Joedicke Slides

Find out more about the EUROCAST Conference 2022.

Talks on Machine Learning and Symbolic Regression

Thu, 24 Feb 2022 10:44:09 +0000

Dr. Bogdan Burlacu was speaker at the event "Scientific Machine Learning" of the AI Community Iași in Romania (online talk) which took place on February 23, 2022. Slides. Re-listen on YouTube.

Dr. Gabriel Kronberger talked on "Welchen Beitrag kann symbolische Regression zu Explainable AI leisten? – Praxis-Beispiele aus dem Josef Ressel Zentrum" at the Softwarepark Hagenberg IT-Expert*innenreihe „Thinking AI“ on February 17, 2022. Slides

HEAL is hiring!

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 15:16:00 +0000

In unserem Josef Ressel Zentrum adaptOp suchen wir derzeit eine/n neue/n Mitarbeiter/in:

Research Associate - Data Science and Evolutionary Computation

AUFGABEN

Mitarbeit in F&E-Projekten zu evolutionären Algorithmen und maschinellem Lernen der Forschungsgruppe HEAL
Entwicklung, Erweiterung und Anwendung von Optimierungsverfahren für dynamische Probleme im Josef Ressel Zentrum adaptOp
Umsetzung wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse zur Lösung von industriellen Optimierungsproblemen in der Praxis
Publikationstätigkeit und Mitarbeit bei Forschungsanträgen
Möglichkeit zur Dissertation an einer unserer Partner-Universitäten

PROFIL

Abgeschlossenes technisches Studium auf Masterniveau (z.B. Informatik, Software Engineering, Data Science, Mathematik, ...)
Fundierte Kenntnisse in der Softwareentwicklung (bevorzugt .NET und C#)
Interesse an Forschung und wissenschaftlichem Arbeiten mit einem jungen Team
Kreative und multidisziplinäre Herangehensweise in einem zukunftsweisenden Gebiet
Sehr gute Deutsch- und Englischkenntnisse

Die vollständige Stellenausschreibung finden Sie hier.
Wir freuen uns auf Ihre Bewerbung!

FH-Prof. DI Dr. Stefan Wagner
researchjobs20@fh-ooe.at

5 Fully-funded PhD Positions

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 15:28:08 +0000

We are very happy to announce an exciting new research and training program for PhD students:

Human-centered Artificial Intelligence (HCAI)

5 PhD positions at the FH Upper Austria, Campus Hagenberg or Johannes Kepler University Linz with the following research topics are available:

PhD 1: Overcoming the Dichotomy of Deep Learning vs. Symbolic AI
PhD 2: Mitigating Multifaceted Biases in Recommender Systems
PhD 3: Explaining Visual Patterns in Embedding Spaces
PhD 4: Human-AI Collaboration
PhD 5: Integration of Human Expertise and a-priori Knowledge in White-box Machine Learning

For further information and application please see: Job Announcements

Call for Papers: EvoSoft Workshop and Symbolic Regression Workshop at GECCO 2022

Thu, 13 Jan 2022 11:09:49 +0000

At this year’s GECCO, taking place from July 09th - 13th, 2022 in Boston (hybrid event) two workshops will be hosted by HEAL members

Workshop on Evolutionary Computation Software Systems by Stefan Wagner and Michael Affenzeller, and the
Workshop on Symbolic Regression by Michael Kommenda and Gabriel Kronberger.

Everyone is invited to submit a contribution!

The deadline for submission is April 11th, 2022.

For further important dates and submission guidelines see:

COMET-Project „TransMet1” started

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 14:19:42 +0000

HEAL is part of the COMET IC-MPPE project “TransMet1”, which is dedicated to the transformation in metallurgy to recycled steel. The objective is to provide fundamentals and tools for the production of high-quality recycled and CO2-reduced strip steels.

Based on two use cases, a demonstrator of a material and process design and optimization software based on hybrid modeling techniques for offline use in steel sheet production will be established. Hybrid modelling combines physics-based models with machine learning models. The main strategy is to use a combination of physical and data-driven modeling approaches for the development of process planning tools for steel strip production.

Use case 1 focuses on hybrid model-based prediction of the phase transformation of well-recrystallized austenite into its child phases.

Use case 2 is devoted to hybrid model-based prediction of the deformation behavior.

The task of HEAL in the project is to develop symbolic regression algorithms that can be used for hybrid modeling in use case 1.

Important impacts of the project are the reduction of CO2 emissions due to a switch from the blast furnace route to an electric arc furnace route, an economical use of raw materials such as iron ore and coal due to a radical switch to circular economy and a more efficient steel strip production with lower rejection rates.

Thinking AI - Das Softwarepark Hagenberg Magazin

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 12:36:30 +0000

Thinking AI - Das Softwarepark Hagenberg Magazin - Ausgabe 2021/22

New Project „In Process Optimisation (IPO)”

Thu, 02 Sep 2021 05:49:39 +0000

HEAL supports GAMED (https://gamed.com) in Graz, Austria in the development of self-learning quality control software for the food industry. The new collaborative project supported by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) aims to use KI-driven in process optimisation (IPO) to improve product safety, product quality and cost-effectiveness.

The software solution will allow centralized access to information from different departments, and process flows and provide the basis to reduce throughput times, manufacturing costs and rejection rates. In the event of deviations, it will become possible to immediately adapt test plans, which leads to a reduction in customer reclamation rates and recalls and thus strengthens international competitiveness.

HEAL supports the implementation and integration of machine learning components and advises on the selection and application of suitable algorithms learning tasks.

Austria Innovativ 3-21

Sun, 15 Aug 2021 08:53:00 +0000

Digitale Zwillinge mittels neuer Algorithmen

Mitarbeiter*innen gesucht!

Tue, 27 Jul 2021 07:49:17 +0000

Im Rahmen eines FWF Projektes oder eines Josef Ressel Zentrums können Sie in der Forschungsgruppe HEAL mitarbeiten (2 Vollzeitstellen):

AUFGABEN

Mitarbeit in F&E-Projekten im Bereich KI mit Schwerpunkt maschinelles Lernen und Optimierung
Anwendung, Erweiterung und Entwicklung von Methoden der dynamischen Optimierung
Umsetzung wissenschaftlicher Konzepte für praxisrelevante Aufgabenstellungen
Publikationstätigkeit und Erstellung neuer Forschungsanträge

PROFIL

Abgeschlossenes technisches Studium auf Masterniveau (z.B. Informatik, Mathematik, …)
Interesse an heuristischer Optimierung, evolutionären Algorithmen und maschinellem Lernen
Erfahrung in der Softwareentwicklung (bevorzugt .NET und C#)
Möglichkeit zur Dissertation an einer unserer Partner-Universitäten
Intrinsische Motivation zur wissenschaftlichen Arbeit
Multidisziplinäre Herangehensweise und offene Umgangsformen
Verlässlichkeit, Flexibilität und hohe Einsatzbereitschaft
Sehr gute Deutsch- und Englischkenntnisse

Die vollständige Ausschreibung finden Sie hier.

Wir freuen uns auf Ihre Bewerbung! / We are looking forward to your application!

FH-Prof. PD DI Dr. Michael Affenzeller

researchjobs20@fh-ooe.at

Farewell to Eva Maria Holzleitner and Viktoria Hauder

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 14:00:00 +0000

It is with a heavy heart that we said goodbye to Eva-Maria Holzleitner and Viktoria Hauder from the HEAL research group today. Thank you very much for your energy, friendship and support.

Your next stations are enormously exciting, responsible and challenging. Therefore, the smiling eye prevails, because we will observe, support and sometimes hopefully accompany your ways.

All the best

The HEALers

1st HeuristicLab Community Meeting

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 08:30:00 +0000

Our open source software HeuristicLab - used for optimization and machine learning - has been in development since 2002 and had mainly international users in the past. In recent years we have observed that a growing group (especially at the JKU, FH and non-university research institutions) is forming here as well, which is modeling and optimizing with HeuristicLab or sees potential in doing this more intensively in the future.

From this background we started a first event, to bring together the groups of HeuristicLab users, developers and those yet to become one for a constructive exchange and friendly get-together. The first event of this kind took place on June 21st, 2021.

Head of the research group HEAL, Michael Affenzeller, gave a first input on research group activities, followed by Stefan Wagner (HeuristicLab), Andreas Beham (optimization of production and logistics) and Gabriel Kronberger (data analytics and machine learning).

After that, Wolfgang Roland from the Institute for Polymer Extrusion and Compounding (IPEC) and Siegfried Silber from the Linz Center of Mechatronics (LCM), talked about their experience using HeuristicLab.

Finally, Stephan Winkler lead through a panel discussion with Stefan Wagner, Wolfgang Roland, Robert Wille, Siegfried Silber and Michael Affenzeller to talk about the future development of the software.

New Project with FunnelFox – “AI for new customers”

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 08:35:02 +0000

HEAL and FunnelFox have just started a new collaborative project to develop an AI-driven recommendation system for new customers for the FunnelFox distribution software. The project is supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs within the FFG General Programme.

FunnelFox offers an e-mail integration for CRM systems which connects with the e-mail account of a sales representative and automatically synchronizes all customer e-mails to the CRM system.

Although there is more data today than ever before, most sales teams struggle to work data-driven. This is partly because most companies do not have data science experts in the sales team. Especially with SMEs, there are often no data science competencies at all in the company.

Furthermore, the data environment in sales is very complex, with many providers and many different types of data such as company data, personal data, events, new hires, and other specializations within these categories.

The FunnelFox software supports the sales process from the first contact to success. The new recommendation system shall help to find ideal customer profiles including the optimal moment for establishing contacts, so-called "Predictive Lead Generation".

FunnelFox is looking for a Junior Python Developer to expand their platform and to participate in the project. For further information please contact Mr. Vincent Jong.

Research Group HEAL strongly represented at GPTP 2021

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 08:42:19 +0000

Participation in the Workshop on Genetic Programming Theory & Practice (GPTP) is only possible on invitation. Therefore, we are pleased that HEAL members have been part each year since 2013. This year, Prof. Stephan Winkler was even one of the organizers of the workshop.

Normally taking place in Michigan - either at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor or the Michigan State University - this year the workshop was hosted by ZOOM from May 19-21.

COMPETITION ON DYNAMIC STACKING OPTIMIZATION IN UNCERTAIN ENVIRONMENTS

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 08:56:55 +0000

Competition to be held as part of the 2021 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2021) organized by ACM SIGEVO (https://gecco-2021.sigevo.org).

Competition webpage: https://dynstack.adaptop.at

In this competition we give you a server where you can delve into two challenging and mysterious worlds of blocks and stacks. The hero in these worlds are robotic cranes that are fearlessly stacking and delivering blocks. Did you ever wish to take control of such a robot solving a herculean task? Well, now is your chance! Our cranes want to do a good job and therefore rely on YOUR optimization skills! They wait for you to tell it which blocks to pick up and where to drop them off so that the continuing stream of incoming blocks is dealt with most effortlessly.

A 15 minutes getting started tutorial is available on the competition webpage which shows how you can run a (pretty bad) sample policy. This is implemented in four different languages: C++, Python, C#, and Rust. However, you can use any other programming language that you like! The basic requirements is that you have an implementation of ZeroMQ and Protobuf. We aimed to make the topic of optimization in dynamic or uncertain environments as easy to approach as possible and yet create a challenging and also rewarding experience.

There are two tacks with increasing complexity and challenge. Each time you have one hour in real-time where you decide on the cranes’ actions. In the first track “Hotstorage” you are controlling one crane that serves one arrival stack and one handover stack using a range of buffer stacks. In the second track “Rolling mill” you are controlling two cranes with capacity > 1 that serve a larger number of arrival stacks and two handover stacks. You can compete in either or both tracks. You are given certain training scenarios to test your solver with.

This competition is hosted by Andreas Beham, Stefan Wagner, Sebastian Leitner, Johannes Karder, and Bernhard Werth at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria (https://fh-ooe.at/en) Hagenberg Campus within the research project Josef Ressel Center for Adaptive Optimization in Dynamic Environments (https://adaptop.at) led by Stefan Wagner and funded by the Christian Doppler Forschungsgesellschaft (https://www.cdg.ac.at/en). If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to contact us at dynstack@adaptop.at!

You can also publish a 2-page summary of your contributions in the Companion Materials of the Proceedings of ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2021). Deadline for these 2-page summaries is April 12th. Instructions are given*, however, only 2 pages are allowed. Submission to the GECCO proceedings is not required to participate in the competition, nor is it required to attend GECCO. The announcement of the winner will be made during GECCO 2021.

We hope that you will have fun participating in this challenge! The deadline is Saturday June, 27 2021 (anywhere in the world). For more information please visit our webpage https://dynstack.adaptop.at

CONGRATULATIONS, Nic McPhee!

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 08:47:42 +0000

Our good friend Nicolas Freitag McPhee earned the 2020–21 University of Minnesota Morris Faculty Distinguished Research Award - an award that recognizes sustained research and artistic productivity of a Morris faculty member over the course of a career!

Nic McPhee has authored and co-authored many relevant publications especially in the field of genetic programming like "A Field Guide To Genetic Programming" (one of the most read and cited books in the field!).

We would like to congratulate you, Nic, to your award and incredible achievements!

(Photo from before Covid19)

Awards for our researchers Stephan Winkler and Andreas Beham

Thu, 07 Jan 2021 09:03:30 +0000

In the field of R&D the FH OÖ has been particularly successful since 2003 and over the years has developed into Austria's No. 1 university of applied sciences and one of the front runners in German-speaking countries. Research & Development at the four faculties is carried out by around 400 FH OÖ professors and scientific staff in more than 400 projects on 17 key topics and 6 excellence fields: Smart Production, Medical Technology, Energy, Food, Automotive and Logistics - practice-oriented with and for companies and institutions Economy and society.

We are delighted to announce that prizes went also to two of our research team this year: Stephan Winkler received the Researcher Award 2020 and Andreas Beham the Junior Researcher Award 2020 for their contributions within their research fields. Congratulations to both of them!

Fotocredit: Bernhard Plank

Michael Affenzeller @ LT1 on "Prescriptive Analytics"

Mon, 05 Oct 2020 16:10:00 +0000

There was an exciting event on the subject of "Prescriptive Analytics" at the Sofwarepark in Hageberg recently. You can find a TV-report with a shot interview of our research group leader Michael Affenzeller in the LT1 media library:

https://www.lt1.at/aktuelles/software-hilft-beim-entscheiden/

Dr. Viktoria Hauder - Congratulations!

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 09:49:00 +0000

We would like to congratulate our colleague Viktoria Hauder who successfully defended her PhD thesis!

Viktoria joined HEAL in 2016 and supported projects like HOPL or LOISI - she is now researcher in the Josef Ressel Center for Adaptive Optimization in Dynamic Environments.

She has done her PhD-thesis "Integrated Logistics Optimization" at the JKU - supervised by Univ.-Prof.in Sophie Parragh, PhD. and FH-Prof. PD DI Dr. Michael Affenzeller.

HEAL @ Home-Office

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 09:31:00 +0000

Due to the COVID-19 virus pandemia all employees from the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria are forced to work from home.

Also our members of research group HEAL stay at home, but as you can see on the photo: we are still going strong!

Our appeal to all of you out there: please stay home and stay safe!

Tea Time Science Talk @ Welios in Wels with Michael Affenzeller

Fri, 07 Feb 2020 09:07:14 +0000

On Sunday, 9th February Michael Affenzeller is invited to the "Tea Time Science Talk" in the Welios Science Center in Wels.

Artificial Intelligence has changed our world already and will still continue to do so. Many everyday objects already contain them so naturally that we no longer perceive them consciously. This issue and further topics will be discussed in Michael Affenzeller's talk about "Von lernfähigen Systemen: Wie gescheit ist künstliche Intelligenz schon?".

Find out more informations here: https://www.welios.at/2019/11/tea-time-science-talk/

Michael Affenzeller in the "Krone"

Fri, 24 Jan 2020 09:09:00 +0000

Michael Affenzeller was interviewed by the newspaper "Krone".

The interview is about artificial intelligence, algorithms and industry in Austria.

Stefan Wagner received Researcher Award 2019

Fri, 20 Dec 2019 09:19:30 +0000

The Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences (FH OÖ) honors outstanding scientists and scholars actively engaged in research in an annual award ceremony. The most successful among them were acknowledged with the Researcher Award of the FH OÖ on December 18th 2019 by LR Achleitner, FH-OÖ-Managing Director Gerald Reisinger and R&D director FH-Prof. Priv. Doz. DI Dr. Johann Kastner.

We are delighted to announce that a prize went also to our research team this year: Stefan Wagner received the Researcher Award 2019 for his contributions in the field of heuristic optimization and artificial intelligence. Congratulations!

Picture (fltr): R&D director FH-Prof. Priv. Doz. DI Dr. Johann Kastner, FH-Prof. DI Dr. Stefan Wagner and FH-OÖ-Managing Director Gerald Reisinger

Josef Ressel Center for for Adaptive Optimization in Dynamic Environments

Thu, 05 Dec 2019 11:20:21 +0000

On 27th November 2019, the Josef Ressel Center for Adaptive Optimization in Dynamic Environments (JRC adaptOp) was officially opened in Hagenberg. The JRC adaptOp conducts research on methods to meet challenges in dynamic production systems, as for example uncertainties, disruptive events and limited time. Partners of the project are the companies voestalpine Stahl, Industrie Logistik Linz, LogServ and LiSEC, which fund the center together with the Federal Ministry for Digital an Economic Affairs.

Within JRC adaptOp, the researchers of HEAL and the University of Vienna are challenged with solving dynamic optimization problems in domains such as warehousing, production, and transportation. A framework of adaptive methods is developed which react to observed changes in the environment swiftly. Machine learning techniques are integrated to predict the occurrence of future events, devise potential future scenarios, and select and configure adequate optimization algorithms.

As keynote speaker Prof. Thomas Bäck was invited. He is the head of the Natural Computing Group at the University in Leiden, Netherlands, and discussed the topic „ Prescriptive Analytics für dynamische Optimierung im industriellen Kontext: Methoden und Anwendungen“ as a keynote at the opening.

Also lots of media reported about the new Josef Ressel Center adaptOp:

Oberösterreichische Nachrichten - Ressel-Institut: "Den Geist in der Maschine wecken"

ORF OÖ - Neues Forschungszentrum an FH Hagenberg

Industriemagazin - Neues Ressel Zentrum an der FH OÖ will den "Geist in der Maschine wecken"

Factory - Viertes Ressel-Zentrum wird eröffnet

TIPS - Neues Josef Ressel Zentrum: FH OÖ forscht an lernender Optimierungssoftware für produzierende Industrie

Regionews - Neues Josef Ressel Zentrum in Hagenberg eröffnet: FH OÖ forscht an lernender Optimierungssoftware für produzierende Industrie

Photocredit: FH OÖ/foto-pils

Opening "Josef Ressel Centre for Adaptive Optimization in Dynamic Environments"

Wed, 27 Nov 2019 11:36:01 +0000

The opening ceremony of our Josef Ressel Centre for Adaptive Optimization in Dynamic Environments (JRZ adaptOp) will take place at Wednesday, 27. November 2019 - 14:30 Uhr at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria Campus Hagenberg.

We ask you to register at events@fh-hagenberg.at until 20th November and are looking forward to see you at our opening!) until 20th November and are looking forward to see you at our opening!

Michael Affenzeller at LT1-television

Mon, 28 Oct 2019 11:37:32 +0000

The head of our research group Michael Affenzeller was interviewed by the regional television LT1 about the strategy and key topics of the Softwarepark in Hagenberg.

You can watch the interview with Michael Affenzeller and Viktoria Hauder about the research in Prescriptive Analytics online in the LT1-Mediathek.

Michael Affenzeller - opening speech at EMSS, 2019

Thu, 26 Sep 2019 11:38:58 +0000

At last weeks I3M-Multiconference in Lisbon, Portugal, Michael Affenzeller had the honor to welcome the I3M community in his role as EMSS Program Chair.

The European Modeling and Simulation Symposium (EMSS) is the oldest and most established event at the I3M-Multiconference and a very important platform for the scientific community.

The European Modeling and Simulation Symposium is one of the most important simulation appointments in Europe. As tradition the conference focuses on Modeling & Simulation in Industry taking into consideration both applications and theoretical approaches. The conference proposes a multi-sides perspective to Modeling & Simulation environment. Tracks organization is intended to cover different research macro-areas dedicated to industrial engineering, Effective design, business, economy and finance, medicine, methodologies, techniques and applications. Such framework gives to scientists, technicians and users the opportunity to interact, collaborate on the most challenging research topics in the field of Modeling & Simulation.

In his opening statement, Michael Affenzeller announced that the traditional workshop organized by the HEAL research group within the scope of EMSS will appear under the name „Prescriptive Analytics“ at EMSS 2020 which will be held in Athens.

Michael Affenzeller also received a scientific achievement Award of the I3M-community at the opening event.

HeuristicLab 3.3.16 "Prague" Release

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 11:48:38 +0000

We are happy to announce the release of HeuristicLab 3.3.16, which is named after the location of this year's Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) in Prague, Czech Republic.

HeuristicLab 3.3.16 "Prague" contains the following new features:

decision tree algorithms for regression problems
integration of Google OR-Tools for writing and solving MIP/LP models
new and much faster persistence API (HEAL.Attic) for saving and loading files
management of projects in HeuristicLab Hive for assigning jobs and compute resources
upgraded to .NET Framework 4.6.1
several other performance improvements and bug fixes

For a full list of all changes have a look at the ChangeLog.

Go to the Download page or click on the image below to get HeuristicLab 3.3.16 "Prague" now!

Dr. Andreas Beham - Congratulations!

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 11:42:33 +0000

We would like to congratulate our colleague Andreas Beham who successfully defended his PhD thesis!

Andreas is one of our longest researchers and joined HEAL in 2004. He has done his PhD-thesis "Fitness Landscape Analysis and Algorithm Selection for Assignment Problems" at the JKU - supervised by FH-Prof. PD DI Dr. Michael Affenzeller and Prof. Enrique Alba, who came personally from Malaga to perform his role as second examiner.

GECCO 2019 Follow Up Visit

Wed, 24 Jul 2019 10:53:28 +0000

As before in the past after major events, such as conferences, held in Central Europe, fellow research colleagues once again used the opportunity to visit us at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Campus Hagenberg.

This time we were happy to welcome Prof. Eugene Semenkin and Prof. Nic McPhee - two renowned researches in the field of evolutionary algorithms and artificial intelligence - on neutral austrian soil;)

HEAL at GECCO 2019, Prague

Mon, 22 Jul 2019 10:55:51 +0000

Our research group HEAL was again strongly represented with 7 participants at this years GECCO - The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2019, that took place in Prague from July 13th-17th.

Among other things, Stefan Wagner organized the EvoSoft Workshop for the eighth time and Michael Affenzeller gave an invited lecture on Prescriptive Analytics as part of the Evolutionary Computation in Practice Workshop (ECiP).

Find out more about the GECCO -The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2019 in Prague here.

Find out more about the ECiP - The Evolutionary Computation in Practice workshops at the GECCO here.

Find out more about the EvoSoft - The Evolutionary Comutation Software Systems workshop at the GECCO here.

Conferment of the title Prof. (FH) to Erik Pitzer

Mon, 08 Jul 2019 10:58:11 +0000

Our research team member Erik Pitzer received the title Prof. (FH) for his achievements in teaching and research during a ceremony at the Landhaus in Linz.

We would like to congratulate him whole-heartedly!

HEAL at Conference on GPTP 2019

Fri, 05 Jul 2019 11:03:21 +0000

Stephan Winkler, Lukas Kammerer and Susanne Schaller participated at the Conference on Genetic Programming in Theory and Practice XVII. Lukas Kammerer also presented his paper on “Symbolic Regression by Exhaustive Search” during a conference workshop.

Genetic Programming Theory & Practice is a small, invitation-only workshop hosted 2019 by the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action at Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI. This year’s conference was held May 16-19, 2019.

Afterwards Lukas Kammerer was invited by Jason Moore to the Institute for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania for a short scientific exchange and discussed his current research topics within the Josef Ressel Centre for Symbolic Regression.

Bogdan Burlacu is Upper Austrian champion in tournament chess

Tue, 30 Apr 2019 14:13:33 +0000

Even though this announcement is not exactly in the core area of our research interests, we are more than proud to announce that our research associate Dr. Bogdan Burlacu has won the Upper Austrian championship title in tournament chess.

Bogdan came from Romania to Upper Austria in 2011 as candidate of a dissertation program that was carried out as part of the Joint International PhD Project between JKU and FH Hagenberg. In addition to working on several R&D projects, he completed his doctoral studies with distinction in 2017 under the supervision of Professors Michael Affenzeller and Josef Küng.

Bogdan is currently working at the Josef Ressel Centre for Symbolic Regression as part of our research group. We are proud of your remarkable success in your favorite hobby!

Find the regional newspaper article here.

Find the chess tournament results here and the official homepage entry of the Upper Austrian Chess association here.

Michael Affenzeller in the "Kurier"

Sun, 03 Mar 2019 14:15:28 +0000

Michael Affenzeller was interviewed by the newspaper "Kurier".

The interview is about artificial intelligence and industry in Austria.

Honour for Stephan Winkler's Habilitation

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 14:22:08 +0000

During the end-of-year review of the University of Applied Sciences FH Upper Austria, also our research group member Stephan Winkler was also honored on the occasion of his habilitation at the Johannes Kepler University in 2018.

We are very proud, that we have another habilitated member in our team, that supports our work and research!

Michael Affenzeller in the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 14:17:30 +0000

Michael Affenzeller was interviewed by the newspaper "Oberösterreichische Nachrichten"

The article is about heuristic algorithms, artificial intelligence and their opportunity for the Austrian economy.

Find the whole article here.

Michael Kommenda received Junior Researcher Award 2018

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 14:27:09 +0000

The Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences (FH OÖ) honors outstanding young scientists and scholars actively engaged in research in an annual award ceremony. We are delighted to announce that a prize went also to our research team this year: Michael Kommenda received the Junior Researcher Award 2018 for his contributions in the field of structure identification and heuristic optimization and finishing his PhD. Congratulations!

Picture: (f.l.t.r.): Dr. Gerald Reisinger, FH-Prof. Priv.Doz. DI Dr. Johann Kastner, DI (FH) Dr. techn. Michael Kommenda MSc, DI Dr. Johannes Preiner, DI (FH) Dr. Christoph Heinzl, Dr. Lisa-Maria Putz BSc MA, Wirtschaft-Landesrat Markus Achleitner (c) Land OÖ/Daniel Kauder

Michael Affenzeller received Researcher Award 2018

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 14:25:12 +0000

The Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences (FH OÖ) honors outstanding scientists and scholars actively engaged in research in an annual award ceremony. The most successful among them were acknowledged with the Researcher Award of the FH OÖ on December 19th 2018 by LR Achleitner, FH-OÖ-Managing Director Gerald Reisinger and R&D director FH-Prof. Priv. Doz. DI Dr. Johann Kastner.

We are delighted to announce that a prize went also to our research team this year: Michael Affenzeller received the Researcher Award 2018 for his contributions in the field of heuristic optimization and artificial intelligence. Congratulations!

Picture (f.l.t.r.): Dr. Gerald Reisinger, FH-Prof. Priv.Doz. DI Dr. Johann Kastner, FH-Prof. PD DI Dr. Michael Affenzeller, FH-Prof. DI Franz Staberhofer, Wirtschaft-Landesrat Markus Achleitner (c) Land OÖ/Daniel Kauder

Habilitation Stephan Winkler

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 09:39:51 +0000

We are very proud to announce, that our long-time colleague Stephan Winkler finished his habilitation at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz.

This is a huge success not only for him, but also for the research group HEAL and gives us new perspectives in researching and supervising theses!

Congratulations!

Big in Japan - GECCO Conference 2018

Thu, 26 Jul 2018 09:45:27 +0000

At this year's Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) in Kyoto, our research group was again represented with a large delegation of experienced and young researchers. The GECCO Conference is one of the most important and prestigious conferences for the latest high-quality results in genetic and evolutionary computation since 1999.

We are very proud, that this year four of our contributions were accepted in one of the main tracks!

Besides the EvoSoft workshop hosted by Stefan Wagner and Michael Affenzeller several of our researchers held workshops, paper and poster presentations:

Gabriel Kronberger presented „Predicting Friction System Performance with Symbolic Regression and Genetic Programming with Factor Variables“
Andreas Beham presented "Algorithm Selection on Generalized Quadratic Assignment Problem Landscapes"
Michael Affenzeller held an invited talk about "Data-Based Modeling and Optimization in Industrial Processes" in the "Evolutionary Computation in Practive (ECip)" track organized by Thomas Bartz-Beielstein
Johannes Karder presented the paper "Asynchronous Surrogate-assisted Optimization Networks"
Sebastian Raggl presented "Discrete Real-world Problems in a Black-box Optimization Benchmark"
Bogdan Burlacu presented a part of his PhD thesis, finished with distinction in 2017, under the title "Schema-based Diversification in Genetic Programming"
Bernhard Werth presented the paper entiteled "Quasi-Bistability of Walk-Based Landscape Measures in Stochastic Fitness Landscape"
Lukas Kammerer discussed his poster "Confidence-Based Ensemble Modeling in Medical Data Mining"

Also some of our former research group members and graduates like Roland Braune (University of Vienna), Stefan Forsterlechner (University of Dublin) or Ciprian Zavoianu (Johannes Kepler University Linz) are successfully represented at the GECCO Conference.

Around 700 researchers participated at the conference in Kyoto - they made this year's conference the second largest GECCO ever.

Find out more about the GECCO Conference 2018.

HEAL at GPTP Workshop

Thu, 24 May 2018 09:47:59 +0000

Gabriel Kronberger and Stephan Winkler visited the Genetic Programming in Theory and Practice (GPTP) Workshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan (http://gptp-workshop.com/). The workshop is an annual event hosted by the Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan.

Gabriel Kronberger presented our work on "Cluster Analysis of a Symbolic Regression Search Space". Our student, Tom Schmiedlechner, who is currently on a 3-month visit at the ALFA Group (http://alfagroup.csail.mit.edu) led by Una-May O'Reilly, presented their work together with Abdullah Al-Dujaili and Erik Hemberg on "Distributed Coevolutionary Learning in Generative Adversarial Networks"

Dr. Michael Kommenda - Congratulations!

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 09:50:53 +0000

We would like to congratulate our colleague Michael Kommenda who successfully defended his PhD thesis! Michael is one of our longest researchers and joined HEAL in 2008. He has done his PhD-thesis "Local Optimization and Complexity Control for Symbolic Regression" at the JKU - supervised by FH-Prof. PD DI Dr. Michael Affenzeller and a.Univ.Prof Dr. Josef Küng.

K-Project HOPL in "Der Standard"

Fri, 13 Apr 2018 13:03:29 +0000

K-Project HOPL in "Der Standard"

"Die Super-Profs - Michael Affenzeller" - Industriemagazin 05/2017 S.54-55

Fri, 13 Apr 2018 13:01:16 +0000

"Die Super-Profs - Michael Affenzeller" - Industriemagazin 05/2017 S.54-55

"Talking about a (r)evolution" - Informer 2017, S. 10-14

Fri, 13 Apr 2018 12:58:18 +0000

"Talking about a (r)evolution" - Informer 2017, S. 10-14

"Die Mathematik hinter den Autos der Zukunft" - Josef Ressel Center for Symbolic Regression in "der Standard"

Wed, 28 Mar 2018 12:54:00 +0000

"Die Mathematik hinter den Autos der Zukunft", 28.03.2018, Der Standard

Opening of the Josef Ressel Center for Symbolic Regression in Hagenberg

Thu, 08 Mar 2018 09:56:52 +0000

On March 2nd, the Josef Ressel Center (JRC) for Symbolic Regression was officially opened in Hagenberg. The subject of the JRC are mathematical models for propulsion systems. Partners of the project, funded by the Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs, are the companies AVL List and Miba.

At the Josef Ressel Center for Symbolic Regression, algorithms for the mathematical modeling of technical systems are being researched and developed. These should lead to improvements in the development and optimization of drives and their components. The JRC is funded with 1.14 million €, whereby the Ministry of Economics and the partner companies AVL List GmbH and Miba Frictec GmbH each carry half of the financing. "Like many other manufacturers, our partners AVL List and Miba Frictec are faced with the challenge that drives and their components, driven by hybridization, electrification and the resulting greater variety of variants, are becoming increasingly complex," explains the head of JRC Gabriel Kronberger. "At the same time, stricter emission standards must be adhered to, even in real driving conditions," continued the FH Upper Austria professor. That is why models and simulations play an increasingly important role in the development, configuration and optimization of drive components. In the new JRC in Hagenberg solution methods for symbolic regression are developed, which - integrated into the software systems of the partner companies - provide real-time models for the mentioned purposes. "The JRC gives us the opportunity to explore completely new approaches to symbolic regression. For industrial applications we need deterministic and efficient solution methods with few parameters," says Kronberger.

As keynote speaker Prof. Bartz-Beielstein was invited. He discussed the topic „Künstliche Intelligenz in industriellen Anwendungen“. Between the research groups HEAL and Prof. Bartz-Beielstein has been an intensive exchange of expertise for more than ten years. He also made a news entry on his homepage about the JRC opening.

The media also reported about the Josef Ressel Center for Symbolic Regression:

ORF OÖ – Neues Forschungszentrum in Hagenberg: http://ooe.orf.at/news/stories/2898709/

Der Standard – FH Oberösterreich bekommt drei neue Josef-Ressel-Zentren: https://derstandard.at/2000075127837/

Die Presse – Vier neue Labors eröffnet: https://diepresse.com/home/science/5381547/Vier-neue-Labors-eroeffnet

OÖN – Drei neue Forschungszentren für Fachhochschule: http://www.nachrichten.at/nachrichten/wirtschaft/Drei-neue-Forschungszentren-fuer-Fachhochschule;art15,2827727

Mein Bezirk – Neues Forschungszentrum der FH OÖ in Hagenberg: https://www.meinbezirk.at/freistadt/wirtschaft/neues-forschungszentrum-der-fh-ooe-in-hagenberg-d2426495.html

LT1 – Neues Forschungszentrum in Hagenberg: https://www.lt1.at/programm/05-03-2018/episode/neues-forschungszentrum-in-hagenberg

(Trend, No.: 20180309, p.43)

Find out more about the Christian Doppler Research Association.

Open PhD Positon

Thu, 08 Mar 2018 07:46:28 +0000

Josef Ressel Center for Symbolic Regression in "Mein Bezirk"

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 12:51:00 +0000

Mein Bezirk – Neues Forschungszentrum der FH OÖ in Hagenberg: https://www.meinbezirk.at/freistadt/wirtschaft/neues-forschungszentrum-der-fh-ooe-in-hagenberg-d2426495.html

Josef Ressel Center for Symbolic Regression in LT1

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 12:49:00 +0000

LT1 – Neues Forschungszentrum in Hagenberg:

https://www.lt1.at/programm/05-03-2018/episode/neues-forschungszentrum-in-hagenberg

Josef Ressel Center for Symbolic Regression in ORF OÖ

Sat, 03 Mar 2018 12:52:00 +0000

ORF OÖ – Neues Forschungszentrum in Hagenberg

http://ooe.orf.at/news/stories/2898709/

Josef Ressel Center for Symbolic Regression in "Die Presse"

Sat, 03 Mar 2018 12:50:00 +0000

Die Presse – Vier neue Labors eröffnet:

https://diepresse.com/home/science/5381547/Vier-neue-Labors-eroeffnet

Josef Ressel Center for Symbolic Regression in "Oberösterreichische Nachrichten"

Tue, 27 Feb 2018 12:51:00 +0000

OÖN – Drei neue Forschungszentren für Fachhochschule: http://www.nachrichten.at/nachrichten/wirtschaft/Drei-neue-Forschungszentren-fuer-Fachhochschule;art15,2827727

Eröffnung Josef Ressel Zentrum für Symbolische Regression

Mon, 19 Feb 2018 07:49:52 +0000

Die FH OÖ Fakultät für Informatik, Kommunikation und Medien lädt zur feierlichen Eröffnung des Josef Ressel Zentrums für Symbolische Regression ein.

Im neuen JR-Zentrum unter der Leitung von FH-Prof. DI Dr. Gabriel Kronberger erforscht die FH OÖ gemeinsam mit AVL List GmbH und Miba Frictec GmbH neue Algorithmen und Methoden für empirische und semi-physikalische Modellierung. Diese Methoden finden Anwendung zum Beispiel in der Entwicklung, Optimierung und Steuerung von Antriebssträngen.

Wir freuen uns auf Ihr Kommen!

Josef Ressel Zentren

In Josef Ressel Zentren wird anwendungsorientierte Forschung auf hohem Niveau betrieben, hervorragende ForscherInnen kooperieren dazu mit innovativen Unternehmen. Für die Förderung dieser Zusammenarbeit gilt die Christian Doppler Forschungsgesellschaft international als Best Practice Beispiel. Josef Ressel Zentren werden vom Bundesministerium für Digitalisierung und Wirtschaftsstandort und den beteiligten Unternehmen gemeinsam finanziert.

Programm

13:30 Uhr - Sektempfang

14:00 Uhr - Begrüßung (Dr. Gerald Reisinger, Geschäftsführer der FH OÖ)

14:10 Uhr Eröffnungsreden (Mag. Dr. Michael Strugl, MBA, Landeshauptmann-Stellvertreter, Wirtschafts-, Wissenschafts- und Forschungsreferent; Univ.-Prof. Dr. Reinhart Kögerler, Präsident der Christian Doppler Forschungsgesellschaft)

14:30 Uhr - Vorstellung des JRZ für Symbolische Regression (FH-Prof. DI Dr. Gabriel Kronberger, FH OÖ, Leiter des Josef Ressel Zentrums für Symbolische Regression - SymReg)

15:00 Uhr - Pause

15:15 Uhr - Fachvortrag „Künstliche Intelligenz in industriellen Anwendungen“ (Prof. Dr. Thomas Bartz-Beielstein, Sprecher des Forschungsschwerpunkts „Computational Intelligence plus“ an der TH Köln)

Ausklang am Buffet

Nähere Informationen und Anmeldung

Wir bitten um Anmeldung unter events@fh-hagenberg.at Die Teilnahme ist kostenlos. Anmeldeschluss: 22. Februar 2018

HeuristicLab 3.3.15 "Berlin" Release

Fri, 12 Jan 2018 07:53:57 +0000

We are happy to announce the release of HeuristicLab 3.3.15, which is named after the location of last year's Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) in Berlin, Germany.

HeuristicLab 3.3.15 "Berlin" contains the following new features:

New problems: Graph Coloring New data analysis algorithms: Barnes-Hut t-SNE (C# port of Laurens van der Maaten's C++ implementation) Kernel Ridge Regression Elastic-net Regression (glmnet wrapper) Support for categorical variables for symbolic regression and multiple data analysis algorithms PSO improvements (compatible with standard PSO 2011) Extreme-point based packing algorithm for 3D bin packing New functionalities for data preprocessing New functionality for run analysis (e.g. RLD/ECDF) For a full list of all changes have a look at the ChangeLog.

Go to the Download page or click on the image below to get HeuristicLab 3.3.15 "Berlin" now!

"New ways of managing slab processing"

Mon, 08 Jan 2018 07:56:06 +0000

Our company partner voestalpine authors a own blog lately and in one of their articles they published the output of the K-Project HOPL in slab processing.

Under the title " New ways of managing slab processing" they wrote an article about the innovative digital technologies that are being applied to manage slab processing at the Steel Division in Linz.

You can find the whole article here.

Gabriel Kronberger received Researcher Award 2017

Wed, 03 Jan 2018 07:58:30 +0000

The Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences (FH OÖ) honors outstanding scientists and scholars actively engaged in research in an annual award ceremony. We are delighted to announce that a prize went also to our research team this year: Gabriel Kronberger received the Researcher Award 2017 for his contributions to the field of Business Intelligence and Data Engineering. Congratulations!

Looking for a doctoral candidate: Joint JKU/UAS International PhD Program in Informatics

Mon, 18 Dec 2017 08:00:33 +0000

We are looking for a doctoral candidate for the Joint JKU/UAS International PhD Program in Informatics - this is a funded PhD Position.

"Self-organizing and Self-adaptive Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms"

We are looking for outstanding students with a degree in Computer Science or a related discipline and a strong background in computational intelligence, machine learning and programming. During your work on the PhD project, you will be part of the Heuristic and Evolutionary Algorithms Laboratory (HEAL, http://heal.heuristiclab.com/), one of the leading research groups in the field of applied evolutionary computation research. Members of the research group HEAL have implemented and maintain the open source software HeuristicLab, and they are continuously working on several application-oriented research projects with leading industrial companies in Austria. You will be supervised by Michael Affenzeller in collaboration with a co-supervisor at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. The position is fully funded (comfortably covering living expenses and health insurance) for 3 years. HEAL is part of the Department for Software Engineering of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria located in Hagenberg, Austria. The campus in Hagenberg is located 20 minutes north of Linz, the capital of Upper Austria, and is easily reachable by car or public transport. Linz is well known for its successful production industry, cultural diversity, and music. Please send your comprehensive application including CV, motivation letter, university certificates research interests and references until March 16th 2018 to michael.affenzeller@heuristiclab.com.

We are looking forward to your application!

ÖGOR-award for Jan Zenisek's master thesis

Thu, 30 Nov 2017 08:58:38 +0000

Jan Zenisek was awarded by the Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Operations Research for his outstanding master thesis!

The Austrian Society of Operations Research (in german: Österreichische Gesellschaft für Operations Research, abbreviated ÖGOR) is a non-profit scientific organization which supports application and and promotes development of operation research methods in Austria, focusing upon efficient knowledge transfer between high-profile scientific research and decision makers in all areas.

The award for the best master thesis is bestowed on the basis of opinions of international experts.

Jan joined our research group a year ago and finished his Master's degree in Software Engineering on the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg with distinction. The Master Thesis is titled "Simulation-Based Optimization Strategies for Real-World Vehicle Routing Problems" and he is now carrying on his research on the EFRE IWB 2020 project "Smart Factory Lab".

Congratulations to Jan for this great honor of his master thesis!

Michael Affenzeller & Stefan Wagner at IWMMA conference 2017 in Krasnoyarsk

Tue, 14 Nov 2017 08:59:58 +0000

Michael Affenzeller and Stefan Wagner were invited to hold a keynote and a HeuristicLab-tutorial at the IWMMA conference in Krasnoyarsk, Russia - The Sixth International Workshop on Mathematical Models and their Applications.

The Sixth International Workshop on Mathematical Models and their Applications (IWMMA 2017) will provide an international forum for the presentation of original results in mathematical modeling for software- and hardware applications in various fields. It will stimulate lively discussions among researchers as well as industrialists.

Michael Affenzeller's keynote titled "Real-World Systems Modeling and Optimization with Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithms" - The focus of the talk was on systems modeling, optimization, algorithm design and analysis with respect to real world problems using different flavors of evolutionary algorithms. A special focus was on the analysis of algorithm dynamics in order to analyze the reasons of premature convergence which provides deeper insights about the algorithms internal behavior and gives inspiration for the design of new hybrid algorithms.

Stefan Wagner's tutorial titled "Algorithm and Experiment Design with HeuristicLab. An Open Source Optimization Environment for Research and Education" - This tutorial demonstrated how to apply and analyze metaheuristic optimization algorithms using the HeuristicLab open source optimization environment. It was shown how to parameterize and execute evolutionary algorithms to solve various optimization problems (e.g., traveling salesman, vehicle routing, quadratic assignment, symbolic regression).

Thanks to Eugene Semenkin and his team for the invitation and the interesting feedback to the keynote and the tutorial!

New research group members

Thu, 05 Oct 2017 09:01:26 +0000

The HeuristicLab Team is expanding further and we want to welcome our new team members, Daniel Dorfmeister, Lukas Kammerer and Roland Hanghofer.

Daniel and Lukas completed their master studies at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria this year. Both graduated in Software Engineering from the double degree program at the University of Calabria and the FH OÖ Campus Hagenberg .

Daniel is working on the project DigiMont, Lukas on the contract research for EREMA.

Roland is still in the bachelor degree course and works as a trainee for the research group.

Jan Zenisek won Gianni Cantice Award for Gifted Simulation Students at I3M conference

Mon, 25 Sep 2017 09:10:43 +0000

Our research group member Jan Zenisek won the VI Edition of Gianni Cantice Award for Gifted Simulation Students for his submission "Smart Maintenance Lifecylce Management: A Design Proposal".

The Award Winner is announced, as each year, during I3M Conference (2016 Cyprus, 2015 Bergeggi, 2014 Bordeaux, 2013 Athens, 2012 Wien) as best simulation student(s) among the applicants. The Award is entitled to Col. Gianni Cantice as recognition for his long activity in Simulation. Requirements: Students (e.g. engineering, mathematics, physics, etc.) enrolled in Simulation Researches in Institute, Universities & Agencies are entitled to participate. Students from all countries are invited to send R&D Papers & Applications. The prize also includes the next I3M-conference fee for 2018's edition.

We would like to congratulate you, Jan, on this award!

Michael Affenzeller held keynote at I3M conference 2017

Mon, 25 Sep 2017 09:05:30 +0000

Michael Affenzeller held a keynote about interactions between Modeling/Simulation and Computational Intelligence at I3M conference 2017 in Barcelona. The lecture was very well attended.

The presentation covered theoretical aspects as well as real world examples demonstrating how the open source framework HeuristicLab can be used for modeling, optimization and machine learning tasks for concrete challenges in the domain of production, logistics and systems research.

Find out more about the keynote here.

Dr. Bogdan Burlacu - Congratulations!

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 09:13:01 +0000

We would like to congratulate our colleague Bogdan Burlacu who successfully defended his PhD thesis yesterday! Bogdan joined us a couple of years ago and is doing research in genetic programming. He has done his PhD within the international PhD program jointly organized by JKU and FH Upper Austria and finished his PhD studies with distinction.

The best of both worlds: Combining the Flexibility of Modeling & Simulation with Optimization by Evolutionary Algorithms

Mon, 11 Sep 2017 09:19:24 +0000

Michael Affenzeller as keynote speaker at the I3M conference in Barcelona!

Every year, the I3M Multiconference renovates the opportunity to bring together researchers, scientists and practitioners, from the Mediterranean Area, Latin & North Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, who are concerned with Modeling and Simulation in Industry and Academia.

Affenzeller's presentation will cover theoretical aspects as well as real world examples demonstrating how the open source framework HeuristicLab can be used for modeling, optimization and machine learning tasks for concrete challenges in the domain of production, logistics and systems research.

Find more information about the keynote here.

Looking for researchers

Mon, 04 Sep 2017 09:20:34 +0000

We are looking for staff again - find the necessary information in the profile description.

Do not hesitate to contact us! We are looking forward to your application.

Evolutionary Algorithms Pioneer Nic McPhee visiting Hagenberg campus

Tue, 25 Jul 2017 09:22:00 +0000

We are glad to announce that Nicolas Freitag McPhee from the University of Minnesota, Morris visited our campus after the Berlin GECCO giving many valuable hints to Patrik Kimmeswenger, who is implementing PushGP in HeuristicLab in his master thesis. Nic McPhee has authored and co-authored many relevant publications especially in the field of genetic programming like the field guide to genetic programming; his recent research interests include the analysis of GP ancestry which brought us in contact as our colleague Bogdan Burlacu has also been working in this field over the last years within the scope of his PhD thesis and has spent a research visit in Morris last year.

Another Award for Viktoria Hauder @ Sigevo Summer School 2017

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 09:24:10 +0000

SIGEVO is a special interest group of ACM who is always looking for new ways to improve research and learning on genetic and evolutionary calculations. In this search for the spread of knowledge and experience in this area, a summer school around GECCO 2017 in Berlin was organized for the first time this year: S3 (Sigevo Summer School).

Our researcher Viktoria Hauder was again awarded the prize for "Best assignment resolution of appreciation 2nd place". (1st photo with Dr. Manuel Lopez-Ibanez, 2nd photo with Prof. Enrique Alba and Dennis Wilson).

We would like to congratulate you on this award!

HEAL at GECCO Conference 2017 - Best Paper 3rd Place at Student Workshop for Viktoria Hauder

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 09:26:48 +0000

At this year's Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) in Berlin, our research group was again represented with a large delegation of experienced and young researchers.

Besides the EvoSoft workshop hosted by Stefan Wagner and Michael Affenzeller, we are especially pleased that our researcher Viktoria Hauder has reached Best Paper 3rd place at the Student Workshop. (in the picture with Vanessa Volz and Boris Naujoks) Congratulations!

Find out more about the GECCO Conference 2017.

We are looking for staff again - find the necessary information in the profile description. Do not hesitate to contact us! We are looking forward to your application.

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 09:31:37 +0000

We are looking for staff again - find the necessary information in the profile description.

Do not hesitate to contact us! We are looking forward to your application.

Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (m/w) Heuristic and Evolutionary Algorithms Laboratory Fakultät für Informatik, Kommunikation und Medien | Hagenberg

IHRE AUFGABEN: Modellierung von industriellen Produktions- und Logistikszenarien | Entwicklung und Umsetzung von Optimierungsalgorithmen aufbauend auf HeuristicLab | White-Box Data Mining | Predictive Maintenance | Eigenständige und kooperative Publikationstätigkeit | Mitwirkung bei Erstellung neuer Forschungsanträge

IHR PROFIL: Hochschulabschluss (Masterniveau) in Informatik, Software Engineering, Mathematik o.ä. | Erfahrung in Problemmodellierung und Softwareent- wicklung (insbes. C#) | Kenntnisse und Interesse an metaheuristischen Optimierungsverfahren (wie genetische Algorithmen, Schwarmverfahren etc.) | Intrinsische Motivation zu wissenschaftlicher Arbeit | Multidisziplinäre Herangehensweise und offene Umgangsformen | Eigenverantwortlichkeit und Teamfähigkeit | Verlässlichkeit, Flexibilität und hohe Einsatzbereitschaft | Dissertationsmöglichkeit im engeren thematischen Umfeld der Aufgabenstellung

WIR BIETEN IHNEN ein spannen- des, innovatives Arbeitsumfeld mit Gestaltungsspielraum im oberöster- reichischen Zentralraum. Sie werden Teil eines dynamischen Teams und bringen Ihr Wissen und Ihre Erfahrung ein, um eine laufende Weiterentwicklung voranzutreiben. Eine faire Entlohnung und ein eigenverantwortliches Aufga- benumfeld runden unser Angebot ab!

WIR FREUEN UNS AUF IHRE BEWERBUNG: Dr. Michael Affenzeller, Michael.Affenzeller@fh-hagenberg.at, Tel.: +43 5 0804 22031, FH OÖ Studienbetriebs GmbH, Softwarepark 11, 4232 Hagenberg/Austria, www.fh-ooe.at Wir versuchen den Anteil an weiblichem Lehr- und Forschungspersonal zu erhöhen. In diesem Sinne laden wir speziell Frauen ein, sich zu bewerben. Gehalt ab € 2.680,53 brutto/Monat in Abhängigkeit vom Qualifikationsprofil. Kosten, die mit der Bewerbung entstehen, werden nicht ersetzt.

Michael Affenzeller at the SISOM Workshop in Rome

Mon, 20 Mar 2017 09:33:52 +0000

The SISOM Workshop was held in Main Auditorium of INAIL (Piazzale Pastore, Rome, Italy) on March 20, 2017.

Michael Affenzeller was invited to hold a session about "Integrated Modeling and Optimization in Industry 4.0" - a part of the Industry 4.0 at International Level workshop.

Industry 4.0 is the current Paradigm of Automation and Data Exchange in manufacturing leading to Smart Manufacturing; the idea is to combine concepts such as Cyber-Physical Systems, the Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Modeling and Simulation, Augment & Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Agents to create a common intuitive framework to control the Industrial Processes

Modeling and Simulation use the computers to recreate real systems on computers and to experiment them within such virtual environment; this allow to conduct experiments and tests even before a new industrial system is realized and to conduct Virtual Prototyping as well as to develop Training Equipment and decision Support Systems (DSS)

Find more information about the SISOM workshop on http://www.liophant.org/siren/2017/industry4dot0/#industry_sisom

Mini-Symposium at EUROGEN - Applications of Optimization in Engineering Design Automation (AppODA)

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 09:38:34 +0000

Mini-Symposium at EUROGEN, Sep 13-15, 2017, Madrid, Spain

Based on a history of automating design calculations, simulation support, and applying artificial intelligence and optimization in engineering domains, design automation (DA) provides methods and tools for exploring solution spaces and generating designs at different levels of detail.

Optimization problems are often an inherent part of DA approaches and solutions since the complexity of products often yields optimization tasks which exceed the human capacity to solve them manually. In order to support the striving to fully explore the design envelope before making decisions with a high impact on committed costs, a wide range of industries has thus adopted optimization problems within engineering DA. Exemplary application areas include the validation and improvement of structural aspects and the appropriate selection, dimensioning and assembling of components to fulfil customer-specific needs. Beyond, also optimization methods to guide solution finding related to tasks with large and unstructured solution spaces have received increased attention.

This symposium aims at bringing together practitioners and scientists from academia, research institutes and industry to discuss about practical and scientific problems and solution strategies in the context of engineering design automation and optimization.

Call for papers: EvoSoft Workshop at GECCO 2017

Tue, 24 Jan 2017 09:41:48 +0000

Once again, the EvoSoft workshop at this years GECCO is being hosted by Stefan Wagner and Michael Affenzeller. Everyone is invited to submit a contribution addressing a number of different aspects such as:

development and application of generic and reusable EC software systems
architectural and design patterns for EC software systems
software modeling of EC algorithms and problems
open-source EC software systems
expandability, interoperability, and standardization
comparability and traceability of research results
graphical user interfaces and visualization
comprehensive statistical and graphical results analysis
parallelism and performance
usability and automation
comparison and evaluation of EC software systems

The deadline for the submission is March 27th, 2017. Further important dates and submission guidelines can be found in the call for papers.

Andreas Beham received Junior Researcher Award 2016

Thu, 22 Dec 2016 09:48:37 +0000

The Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences (FH OÖ) honors outstanding scientists and scholars actively engaged in research in an annual award ceremony. We are delighted to announce that a prize went also to our research team this year: Andreas Beham received the Junior Researcher Award 2016 for his contributions to the field of heuristic and evolutionary optimization. Congratulations!

Bernhard Werth finished MSc with distinction

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 10:16:22 +0000

We want to congratulate our research group member Bernhard Werth for finishing his Master of Science in Informatics at the Johannes Kepler University with distinction!

His Master Thesis topic was "Identifikation von Datenqualitätsproblem in integrierten Informationssystemen".

Project HOPL at the Austrian Summit Industry 4.0

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 09:50:45 +0000

Leading companies, international experts and politicians presented the strategies for success in the Industry 4.0 sector and discussed current and future prospects of digitalization.

A key topic were cooperations between companies and research institutions - Michael Affenzeller presented the HOPL - Heuristic Optimization in Production and Logistics - Project.

Find more information about the Austrian Summit Industry 4.0 on http://plattformindustrie40.at/das-war-der-summit-industrie-4-0-oesterreich/

The Summit was organized by the Plattform Industrie 4.0.

Theory and Applications of Metaheuristic Algorithms Workshop at eurocast 2017

Thu, 17 Nov 2016 09:53:16 +0000

Theory and Applications of Metaheuristic Algorithms Workshop at eurocast 2017

Description

Heuristic algorithms have been successfully used to attack complex real-world problems. For a large set of domains they are able to calculate approximate solutions in affordable time. However, heuristic algorithms tend to be very domain specific and suffer from a high problem dependency. In order to overcome this insufficiency various different heuristic optimization strategies are generalized resulting in metaheuristic algorithms.Nowadays metaheuristics enter more and more fields of applications ranging from telecommunications to bioinformatics including of course also other more traditional academic fields as for example continuous or combinatorial optimization. The drastic improvement of computational power and the successful implementation of advanced parallel and grid computing concepts enable efficient solving of problems that have been previously unsolved for a long period of time.Other important issues arise from the consequences of the No-Free-Lunch theorem. It is suggested to extend the power of basic algorithms by analyzing the topology and features of the search space leading to the design of self-adaptive algorithms. Hybridization, local search and specialized operators are in this context some of the major approaches leading to even more efficient algorithms in terms of computational effort and solution quality. All these developments enable the research community to tackle previously unsolvable problems in various challenging and often interdisciplinary applications.

Topics

Suggested topics for papers include but are not limited to:

New algorithmic developments
Theory and applications of Genetic Algorithms
Theory and applications of Genetic Programming
Other metaheuristics like Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search, Ant Colony Optimization, Particle Swarm Optimization, Scatter Search,...
Mathematical programming based approaches
Hybrid approaches
Parallel metaheuristics
Machine learning and simulation
Data driven modelling and prediction
Simulation based heuristic optimization
Application of simulation based soft computing

Paper Submission

An extended two pages abstract, including references in English with indication of the workshop of the intended contribution must be sent via webpage (http://www.iuctc.ulpgc.es) from May, 1, 2016 until October, 31, 2016. For the extended abstract please follow the instructions for LNCS Authors given at the Springer Online web site. Authors will be notified of acceptance by December 1, 2016. Accepted Extended Abstracts will be published in a pre-Conference volume with ISBN. It is anticipated that the final selected full papers will be published in line with prior Eurocast meetings (Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 410, No. 585, No. 763, No. 1030, No. 1333, No. 1798, No. 2178, No. 2809, No. 3643, No. 4739, No.5717, and No. 9520). Full final papers for publication will be required before April 30, 2017

Important Dates

Submission Deadline (Extended Abstract): October 31, 2016
Acceptance Notification: December 1, 2016
Camera-Ready Paper Deadline: April 30, 2017

Workshop Chairs

Michael Affenzeller, Witold Jacak (University of Appl. Sciences of Upper Austria, Campus Hagenberg), Günther Raidl (Vienna University of Technology, Austria)

Heureka! Projekt HOPL - Forbes Magazin 09/2016

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 16:32:51 +0000

The HOPL project was featured in Forbes Magazin.

ECiP 2016 Talks and Slides online

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 10:09:00 +0000

In the Evolutionary Computation in Practice (ECiP) track, well-known speakers with outstanding reputation in academia and industry present background and insider information on how to establish reliable cooperation with industrial partners. They actually run companies or are involved in cooperations between academia and industry. If you attend, you will learn multiple ways to extend EC practice beyond the approaches found in textbooks. Experts in real-world optimization with decades of experience share their approaches to creating successful projects for real-world clients.

Due to many requests you can find some talks and slides of the ECiP - a part of the GECCO 2016 - now online:

http://www.spotseven.de/gecco/evolutionary-computation-in-practice/

You can find Michael Affenzeller's slides on "Heuristic Optimization in Production and Logistics" there too.

Visit to the GECCO Conference in Denver, Colorado, USA

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 10:12:02 +0000

Several HEAL members presented their work from 20th to 24th July at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference in Denver, Colorado, USA.

The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2016) presented the latest high-quality results in genetic and evolutionary computation. Topics include: genetic algorithms, genetic programming, evolution strategies, evolutionary programming, memetic algorithms, hyper heuristics, real-world applications, evolutionary machine learning, evolvable hardware, artificial life, adaptive behavior, ant colony optimization, swarm intelligence, biological applications, evolutionary robotics, coevolution, artificial immune systems, and more.

HeuristicLab 3.3.14 "Denver" Release

Thu, 28 Jul 2016 10:27:49 +0000

We are happy to announce the release of HeuristicLab 3.3.14, which we finished at this year's Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) in Denver, CO, USA.

HeuristicLab 3.3.14 "Denver" contains the following new features:

New problems:
- Bin Packing
- Probabilistic TSP
- Multi-Objective Testfunctions
New data analysis algorithms:
- Gradient Boosted Regression
- Nonlinear Regression
- Elastic-Net
Gradient Charts

For a full list of all changes have a look at the ChangeLog.

Go to the Download page or click on the image below to get HeuristicLab 3.3.14 "Denver" now!

Combinatorial Black Box Optimization Competition (GECCO'16)

Sun, 24 Jul 2016 10:21:15 +0000

We are proud to announce that HEAL member Andreas Beham scored 2nd place with his algorithm titled MemPR submitted to the 2nd Combinatorial Black Box Optimization Competition (CBBOC) at the GECCO 2016 conference in Denver, USA. MemPR competed in the track where no parameter tuning was allowed against 5 other algorithms. Only three algorithms could manage to take a lead in a different subset of the problem instances. MemPR was especially successful when applied on Ising Spin Glasses problem instances.

The top three algorithms in the category without parameter tuning were reported to be

CMA-VNS2
MemPR
P3

The ranks were computed using the Schulze method to find the Condorcet winner.

We would like to thank the organizers of doing a great job in organizing the competition, creating the competition framework for a multitude of programming languages and carrying out all the computations. We would like to encourage everyone to consider the competition at next year's GECCO 2017.

Call for Papers: ECTA 2016

Wed, 25 May 2016 10:23:50 +0000

Once again, the 8th International Conference on Evolutionary Computation Theory and Applications is held in Porto, Portugal from 9-11th November 2016. Everyone is invited to submit a contribution addressing a number of different aspects such as:

Genetic Algorithms
Machine Learning
Artificial Life
Representation Techniques
Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization
Game Theory and Applications
Evolution Strategies
Evolutionary Robotics and Intelligent Agents
Society and Cultural Aspects of Evolution
Co-evolution and Collective Behavior
Biocomputing and Complex Adaptive Systems
Bio-inspired Hardware and Networks
Swarm/Collective Intelligence
Evolutionary Art and Design
Hybrid Systems
Memetic Algorithms
Genetic Programming
Hyperheuristics

The deadline for the Regular Paper Submission is June 2nd, 2016. Further important dates and submission guidelines can be found in the attached call for papers.

Visit to the Genetic Programming Theory and Practice Workshops 2016

Tue, 17 May 2016 09:43:43 +0000

Michael Affenzeller and Michael Kommenda are going to attend this years GPTP 2016 workshop which takes place this week 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.

Call for papers: EvoSoft Workshop at GECCO 2016

Thu, 03 Mar 2016 09:46:54 +0000

development and application of generic and reusable EC software systems
architectural and design patterns for EC software systems
software modeling of EC algorithms and problems
open-source EC software systems
expandability, interoperability, and standardization
comparability and traceability of research results
graphical user interfaces and visualization
comprehensive statistical and graphical results analysis
parallelism and performance
usability and automation
comparison and evaluation of EC software systems

The deadline for the submission is April 2nd, 2016. Further important dates and submission guidelines can be found in the attached call for papers.

BioBoost Project Successfully Completed

Thu, 11 Feb 2016 10:00:29 +0000

We are happy to announce that the BioBoost project which has been completed in July 2015 is now also formally finished. BioBoost is focused on boosting bioenergy through biomass-based energy intermediates using a de-centralized infrastructure for conversion of biological residues to bio-oils. HEAL developed a simulation and optimization software for optimizing plant locations, capacities and logistics.

The resulting software tool is now available as an add-on for HeuristicLab.

A short summary on the project has been published on the EU commission websites: "Biomass for for energy: from field to fuel" and on the Horizon2020 websites

The main goals and challenges as well as results are explained in a 10-minute long documentary video on BioBoost.

A European R&D project funded under contract 282873 within the Seventh Framework Programme by the European Commission.

Offene Stelle in der Forschungsgruppe HEAL

Tue, 17 Nov 2015 10:03:20 +0000

Wir möchten unsere deutschsprachigen Besucher auf eine aktuelle Stellenausschreibung für eine Position als wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in unserer Forschungsgruppe aufmerksam machen. Eine Anzeige mit weiteren Details wurde auf karriere.at geschalten.

HEAL Strategy Meeting

Fri, 23 Oct 2015 10:04:04 +0000

In the beginning of October this year we had a very fruitful two-day meeting to discuss the HEAL strategy and related organizational topics. All members of HEAL joined in and we had a great workshop! As you can see in the group photo below, we are already a sizeable group...

Full size image

In memoriam John H. Holland 1929-2015

Tue, 11 Aug 2015 10:20:28 +0000

We're sorry to hear that the inventor of the genetic algorithm, John H. Holland, has passed away at 86. He was a pioneer in the study of complex adaptive systems and an inspirational source for many researchers including our research group. The importance of his work cannot be emphasized enough and it will certainly continue to influence generations of researchers that are yet to come.

santafe.edu

Research visit from Michigan

Tue, 17 Mar 2015 10:22:34 +0000

This December Dr. Brian Goldman, a Researcher of BEACON, an NSF Center for the Study of Evolution in Action which is headquartered at the MSU (Michigan State University), joined the HeuristicLab Team for a few days.

BEACON’s research focus which is headed by Prof. Eric Goodman, may be the most important research initiative for evolutionary algorithms at the moment and we are happy to have expanded our international cooperation network with this group.

Brian integrated his P3 algorithm (which won the best paper award in Track: Genetic Algorithms at GECCO 2014) into HeuristicLab. The Parameter-less Population Pyramid (P3) is an evolutionary technique that requires no parameters and is built on the idea that it is often easier to determine how good a solution is than to find the best possible solution.

To learn more about Brian’s visit in Hagenberg, read his work blog:

http://beacon-center.org/blog/2015/03/09/beacon-researchers-at-work-evolutionary-optimization-and-the-open-source-community/

New Team Member: Sebastian Raggl

Mon, 09 Mar 2015 10:23:16 +0000

The HeuristicLab Team is expanding further and proud to announce another new team member, Sebastian Raggl.

Sebastian completed his master studies at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria last year. Now he is supporting the team in developing optimization models and algorithms for complex problems in the domains of production and logistics.

Call for papers: EvoSoft Workshop at GECCO 2015

Mon, 23 Feb 2015 10:24:31 +0000

development and application of generic and reusable EC software systems
architectural and design patterns for EC software systems
software modeling of EC algorithms and problems
open-source EC software systems
expandability, interoperability, and standardization
comparability and traceability of research results
graphical user interfaces and visualization
comprehensive statistical and graphical results analysis
parallelism and performance
usability and automation
comparison and evaluation of EC software systems

The deadline for the submission is April 3rd, 2015. Further important dates and submission guidelines can be found in the attached call for papers.

Dr. Stefan Vonolfen

Mon, 26 Jan 2015 10:25:09 +0000

We would like to congratulate our colleague Stefan Vonolfen as he successfully defended his PhD thesis in September! Stephan joined us a couple of years ago and was doing Heuristic Optimization Methods and Operational Research. We wish him the best for his future.

"Software sorgt für ganzheitliche Prozessoptimierung" - futurezone.at 12/14

Thu, 18 Dec 2014 13:02:00 +0000

"Software sorgt für ganzheitliche Prozessoptimierung" - futurezone.at 12/14

New Team Member Judith Fechter

Wed, 26 Nov 2014 10:27:07 +0000

The HeuristicLab Team is proud to announce a new team member, Judith Fechter.

Judith studied technical mathematics at Vienna University of Technology and one year abroad at University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her focus was business mathematics, especially operations research.

Now she is supporting the team in mathematical modelling of problems in production and logistics and developing algorithms therefor.

Stephan’s Research Visit at BEACON, Michigan State University

Thu, 12 Jun 2014 10:30:06 +0000

Since April Stephan Winkler is at Michigan State University where he is joining BEACON, an NSF Center for the Study of Evolution in Action lead by Prof. Erik Goodman, as a visiting scholar. He is there working with computer scientists, bioinformaticians, biologists, and psychologists on several interesting research topics, namely population dynamics in genetic algorithms and genetic programming, the identification and classification of wings, simulation-based evolution of behavior and intelligence, and evolutionary feature selection and parameter optimization for early cancer detection.

Stephan will stay at BEACON until July, then he will attend GECCO 2014 and afterwards he will come back home to HEAL.

Visit to the Genetic Programming Theory and Practice Workshops

Mon, 26 May 2014 10:32:10 +0000

Michael Affenzeller and Gabriel Kronberger have attended the GPTP workshop 2014 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI, USA. Michael talked about recent research in the field of symbolic regression and Gabriel demoed recent improvements and features of HeuristicLab.

Stephan Winkler who is currently in Michigan at the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action also joined the workshop due to the close proximity.

Call for papers: EvoSoft Workshop at GECCO 2014

Thu, 06 Feb 2014 10:33:35 +0000

Stefan Wagner and Michael Affenzeller are going to host another installment of the EvoSoft workshop at the upcoming GECCO conference. Everyone is invited to submit a contribution addressing a number of different aspects such as:

development and application of generic and reusable EC software systems
architectural and design patterns for EC software systems
software modeling of EC algorithms and problems
open-source EC software systems
expandability, interoperability, and standardization
comparability and traceability of research results
graphical user interfaces and visualization
comprehensive statistical and graphical results analysis
parallelism and performance
usability and automation
comparison and evaluation of EC software systems

The deadline for the submission is March 28th, 2014. Further important dates and submission guidelines can be found in the attached call for papers and on the workshop page.

HeuristicLab Software Review in GPEM Journal

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 10:34:36 +0000

A review of HeuristicLab was published in the Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines Journal (GPEM). Achiya Elyasaf and Moshe Sipper both from the Computer Science Department of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev summarize the major features and describe strengths and weaknesses. The review can be accessed at Springer Link.

HEAL members at APCASE'14

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 08:16:35 +0000

Several HEAL members will present their work at the 2nd running of the well-received Asia-Pacific Conference on Computer Aided System Engineering (APCASE) conference. The conference takes place in the Asia-Australia and Pacific region in even years, and is a sister conference of EUROCAST. The APCASE is organized by Zenon Chaczko from the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia and Ford Lumban Gaol, IEEE Indonesia Section, Indonesia.

A HeuristicLab tutorial will be given alongside several talks concerning challenges in heuristic optimization.

Logistics Research Austria founded

Fri, 20 Dec 2013 08:19:36 +0000

The founding members of the Logistics Research Austria (LRA) gathered on Tuesday to officially found the association as a registered society. LRA members aim to further the knowledge in logistics research through cooperative projects. Members of this association come from several important research institutions in Austria including university departments, research groups at applied universities as well as members of research oriented companies. The head of LRA is Dr. Friedrich Starkl from the Logistikum in Steyr, Upper Austria.

Institutions that aim to cooperate in logistics research projects and seek partners in Austria are invited to contact LRA.

HEAL visits Grupo Integrada de Ingeniera

Thu, 19 Dec 2013 08:22:23 +0000

Following research visits by Pilar Caamano from the Grupo Integrada de Ingeneria (GII) at the HEAL laboratory in Hagenberg earlier this year, Michael Affenzeller, Erik Pitzer, and Andreas Beham have been visiting the GII in their laboratories in Ferrol, Spain last week. In their short trip they got to know the members, projects, and approaches of the group that is coordinated by Richard Duro in more detail. The visit was topped off with several presentations from our side regarding our activities, projects, and research interests as well as the HeuristicLab optimization software.

Dr. Stephan Hutterer

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 08:23:17 +0000

We would like to congratulate our colleague Stephan Hutterer as he today successfully defended his PhD thesis! Stephan joined us a couple of years ago and is doing research in smart grids and energy networks. As one of the milestones in his young career was the first place in the GECCO 2012 industrial challenge. The PhD is well earned!

Heureka! finishing event

Wed, 13 Nov 2013 08:37:57 +0000

After 5 years of intensive work the Ressel Center Heureka! finishes. Michael Affenzeller organized a lunch at the Promenadenhof in Linz where the partners came together. It was a hard-working time with many insights and discoveries, finished PhD theses, and with results that have been achieved by implementing the findings at our partners locations. We are happy to have expanded our international cooperation network and that the research group grew more visible with the work that we have been doing.

Project partners got together for a final lunch, to celebrate the end of Heureka! and to discuss and forge new ideas for proposed and future projects

HEAL at MAS Conference in Athens, Greece

Tue, 08 Oct 2013 08:26:13 +0000

Michael Affenzeller has been this years general chair of the Modeling & Applied Simulation (MAS) conference which is held in conjunction with further conferences in the frame of the International Multidisciplinary Modeling & Simulation Multiconference (I3M). The venue of the conference was set to be the Royal Olympic Hotel in Athens, Greece.

HEAL research group at the GECCO 2013

Fri, 19 Jul 2013 08:32:15 +0000

From 6th to 10th of July, HEAL members attended the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) 2013 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Once more, group head Michael Affenzeller and Stefan Wagner chaired the EvoSoft Workshop which enables EC researchers to exchange their ideas on how to develop and apply generic and reusable EC software systems.

Besides that, several group members took the chance to present their scientific achievements at various workshops, namely Bogdan Burlacu at VizGEC, Stephan Winkler at MedGEC, Stephan Hutterer at GreenGEC, and Gabriel Kronberger at the Symbolic Regression Workshop.

While enjoying this great conference, we were happy to successfully participate in GECCO competitions: Gabriel Kronberger and Michael Kommenda won the 2nd place at the Industrial Challenge, while Mohab Elkaref and Andreas Scheibenpflug also reached the 2nd place at the Evorobocode Competition.

Congratulations!

Nomination for the logistics award 2013

Wed, 26 Jun 2013 08:45:36 +0000

One of our projects that we worked on in the Josef Ressel Centre Heureka! together with our partner Rosenbauer International AG has been nominated for the logistics award 2013. The project treats the optimization of the storage location for items in a high rack warehouse identifying items that are going to be picked together and that should be stored together. We are very proud of this nomination and would like to share the video that was created to describe the project.

Conferment of the title Prof. (FH) to Gabriel Kronberger

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 08:46:43 +0000

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!

Invited Talk and HeuristicLab Demo at GPTP

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 09:07:11 +0000

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 visiting the University of Alcalá de Henares in Spain

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 09:10:15 +0000

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 released

Fri, 10 May 2013 09:13:56 +0000

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

GPTP 2013 Workshops

Wed, 08 May 2013 09:14:56 +0000

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.

Stephan Hutterer at the IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:16:06 +0000

HEAL researcher Stephan Hutterer attended the IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence which took place in Singapore. The IEEE SSCI is one of the flagship international events sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE CIS), promoting all aspects of the theory and applications of computational intelligence. Stephan is very happy to have presented his work on intelligent electric vehicle charging control in front of the audience at the "Symposium on Computational Intelligence Applications in Smart Grid". Stephan also took the opportunity to join the meeting of the CIS task force on smart grid, discussing future aspects of smart grids as well as activities of the task force.

HEAL researchers at Evo* 2013 in Vienna, Austria

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 09:17:38 +0000

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.

Monika Kofler in Australia

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 09:20:57 +0000

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.

Looking back at Eurocast 2013

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 09:22:27 +0000

Our group members had a great time at the Eurocast 2013 conference in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. We used the opportunity to meet up with fellow researchers such as Günther Raidl and his team from the Vienna University of Technology, Richard F. Hartl from the University of Vienna, Zenon Chaczko from UTS Sydney, Carmen Paz Suárez Araujo from the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria as well as Jan Nikodem and Ryszard Klempous from Wroclaw University of Technology. Stephan Winkler even managed to get a picture with guest speaker and legendary system theorist Rudolf E. Kalman. Eurocast is a biannual conference which takes place every odd year. Since last year the conference has a "younger sibling" called APCast, which takes place every even year in the Asia Pacific region.

GECCO Workshop: Submission Deadline

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 09:28:43 +0000

We would like to remind everyone that the submission deadline for the upcoming Evolutionary Computation Software Systems (EvoSoft) Workshop at the GECCO 2013 conference is just 1.5 months away. Contributions can be submitted until March 28th, 2013 (hard deadline). For more information download the Call for Papers or check the Workshop Homepage.

HEAL attends Eurocast 2013

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 09:33:02 +0000

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!

Erik Pitzer celebrates PhD viva

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 09:31:59 +0000

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!

CFP: Track on Smart Grid Planning, Optimization and Control - SPOC

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 11:27:38 +0000

Stephan Hutterer and Michael Affenzeller will chair the Track on Smart Grid Planning, Optimization and Control - SPOC, which takes place at the International Workshop on Simulation for Energy, Sustainable Development & Environment (SESDE). SPOC is meant to provide a platform for discussing recent research issues, where achievements in computer sciences enable future technologies for smart grids.

SESDE will take place in Athens, Greece, 23 - 25 September 2013.

Submission deadline: April 15th, 2013
Notification of acceptance: May 15th, 2013
Camera-ready submission: June 15th, 2013
Registration (due): August 7th, 2013

All information regarding submission of extended abstracts respectively full papers can be obtained from the submission section.

See you there!

Research Associate of the Year: Stephan Hutterer

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 11:50:22 +0000

Just a couple of weeks after Viktoria Dorfer received the Junior Researcher Award 2012 we can announce yet another HEAL laureate:

Yesterday, HEAL member Stephan Hutterer was honored as Research Associate of the Year by a jury of industry and university representatives in Wels (FH-Förderverein Wels). Stephan's research focus is on smart grids and e-mobility. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of this field he splits his time between Hagenberg and Wels, combining expertise from both automation engineering and heuristic optimization. Joint-supervisors Michael Affenzeller and Franz Auinger - and of course the entire HEAL team - congratulate Stephan to this well-deserved achievement.

Guest Lecture: Stock Market Trading with HeuristicLab

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 11:53:03 +0000

Fellow HEAL member and Bioinformatics research group head Stephan Winkler would like to invite everyone to an upcoming guest lecture by Prof. Dr. Bonifacio Castaño from the University of Alcalá/Madrid.

Stock Markets Trading Rules and Genetic Programming with HeuristicLab,

Thursday, 24 January, 2013, 18:00, HS3, Hagenberg

The lecture will deal with stock exchange markets and some basic technical analysis strategies focused on trading rules. The main purpose will be to show how these rules can be adapted in order to be exploited in a Genetic Programming context and then implemented using HeuristicLab.

CFP: Workshop on Evolutionary Computation Software Systems (EvoSoft)

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 12:04:25 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Michael Affenzeller and Stefan Wagner will once again chair the Evolutionary Computation Software Systems (EvoSoft) Workshop at the GECCO 2013 conference. We hope that the workshop will help to identify common efforts in the development of evolutionary computation software systems and will be a great platform to discuss cooperation potentials and synergies between different research groups.
GECCO 2013 will take place in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, from July 06-10, 2013.

Submission deadline: March 28th, 2013 (hard deadline)
Notification of acceptance: April 15th, 2013
Camera-ready submission: April 25th, 2013
Workshops at GECCO 2013: July 6 - 7, 2013

Authors should send their papers to evosoft@heuristiclab.com. All workshop papers have to fulfill the preparation requirements of GECCO 2013 full regular papers. Additional details are available at http://evosoft.heuristiclab.com and http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2013.

Download the Call for Papers.

Award for Bioinformatics Researcher

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 12:09:52 +0000

Every year the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences (FH OÖ) honors outstanding scientists and scholars actively engaged in research. We are therefore delighted to announce that long-term HEAL member Viktoria Dorfer received the Junior Researcher Award 2012 for her contributions to the field of bioinformatics. Viktoria's research revolves around the development of novel algorithms to identify proteins in mass spectra. She is a core researcher of Stephan Winkler's young bioinformatics research group, whose successful collaboration with the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) was recently rewarded with a prestigious FWF grant.

Research visit from Spain

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 11:37:31 +0000

David Davis has just left for Australia and we can already announce the next visitor: Pilar Caamaño Sobrino from the Universidad de la Coruña is in Austria this week to prepare a joint research proposal with our group. Her research focuses on the analysis of evolutionary algorithms via fitness landscape analysis, which ties in nicely with the work of HEAL members Erik Pitzer and Andreas Beham. We are therefore pleased to announced that Dr. Caamaño Sobrino will present some of her recent work in Hagenberg this week.

Fitness Landscape and Evolutionary Algorithm Characterization in Real-Coded Optimization Problems

December 6th, 2012, 16:30 - 18:00 HS8, Hagenberg

Fitness landscape analysis can be used to get a better understanding why some problems are harder for certain optimization algorithms than others. The topic is therefore highly relevant to current metaheuristic research and we are looking forward to a stimulating presentation and discussion session. The event is public and interested visitors are warmly welcome.

Upcoming Guest Lectures

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 08:29:24 +0000

David Davis from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) is currently visiting Linz to attend a conference and will use the opportunity to give two guest lectures in Hagenberg:

Friday 23.11.2012, 18:00, HS3: "Information and Communication Systems in Australia"
Wednesday 28.11.2012, 18:00, HS3: "Principles of System Analysis in Software Development

Entry is free and knowing David we can look forward to two exciting talks.

New Vehicle Routing Plugin in HeuristicLab 3.3.7

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 08:33:49 +0000

As previously noted, the HeuristicLab 3.3.7 release features a new implementation of the vehicle routing problem (VRP) plugin, which now includes dynamic and stochastic VRP variants. Our routing expert Stefan Vonolfen writes about the changes on the HeuristicLab Blog. Comments and questions are of course always welcome, either directly via mail or in our google group!

ECML-PKDD 2012

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 08:31:58 +0000

HEAL member Gabriel Kronberger is currently in Bristol, UK, attending the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD2012). He will give a "Spotlight Demo" on symbolic regression with HeuristicLab. For those who cannot attend the demo or who would like some follow-up information, we can recommend the Additional Material page in the HeuristicLab development wiki, which provides complementary material such as slides, video tutorials, test data and pre-configured HeuristicLab experiments and results for our publications and tutorials.

MAS conference opening talk

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 08:36:29 +0000

Michael Affenzeller, in his role as general chair of the 11th International Conference on Modeling and Applied Simulation (MAS 2012), is giving an opening talk tomorrow morning at the conference venue in Vienna, Austria. The MAS conference is, as in previous years, part of the I3M, the International Multidisciplinary Modeling & Simulation Multiconference.

Job Shop Scheduling Add-on for HeuristicLab

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 08:51:55 +0000

A new HeuristicLab add-on for the job shop scheduling problem (JSSP) is now available as zip-archive from our download page. Developer Joseph Helm plans to tackle 3D packing problems next, which will further expand the number of available standard problems. For details, head over to the blog.

LINDI 2012 in Smolenice, Slovakia

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 08:50:20 +0000

Last week HEAL researcher Monika Kofler traveled to Smolenice, Slovakia to attend the 4th IEEE International Symposium on Logistics and Industrial Informatics (LINDI 2012) and present her work on the optimization of steel slab logistics. The first incarnation of LINDI took place in Wildau, Germany (2007) followed by Linz, Austria (2009) and Budapest, Hungary (2011). Once again, it was a stimulating and very international event with researchers from Europe, Thailand, Canada and the U.S., who we hope to see again in Wildau in 2013.

Logistics and HeuristicLab Boot Camp

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 08:38:55 +0000

The University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria consists of four faculties located in Hagenberg, Linz, Steyr and Wels, which specialize in informatics, social sciences, management and engineering, respectively. Although the different faculties have cooperated successfully for years, it is sometimes hard to keep up with the latest research endeavors of the four centers. We all thought it was high time for a bilateral update. Therefore, researchers from Steyr and Hagenberg spent the last two days in workshops, jokingly called "boot camps". Yesterday our colleagues from Logistikum Steyr gave excellent introductions to supply chain management, distribution and factory planning and logistics. Today, fellow HEAL researchers returned the favor and held a detailed tutorial on optimization with HeuristicLab. Both parties profited from interdisciplinary exchange and we definitely plan to hold these "boot camps" more often.

HeuristicLab 3.3.7 released

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 08:56:00 +0000

Most members of the HeuristicLab development team are currently attending GECCO 2012 in Philadelphia. However, before leaving we finalized the HeuristicLab 3.3.7 release, packed with new features for benchmark testing, parameter variation experiments and much more. One of the core incentives for this latest release was that it is still very cumbersome to find suitable parameter settings for a particular problem instance and algorithm. We therefore started to collect algorithm parameters and results of executed test-runs in a systematical way in the so-called optimization knowledge base (OKB). The OKB serves as a centralized experiment and result storage and will be useful for detailed post-analyses about algorithmic behavior. To perform such analyses in a structured manner, the availability of benchmark instances is essential. HeuristicLab 3.3.7 now includes various libraries of published benchmark problem instances for combinatorial optimization problems (TSPLIB, QAPLIB, Taillard, Golden, Cordeau, Solomon, etc.) and regression/classification problems (Keijzer, Korns, Nguyen, real world problems, etc.). HeuristicLab architects Andreas Beham and Gabriel Kronberger blogged about this in detail on the HeuristicLab Blog. Finally, we added a new feature that makes it more comfortable to create parameter variation experiments, which is described in detail in the Parameter Variation Experiments article on the blog.

Additional new features in HeuristicLab 3.3.7 include:

a new and improved implementation of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) which supports more VRP variants such as CVRP, DCVRP, CVRPTW, PDPTW, and MDCVRPTW
lawn mower problem
linear assignment problem and Hungarian algorithm

For the full feature list, samples and documentation, go to http://dev.heuristiclab.com.

Stephan Hutterer wins GECCO 2012 Industrial Challenge

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 09:04:11 +0000

Fellow HEAL researcher Stephan Hutterer has just been announced as the winner of the GECCO 2012 Industrial Challenge. The goal of the of the GECCO 2012 Industrial Challenge was to develop accurate forecasting methods for electrical energy consumption profiles, based on four training data sets from smart-metering equipment. Stephan will present his approach and detailed results at GECCO 2012 in Philadelphia next Monday. The entire group congratulates Stephan on this achievement!

HEAL in Italy and Turkey

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 09:06:54 +0000

The first meeting of the EURO working Group on Vehicle Routing and Logistics Optimization (VeRoLog) takes place in Bologna, Italy this week. Stefan Vonolfen will represent our research group in the special session on dynamic and stochastic vehicle routing problems and present his paper "New measures for describing the structure of dynamic vehicle routing problems".

Meanwhile, fellow HEAL researcher Stephan Hutterer has returned from the 12th International Conference on Probabilistic Methods Applied to Power Systems (PMAPS 2012), which was organized by Istanbul Technical University. Stephan presented his paper "Metaheuristic Optimization of Electric Vehicle Charging Strategies in Uncertain Environment" in the track on energy storage.

Andreas Beham in Spain

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 09:08:42 +0000

HEAL researcher Andreas Beham is currently visiting Prof. Dr. Enrique Alba and his group at the University of Málaga, Spain. This is Andreas' second extended research visit to Spain. Back in 2005 he already spent a couple of months as exchange student at the University of Granada and also worked with the group of Enrique Alba on an adaption of scatter search for multiobjective optimization.

Guest Lecture by Carmen Paz Suárez Araujo

Tue, 29 May 2012 09:11:25 +0000

In the well occupied auditorium HS3, students, external experts, and university employees alike listened to guest lecturer Carmen Paz Suárez Araujo’s captivating talk about "New Insights in Computational Neuroscience and Neural Computation Based Decision Support Systems" last Thursday.

Carmen Paz Suárez Araujo is the head of the Neural and Adaptive Computation and Computational Neuroscience (COMCIENCIA) Research Group at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. Among other things, her group has developed an interesting new neural architecture that models the brain more closely, called HUMANN, which is suitable for blind clustering and data mining. HUMANN has been successfully applied in a variety of fields, for instance to identify fungicides or pollutants in the environment and to build decision support systems for dementia diagnosis. We wish to thank Carmen Paz Suárez Araujo for her visit to Upper Austria and are looking forward to further collaboration opportunities between our research groups.

EULOG 2012 in Salzburg

Fri, 25 May 2012 09:34:45 +0000

The global economic development puts all fields of the supply chain up against new logistic challenges. Therefore the scope of topics presented at the EULOG conference in Salzburg on May 10-11 was very broad and ranged from bike sharing, warehouse and production optimization to the dispatching of freight wagons. HEAL researcher Monika Kofler was invited to present recent scientific and practical advances in warehouse optimization that our group developed within the Josef Ressel Centre Heureka! in close cooperation with Rosenbauer International and voestalpine.

In addition, many of our long-time scientific partners and associates, such as Efrem Lengauer (Logistikum research), Bruno Bliem (RISC Software GmbH) as well as em. o. Univ.-Prof. Günther Zäpfel, Michael Bögl and Stefanie Kritzinger (PLM, Johannes Kepler University Linz) held speeches at the conference.

EU Project BioBoost

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:38:34 +0000

The EU Project BioBoost has just started with the beginning of 2012. BioBoost investigates the production, logistics and valuation of various energy-rich intermediate products from biogenous residues.

Our participation is a collaboration between HEAL and Logistikum where we will concentrate on the creation and optimization of a holistic logistic model to help determine economic and ecologic viability and sustainability. Erik Pitzer and Stephan Hutterer have attended the Kick-Off meeting in Karlsruhe, Germany. The Project Homepage is available at bioboost.eu. A more detailed press-release can be found at the coordinator's webpage and in CORDIS.

HeuristicLab Video Tutorials and YouTube Channel

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 11:00:37 +0000

We are constantly extending and improving the documentation for HeuristicLab to lower the barrier for new users and provide additional insights for our growing user base. Therefore we have created a number of short video tutorials that show some of the functionality. You can find these video tutorials on our website's tutorials section.

Additionally, we have created a YouTube Channel which you can subscribe to and receive future updates.

To get a good overview of some of the most important features in HeuristicLab, we have created a short tour. In this tour we quickly highlight different aspects such as implemented problems, algorithm execution, experiment design and analysis, and more.

HEAL Down Under

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:06:59 +0000

Michael Affenzeller and quite a few HEAL members are currently on their way to Sydney, Australia, to attend the IEEE APCast'12 conference next week. APCast'12 will be hosted by the University of Technology (UTC), Sydney, Australia in conjunction with Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. The conference will be an excellent opportunity to catch up with Zenon Chaczko from UTC, who visited us at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria a couple of years ago and in return invited Stefan Wagner as UTC guest lecturer in 2008. We will be back on 13. February.

HeuristicLab 3.3.6 Released

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:10:33 +0000

Happy new year! The HeuristicLab development team kicks off 2012 with the brand new HeuristicLab 3.3.6 release. One of the most exciting new features of HeuristicLab 3.3.6 is HeuristicLab Hive which provides an infrastructure for parallel and distributed computation. Hive consists of a server with a database and a number of computation slaves. A user can upload a job to the Hive server which distributes the jobs among the available slaves and automatically retrieves the results after they are finished. While the main purpose of HeuristicLab Hive is to execute HeuristicLab algorithms, it can also be used independently.

Additional new features in HeuristicLab 3.3.6 include:

Robust Taboo Search for the Quadratic Assignment Problem
New Standard Algorithms for Regression and Classification (kNN, Neural Networks, Multi-Nominal Logit Regression)
Genetic Programming Grammar Editor
New Standard Tree-Creation Operators for Genetic Programming (Grow, Full, Ramped Half-Half)
Combination and Transformation of Algorithm Results
Customizable Charts
Performance Benchmarks etc.

For the full feature list, samples and documentation, go to http://dev.heuristiclab.com.

EvoSoft Workshop @ GECCO 2012

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 11:15:10 +0000

We are pleased to announce that Michael Affenzeller and Stefan Wagner will chair the Evolutionary Computation Software Systems (EvoSoft) Workshop at the GECCO 2012 conference. Stefan Wagner is the the project manager and head developer of the HeuristicLab optimization environment. The workshop will help to identify common efforts in the development of evolutionary computation software systems and will be a great platform to discuss cooperation potentials and synergies between different research groups.

GECCO 2012 will take place in Philadelphia, USA, from July 07-11, 2012.

Submission deadline: March 28, 2012 (hard deadline)
Notification of acceptance: April 9, 2012
Camera-ready submission: April 16, 2012
Workshops at GECCO 2012: July 7 - 8, 2012

Additional details are available at http://evosoft.heuristiclab.com.

Financial Analysis with HeuristicLab (Part 2)

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:21:37 +0000

Back in September Gabriel Kronberger posted about financial analysis in the HeuristicLab Blog and showed some preliminary results for modelling the European interest rate swap yield with genetic programming. After many months of algorithm tweaking and refinement he presented the completed analysis and generated prognosis models to scientific peers at the ERCIM11 conference in London last weekend. ERCIM11 was organized by the London School of Economics, Queen Mary University of London and Birkbeck University of London.

Michael Affenzeller as Guest Lecturer in Las Palmas

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:24:10 +0000

Michael Affenzeller spent the better part of last week at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. He was invited by Carmen Paz Suárez Araujo, the university’s vice head of internationalization, to hold a guest lecture in her PhD seminar and discuss future collaboration opportunities between our research groups.

Carmen Paz and her group conduct research in the area of artificial neural networks (ANN) with a special focus on (bio-)medical applications and hybrid algorithmic variants. We found that their research on modeling Alzheimer's Disease and related forms of dementia via ANN might tie in nicely with the heuristic dementia models developed by researchers around long-term HEAL member and bioinformatics research group head Stephan Winkler. Our groups are currently preparing a joint research proposal in that area, which will be submitted to the funding agency within the next couple of months. As usual, we will keep you posted about new developments on our homepage.

Erik Pitzer in Riga

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:26:00 +0000

Riga Technical University is a long-term scientific partner of our group. So far, two PhD students from Latvia have visited us in Hagenberg: Tatjana Lagzdina in 2008 and Vitaly Bolshakov in the summer of 2011.

During his stay in Austria, Vitaly and Erik Pitzer indentified a common research interests in the area of fitness landscape analysis, which led to a joint publication on vehicle scheduling problems. Due to the positive and fruitful collaboration, Erik is currently staying in Riga for a reciprocal visit. This time, they will tackle the vehicle routing problem and perform a rigorous fitness landscape analysis on representative problem instances. We will keep you updated about the results on our homepage, as usual.

2nd Workshop on Young Academics' Management Science

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 11:27:00 +0000

HEAL memeber Stefan Vonolfen went to Graz to attend the 2nd Workshop on Young Academics' Management Science last weekend. The workshop is organized each year by Dr. Peter Greistorfer and Dr. Marc Reimann from the University of Graz with the aim to encourage networking between young post-docs and grad students in the fields of metaheuristics and operations research. Stefan presented some recent research results in his paper "An Online Genetic Algorithm for Solving Dynamic Pickup and Delivery Problems".

HeuristicLab Tutorial in Barcelona

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:30:30 +0000

During the IMMM 2011 a tutorial on "System Identification and Data Mining with HeuristicLab" was held by Andreas Scheibenpflug and Michael Kommenda. In particular, they showed how to

generally work with HeuristicLab
setup and analyze large scale optimization experiments
perform regression and classification analysis and
avoid overfitting during the modeling phase.

The slides to this tutorial should be available on the conference homepage soon.

Large Experiments in HeuristicLab

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:28:39 +0000

Andreas Beham recently had to run some large parameter experiments in HeuristicLab - and by large we mean about 400 configurations per experiment and more than 27,000 individual runs. The goal of this experiment was to test several parameter configurations on a number of problem instances in order to find the configuration that performed best in those instances.

Andreas shares his thoughts on the design of large parameter experiments and how you can make them as memory-friendly as possible on the HeuristicLab Blog. The blog entry also comes with a helpful code sample that should get you started, if you face a similar problem. Comments and questions are of course always welcome, either directly via mail or in our google group!

Two "newly minted" PhDs

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 11:31:51 +0000

We are very happy to announce that two long-term HEAL affiliates from the Institute for Production and Logistics Management at the Johannes Kepler University Linz have successfully defended their PhD theses. The orals were scheduled back to back on Tuesday with many friends and colleagues in the audience. Their individual research areas were:

Roland Braune: Job Shop Scheduling with Total Weighted Tardiness Objective: Enhancements to Local Search and Bottleneck-based Methods.
Michael Bögl: Suchraumstrukturanalysen und selbstlernende nachbarschaftsbasierte Suchverfahren am zeitfensterbeschränkten Problem des Handlungsreisenden

In both cases Prof. Zäpfel served as primary PhD supervisor and Michael Affenzeller agreed to be secondary supervisor. Roland and Michael will receive the title Doctor Technicae from the Johannes Kepler University Linz. The whole team congratulates to this success and wishes them all the best for their future careers!

Best Paper Award at EMSS 2011

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 11:34:55 +0000

We are proud to announce that HEAL members have received the Best Paper Award of the 23rd European Modeling & Simulation Symposium (EMSS 2011) for their paper On the Use of Estimated Tumor Marker Classifications in Tumor Diagnosis Prediction!

In this paper recent research results in the area of medical data mining and modeling have been summarized. The paper was written by HEAL members Stephan Winkler, Michael Affenzeller, Gabriel Kronberger, Michael Kommenda, and Stefan Wagner in close collaboration with Prim. Dr. Herbert Stekel from the General Hospital Linz (AKH Linz) and Prof. Dr. Witold Jacak from the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria; it was presented by Stephan Winkler at the EMSS Workshop on Modeling and Simulation in Healthcare. Congratulations!

Download: EMSS2011_BestPaperAward.pdf

Haematology and Oncology Congress in Basel

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 11:38:51 +0000

Michael Affenzeller and Stephan Winkler will represent the Josef Ressel-Centre Heureka! and the bioinformatics research group at the Joint Conference of the German, Austrian, and Swiss Societies for Haematology and Oncology in Basel from Sept. 30th to Oct. 4th, 2011.

We are very pleased by the opportunity to present recent research results in the area of medical data mining and modeling at a conference for medical professionals. The two posters were prepared in close collaboration with Prim. Dr. Herbert Stekel, MD, from the General Hospital Linz (AKH Linz), and Prof. Dr. Witold Jacak from the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria:

Cancer Prediction Models Based on Blood Data with and without Tumor Marker Information
Data Based Identification of Estimation Models for Tumor Markers

TMG/WKO Event: Applied Research in Christian Doppler Laboratories and Josef Ressel Centres

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 11:44:30 +0000

The Austrian Federal Economic Chamber (WKO), the Province of Upper Austria (Land OÖ) and the OÖ. Technologie- und Marketinggesellschaft m.b.H. (TMG) cordially invite anyone interested to an information event about applied research in Christian Doppler Laboratories and Josef Ressel Centres. In particular, the event will showcase how small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) can participate in these research projects. The Province of Upper Austria wishes to strengthen the 'innovation capacity' of SMEs and we can definitely recommend the event for entrepreneurs who want the support of established university und non-university institutes in R&D.

Christian Doppler Labors und Josef Ressel Zentren in der Praxis
Wednesday, 28. September 2011 / 16:00 - 19:00
WKO Oberösterreich, Hessenplatz 3, 4020 Linz, Austria

Research group head Michael Affenzeller will present our own Josef Ressel Centre Heureka! for heuristic and evolutionary algorithms, showing what we are working on with Heureka! partners voestalpine, Rosenbauer, carvatech and AKH Linz in the areas of warehouse logistics optimization, facility layout planning, medical diagnosis or steel production process modeling. Moreover, Rosenbauer logistics center manager Werner Achleitner will be present for Q&A, so you can get the perspective of one of our partners as well.

Financial Analysis with HeuristicLab

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 11:46:40 +0000

Gabriel Kronberger is blogging about financial analysis in the HeuristicLab Blog. He modeled the European interest rate swap yield with genetic programming and performed variable impact analysis, getting interesting results about the influences of the US mortgage market and Euro-zone employment on the interest rate. For details, head over to the blog.

EMSS 2011: Simulation in Healthcare Workshop

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 11:48:40 +0000

We have posted a lot about our research in logistics and industrial applictions recently, so it's time to showcase our (bio-)medical researchers again. Research group head Michael Affenzeller will be in Rome next week to attend the 23rd European Modeling & Simulation Symposium (EMSS 2011). Stephan Winkler and Viktoria Dorfer from the bioinformatics research group will accompany him. HEAL researchers and affiliates will present the following papers at the conference:

On the Use of Estimated Tumor Marker Classifications in Tumor Diagnosis Prediction - A Case Study for Breast Cancer
Missing Data Estimation For Cancer Diagnosis Support
New Genetic Programming Hypothesis Search Strategies for Improving the Interpretability in Medical Data Mining Applications
Using Query Extension And User Feedback To Improve Pubmed Search

HeuristicLab Blog and Google Group

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 11:51:12 +0000

We are constantly working on new features to improve HeuristicLab, our framework for heuristic and evolutionary algorithms, as evident if you have a look at the change and ticket history on our development homepage http://dev.heuristiclab.com. However, we know that our wiki and issue tracking system can be a bit overwhelming.

The solution: Our brand new HeuristicLab Development Blog. The blog will allow our developers to post about new, exciting features they are working on, link to tutorials, teaching materials and additional goodies. We will of course still announce releases and important news on our research group homepage, but for details head over there.

Moreover, we recently created a Google Group for HeuristicLab. This group provides a platform for all HeuristicLab users and developers to ask questions, share comments, post feature requests, or discuss new ideas. The group is open for everyone. Feel free to join!

HEAL Researchers at LINDI2011 conference

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 11:53:42 +0000

HEAL researchers Andreas Beham and Stefan Vonolfen are heading to Budapest, Hungary, on Wednesday to attend the 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Logistics and Industrial Informatics (LINDI 2011). We have been quite busy in the area of logistics and production optimization, as the titles of our accepted LINDI papers indicate:

Solving Large-Scale Vehicle Routing Problem Instances Using an Island-Model Offspring Selection Genetic Algorithm
A New Metric to Measure Distances between Solutions to the Quadratic Assignment Problem
Re-Warehousing vs. Healing: Strategies for Warehouse Storage Location Assignment
Production Fine Planning Using a Solution Archive of Priority Rules
Simulation-based Evolution of Municipal Glass-Waste Collection Strategies Utilizing Electric Trucks

HeuristicLab 3.3.5 Released

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 11:56:09 +0000

Right on time for the upcoming GECCO Tutorial we have released HeuristicLab 3.3.5. Let us know what you think! New features include:

Random forests (wrapper for ALGLIB implementation)
Allele frequency analyzer for symbolic data analysis expression trees
Optional caching and parallel execution of external evaluation results
New analyzers and operators for the quadratic assignment problem (QAP)
New tree view for experiments etc.

For the full feature list, samples and documentation, go to http://dev.heuristiclab.com.

GECCO 2011: HeuristicLab Tutorial

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 11:05:04 +0000

With just a week to go until the GECCO 2011 conference, we would like to remind you that Stefan Wagner and Gabriel Kronberger will hold a HeuristicLab Tutorial there. In particular, they will show how to

parameterize and execute evolutionary algorithms to solve combinatorial optimization problems (traveling salesman, vehicle routing) as well as data analysis problems (regression, classification).
model custom optimization algorithms in the graphical algorithm designer.
setup a large scale optimization experiment and execute such experiments on multi‐core or cluster systems.
inspect executed test runs with HeuristicLab’s interactive charts for visual and statistical
analysis.
extend HeuristicLab with your own problems or algorithms.

If you are attending GECCO it would be great to meet up!

Funded PhD Position: Exact Tracing of Evolutionary Search Trajectories in Complex Hypothesis Spaces

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 13:01:49 +0000

The Heuristic and Evolutionary Algorithms Laboratory at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences (Austria) offers a funded PhD position within the scope of the International PhD Program in Informatics Hagenberg. The group conducts scientific research in the field of metaheuristics for solving business, engineering, and biomedical problems.

The focus of the PhD research project should be to gain a better understanding of the evolutionary process by analyzing the search trajectories of genetic programming (GP) algorithms in different hypothesis spaces for academic as well as real-world data mining applications.

Recent algorithmic achievements like offspring selection in combination with linear scaling have enabled GP to achieve high quality results in system identification in less than 50 generations using populations with only several hundred individuals. Therefore the active gene pool of evolutionary search remains manageable and may be subjected to new theoretical investigations closely related to genetic programming schema theories, building block hypotheses and bloat theories.

We are seeking highly motivated and creative students with a master degree in Mathematics/Informatics or a related technical field. Prior knowledge about heuristic optimization and machine learning and programming experience with C# is a plus. Applications (including your CV, degree certificates, list of publications etc.) and informal queries about the lab and research projects should be addressed to Dr. Michael Affenzeller (michael.affenzeller@fh-hagenberg.at).

Further details about the PhD program can be found on http://www.faw.jku.at/phd/.

A longer, printable description of the PhD position as PDF document is also available.

Application Deadline: July 15th, 2011.

FFH 2011: Best Poster Award Runner-Up

Thu, 05 May 2011 07:23:12 +0000

Michael Affenzeller and Stefan Wagner represented HEAL at the 5th Austrian FH Research Forum (FFH 2011), which took place in Vienna from 27. to 28. April 2011. The aim of the event was to highlight recent scientific research conducted at Universities of Applied Sciences and network with fellow researchers, decision makers and business representatives. In total, 165 papers and posters from diverse research branches were presented at the forum. Our contribution, "HeuristicLab 3.3: An Extensible and Flexible Software System for Heuristic Optimization", received the runner-up best poster award.

You can now download the poster.

HeuristicLab 3.3.4 Released

Thu, 05 May 2011 07:21:06 +0000

The HeuristicLab development team is pleased to announce that you can now download HeuristicLab 3.3.4. We have added some exciting new features in this last release, such as:

New algorithms: Particle Swarm Optimization, Variable Neighborhood Search, Support Vector Machines for Classification
New problems: Quadratic Assignment Problem, Multi-objective Symbolic Regression Problem

For the full feature list, samples and documentation, go to http://dev.heuristiclab.com.

Modeling and Simulation Workshop Aftermath

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 07:35:26 +0000

After the great success of the workshop “Modeling and Simulation” at FH OÖ in January, two follow-up events have been scheduled:

"Process and Prodution Simulation": May 2nd, 2011, 16:00 – 20:00 at FH OÖ, Campus Steyr (Coordination: Prof.(FH) DI Dr. Herbert Jodlbauer)
"Simulation and Optimization": May 4th, 2011, 15:00 – 19:00 at FH OÖ, Campus Hagenberg (Coordination: Prof.(FH) PD DI Dr. Michael Affenzeller)

If you are interested in these topics and current plans regarding R&D projects, then please don’t hesitate and join us in these workshops! The attendance of the workshops is free, please sign up via e-mail to Stephan Winkler (stephan.winkler@fh-hagenberg.at)

New Research Project: MS Amanda

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 07:33:02 +0000

Stephan Winkler and Viktoria Dorfer have started a research co-operation with the research group of Ing. Karl Mechtler from the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria. The research focus of "MS Amanda – Amendment of Algorithms for Mass Spectrometry Protein Identification" will be on the development of novel and improved algorithms to identify so far unknown proteins in mass spectra.

evostar 2011

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 07:30:13 +0000

Next week, HEAL researchers will be attending the evo conference in Torino, Italy. evo* consists of four co-located conferences in the field of evolutionary computing, namely eurogp, evobio, evocop and evoapplications. Together, they form the premier multi-conference on evolutionary computing in Europe.

Michael Kommenda will present his work on "Data Mining using Unguided Symbolic Regression on a Blast Furnace Dataset" in the evonum workshop on on bio-inspired algorithms for continuous parameter optimisation.
Gabriel Kronberger will present results on "Macro-economic Time Series Modeling and Interaction Networks" in the evofin workshop on applications in finance and economics.

Meet HEAL team members at GECCO 2011

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 07:25:52 +0000

We are very pleased to announce the following HEAL team members have been accepted to present recent research at GECCO 2011 in Dublin, Ireland from 12-16 July 2011.

HeuristicLab head developer Stefan Wagner and Gabriel Kronberger will demonstrate how to apply and analyze metaheuristics using our open source optimization environment HeuristicLab. More information is available on the HeuristicLab Tutorial homepage.
In addition, Gabriel Kronberger will give a talk about "Overfitting Detection and Adaptive Covariant Parsimony Pressure for Symbolic Regression" in the Symbolic Regression and Modeling Workshop.
In the Genetic Programming Track, Stephan Winkler will present a poster on the "Analysis of the Effects of Enhanced Selection Concepts for Genetic Programming Based Structure Identification Using Fine-Grained Population Diversity Estimation".
You can also meet Stephan in the Workshop on Medical Applications of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation and listen to his talk about the "Identification of Cancer Diagnosis Estimation Models Using Evolutionary Algorithms - A Case Study for Breast Cancer, Melanoma, and Cancer in the Respiratory System", a topic he has been working on in close cooperation with the General Hospital Linz (AKh Linz).
Finally, Viktoria Dorfer will give a talk "On the Performance of Evolutionary Algorithms in Biomedical Keyword Clustering", also in the Workshop on Medical Applications of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation.

Michael Affenzeller and the HEAL team are looking forward to GECCO 2011 and hope to see you there!

HeuristicLab Tutorial at the GECCO 2011 Conference

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 07:39:31 +0000

We will present our HeuristicLab optimization system at the next GECCO conference. If you are interested, come and join our tutorial. We will show how to use HeuristicLab for the purpose of doing research and teaching in the field of metaheuristic optimization and several of the frameworks most exciting features.

See you at GECCO 2011!

Consortium Meeting

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 07:40:49 +0000

The entire Heureka! project consortium meets roughly twice a year to network, exchange best practises and report on progress in the different research branches. This time, Ing. Reinhard Aschauer from CARVATECH Karosserie & Kabinenbau GmbH invited everyone to Steyrermühl, starting with a diverting tour of the Austrian Papermill Museum, which included the creation of a handmade piece of paper. After coffee and small refreshments Heureka! researchers presented recent developments:

Newly minted PhD Gabriel Kronberger repeated his final thesis presentation, which focused on the generation of Genetic Programming models that are smaller and easier to interpret for human experts.
Stefan Wagner presented the Optimization Knowledge Base, a project that - we hope - will greatly improve the process of testing and parameter tuning for metaheuristics.
Afterwards, Erik Pitzer gave a brief introduction to fitness landscape analysis, a highly relevant topic that he persued during his scientific sabbatical.
Finally, Monika Kofler presented the results of a recently completed warehouse migration project at Rosenbauer International.

Michael Affenzeller would like to thank CARVATECH for hosting the meeting and all attendees for their interest and feedback!
Below are several pictures from the event.

Modelling and Simulation Workshop

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 07:52:32 +0000

We are pleased to announce that the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences will host a

Workshop on modelling and simulation
Date: January 10th, 2011, 4pm
Room: Hörsaal 3 (HS3), FH2

Our colleague Prof. (FH) DI Dr. Stephan Winkler will give the keynote speech and we have been able to secure a set of excellent speakers from the fields of simulation optimization, process and plant simulation as well as simulation and visualization. The workshop will conclude with informal "fireside chats" and a buffet.

For additional information go to http://www.fh-ooe.at/modsim or contact Stephan Winkler (stephan.winkler@fh-hagenberg.at). Attendence is free but please register until January 5th, 2011 via the workshop homepage.

Presentation: Open Source Softwaresystem HeuristicLab

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 07:55:58 +0000

There is an official HeuristicLab presentation scheduled on September, 30th at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences (FH OÖ), Campus Hagenberg. The event will start at 16:30 with a welcome drink and will include a presentation of HeuristicLab and some of its applications. There will also be a buffet afterwards.

Presentation: Open Source Softwaresystem HeuristicLab
September 30th, 16:30
FH OÖ Campus Hagenberg, Building FH2, Room HS3

Consortium Meeting Heureka!

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 07:59:15 +0000

Prim. Dr. Herbert Stekel, MD, from the General Hospital Linz (AKH Linz) was so kind to organize the last consortium meeting before the summer. Shortly before 3:00 p.m. the Heureka! project consortium met in front of the Ars Electronica Center (AEC), which is also one of the most important sights in Linz. Gerfried Stocker, CEO and artistic director of the AEC, surprised us with an exclusive and exciting tour through his "Museum of the Future", followed by presentations and a buffet in the Sky Media Loft. In detail, Heureka! researchers presented results on the following topics:

Research group head Michael Affenzeller talked about the interim evaluation of Heureka! and briefly sketched the most important accomplishments of the center in the last 1.5 project years.
Stefan Wagner talked about the HeuristicLab 3.3 release and gave a live demo of our greatly improved software framework. You can get more information about the framework on the HeuristicLab Develeopment Homepage.
Finally, students from FH OOE presented the results of their study project about medical data analysis in cooperation with AKH Linz.

Michael Affenzeller would like to thank AKH Linz for hosting the meeting and all consortium members for attending!

Heureka! Film Spot

Tue, 04 May 2010 08:07:31 +0000

We recently had a film team in Hagenberg for a short portrait about our work in Heureka! The resulting film was presented at the 4th Science Symposium of Austrian Universities for Applied Sciences in Pinkafeld, Burgenland and very well received.

First Place in Symbolic Regression Competition

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 08:10:51 +0000

We are proud to announce that team HEAL achieved the first place at the symbolic regression competition of the EvoCompetitions side event of Evo* 2010. The goal of the competition was to create a prediction-model for a variable that is expensive to measure based on 57 other variables that can be easily measured based on data from a real world chemical process.

In the modeling process we tried to find a simple model that can be readily interpreted and validated by the domain experts. We put more emphasis on the interpretability, the prediction error of our final model is thus relatively large.

To generate the models for this competition we used an internal pre-release candidate of our software framework HeuristicLab that will be released real soon now. The fact that we achieved first place in this competiton and also second place in the financial time series competition shows that HeuristicLab is powerful and flexible enough to achieve competitive results for real world applications with minimal preparation effort.

Finally we would like to thank the organizers of the symbolic regression competition and of the financial time series prediction competition for making the datasets available for reseach purposes and the EvoCompetitions chair Anna I Esparcia-Alcázar for the organization of the event.

Second Place in Financial Time Series Prediction

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 08:12:47 +0000

Team HEAL achieved second place at the financial time series prediction competition of the EvoCompetitions side event of Evo* 2010. The goal of the competition was to prognose the future values of ten financial time series for a horizon of ten time steps. We used HeuristicLab and genetic programming to create our forecast.

New team member

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:13:56 +0000

The HeuristicLab developement team is proud to announce the next expansion of the research group. Stefan Vonolfen is joining the team to work on projects in the field of logistic optimization. He has contributed to the upcoming HeuristicLab 3 and is eager to continue working with us. We are very glad to have him on board.

Exciting news

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 08:14:35 +0000

The HeuristicLab team would like to wish everyone a happy new year! By the end of this month we will be starting to release the next major version of HeuristicLab on this website and looking forward to hear about your experience in using HeuristicLab for teaching and about your innovative research results! We would be glad to get to know our users and the great things they are doing with HeuristicLab.

WSC'09 conference visit

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:22:49 +0000

Heureka researcher Andreas Beham is attending the Winter Simulation Conference 2009 in Austin, Texas this week. The Winter Simulation Conference is among the premier international conferences on system simulation and Andreas is using the opportunity to network with other researchers and to present recent research results on facility layout optimization .

Consortium Meeting 09

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:16:20 +0000

voestalpine Stahl GmbH invited the Heureka! project consortium to Linz for a retrospection on the first year of the centre. The meeting commenced at 3:00 p.m. with an exciting tour of the voestalpine Stahlwelt exhibition, followed by presentations and a buffet. In detail, Heureka! researchers presented results on the following topics:

Research group head Michael Affenzeller summarized accomplishments of the first year and introduced the research branches.
Gabriel Kronberger presented new approaches for the evaluation of complex process models.
Stephan Winkler showed intermediate results on the analysis of medical data from clinical laboratory testing.
Finally, Monika Kofler gave an update on the progress in facility layout and warehouse optimization.

Michael Affenzeller would like to thank voestalpine for hosting the meeting and all attendees for their interest and insightful comments! Below are several pictures from the event.

Research award

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:05:34 +0000

The Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences (FH OÖ) honors outstanding scientists and scholars actively engaged in research in an annual award ceremony. We are delighted to announce that two prizes went to our research team this year: Michael Affenzeller was awared first place in the category Researcher of the Year and Stefan Wagner received the Junior Researcher Award 2009 for their contributions to the field of heuristic and evolutionary optimization. Congratulations!

Book review

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:07:10 +0000

A review of our book "Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming - Modern Concepts and Practical Applications" has been published in Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines. The reviewer, Gisele L. Pappa from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, points out that the book covers the basics of GA and GP for optimization and presents results of interesting research on new methods capable of preserving relevant building blocks; she also describes it as a good buy for students and researchers interested in genetic algorithms and their application in optimization problems! The full review is available online at SpringerLink.

Presenting Heureka during an invited talk

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:08:58 +0000

Michael Affenzeller is today presenting the Ressel Centre for Heuristic Optimization Heureka! at the annual ÖGM Meeting in Graz, Austria.

HEAL in the news

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:07:54 +0000

The Austrian newspaper OÖ Nachrichten regularly introduces people in technical professions as part of their feature series 'Traumberuf Technik'. Our colleague Monika Kofler was interviewed about her research and gender roles in computer science. Read the full article (in German).

Call for Papers

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:15:02 +0000

The next international workshop on nature inspired distributed computing (NIDISC'2010) is being held during the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA from April 19-23, 2010. The workshop covers the following topics:

Nature-inspired methods (e.g. ant colonies, GAs, cellular automata, DNA and molecular computing, local search, etc) for problem solving environments.
Parallel and distributed metaheuristics techniques (algorithms, technologies and tools).
Applications combining traditional parallel and distributed computing and optimization techniques as well as theoretical issues (convergence, complexity, etc).
Other algorithms and applications relating the above mentioned research areas.

Interested researchers should refer to the NIDISC website and submit their contributions until December, 4th 2009.

Paper presentation

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:13:32 +0000

Stephan Winkler is going to present the paper Heuristic Modeling of the Mental Progress of Persons with Normal Brain Aging, Subjective Cognitive Impairment, Mild Cognitive Impairment, Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementia Disorders at the 21st European Modeling und Simulation Symposium (EMSS 2009). The work presented is a joint contribution between Stephan Winkler and Michael Affenzeller from the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, Hagenberg, Austria, Stefanie Auer and Yvonne Donabauer from the M·A·S Alzheimerhilfe, Bad Ischl, Austria and Barry Reisberg from the Department of Psychiatry of the New York University Langone Medical Center, NY, USA.

KIRAS project completed

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:33:44 +0000

The KIRAS research project Emergency Mission Control Center (EMC²) has ended successfully. The project's aim was to research on information technology support for fire fighting crews that allows for effective cooperation, information discovery and sharing. A prototype application has been built and was tested successfully in a simulated emergency scenario in a motorway tunnel near Wels, Upper Austria. The project partners were ROSENBAUER International AG, FH OÖ Forschungs & Entwicklungs GmbH, mobilkom austria AG, Österreichischer Bundesfeuerwehrverband and SIEMENS IT Solutions and Services GmbH. Project leader at the FH OÖ was Stefan Wagner. The project was funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG). The prototype and live streams from the simulated emergency scenario were presented in a big event at Rosenbauer's headquarters in Leonding, Austria.

LINDI Conference

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:34:55 +0000

The LINDI 2009 conference is taking place in Linz. The conference deals with topics in the field of logistics and industrial informatics and is organized by the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences. The proceedings are published by IEEE.

Professorship for Stefan Wagner

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:35:35 +0000

We are proud to announce that, as of this month, Stefan Wagner started his professorship for Complex Software Systems at the Department of Software Engineering at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, School of Informatics, Commnications and Media, Campus Hagenberg. Stefan is one of the founding members of this research group and father of the software environment HeuristicLab. The whole team congratulates wholehearted!

New projects accepted

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:36:26 +0000

Two research projects, proposed by HEAL in cooperation with the School of Management (FH OÖ, Campus Steyr), have been accepted: "TSCHECHOW" and "COVER.core". In TSCHECHOW, opinion mining and bioinformatical text mining shall be researched; research in cost-efficient vehicle routing with constraint relaxation shall be conducted in COVER.core. Both research projects will be funded by the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences and the Government of Upper Austria; in each of these projects two research assistants will be employed for approximately one and a half years: one in Steyr, one in Hagenberg working with HEAL members. Thus, we expect the HEAL team to grow by two members within the next months!

Guest lecture on the application of metaheuristics in bioinformatics

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:37:21 +0000

On June 25th, 2009, Professor Dr. Enrique Alba will give a talk at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, Campus Hagenberg, entitled "Metaheuristics for Bioinformatics: Gene Selection and Genomics". In this talk Prof. Alba, Professor for informatics at the University of Málaga and expert in parallel metaheuristic algorithms, will explain the use of metaheuristics in bioinformatics. In bioinformatics, metaheuristics are used for solving various kinds of problems in research with genomics and gene interaction, for example. Basic and current research results in this area shall be presented and discussed by Prof. Alba.

Publication in Springer's GPEM

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 12:38:34 +0000

We are proude to announce that an article written by members of the HeuristicLab team has been published in Springer's journal Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (GPEM). The paper "Using enhanced genetic programming techniques for evolving classifiers in the context of medical diagnosis" by Stephan Winkler, Michael Affenzeller, and Stefan Wagner has appeared in GPEM, Vol. 10, No. 2 (June 2009), pp. 111-140; this article can be retrieved online via Springer's online portal.

Microsoft Innovation Award

Sun, 17 May 2009 12:39:55 +0000

Coming back from the presentation and conferment of the Microsoft Innovation Award 09 we are happy to announce that we have received the 2nd price! Among a total of 64 submitted projects HeuristicLab was perceived as one of the three most innovative software projects by both an expert jury and a public audience. We are of course very happy about such a recognition and the award itself, which was presented by Austria's Federal Minister for Science and Research Dr. Johannes Hahn.

During the event we were able to show HeuristicLab to interested people and talk about its possibilities and applications. Below you can find pictures of the conferment and the event and a video where research group head Michael Affenzeller talks about HeuristicLab (german).

Stefan Wagner receives the PhD

Fri, 08 May 2009 12:43:41 +0000

Hoooooray! We are very happy to announce that there is a new doctor among us: Dr. Stefan Wagner, chief architect of the HeuristicLab optimization framework has successfully defended his theses titled Heuristic Optimization Software Systems - Modeling of Heuristic Optimization Algorithms in the HeuristicLab Software Environment and has received the title Doctor Technicae from the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. In his presentation he compared existing software systems and showed the concepts that went into the development of the next generation HeuristicLab which we are going to release early next year to the public. The whole team congratulates whole-heartedly to this success!

At the same day, fellow researcher Prof. Günther Raidl from the Algorithm and Data structures group from the Vienna University of Technology gave a talk on metaheuristic hybridization at the FH OÖ's campus Hagenberg. Prof. Raidl showed interesting ways to combine metaheuristics and exact methods and presented two applications on which this combination has been very successful. His presentation can be found on the HeuristicLab website in the presentations section.

Book presentation

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:44:36 +0000

We are proud to make another big announcement! Our book Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming - Modern Concepts and Practical Applications has finally been printed and is available for purchase. On more than 360 pages the book treats the topic of GA theory, GP theory, and describes the concept of offspring selection as a problem-independent enhancement to the performance. On the example of several problem situations the performances are compared and analysed. Finally several applications are described along with results. More details, such as the table of contents as well as several videos regarding the analysis of genetic diversity can be found on the accompanying website.

Updates on the Innovation Award 2009

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 12:46:56 +0000

We have received further updates from Microsoft regarding the Innovation Award 2009 and were informed that HeuristicLab is among the finalists that are to be presented at the Microsoft Innovation Center in Vienna! So, we will be there on May 7th in a whole-day event where we are going to show the project and talk about applications, technology, and backgrounds. We hope that you meet us there!

HeuristicLab on the shortlist of Microsoft's Innovation Award!

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:47:51 +0000

Hooray! We are proud to announce that HeuristicLab is on the shortlist of 12 finalists competing for Microsoft's Innovation Award 2009. From 64 submissions 12 projects have been selected of which a jury will further select and create a ranking.

Further conference reports

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:48:25 +0000

Gabriel Kronberger is currently attending the EuroGP conference in Tübingen, Germany presenting his study "On Crossover Success Rate in Genetic Programming with Offspring Selection".

The EuroGP continues from today until Friday, April 17th 2009.

Conference Attendances

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 12:49:30 +0000

Our colleague Stephan Winkler is going to represent our research group on heuristic and evolutionary optimization at two conferences in the near future: At the Science Symposium of the Austrian Universities for Applied Sciences 2009 in Villach, Carinthia, he is going to present the paper "Analyse von Patientendaten und Evolutionäres Design von Virtuellen Sensoren für Erkrankungen" ("Analysis of Medical Data of Patients and the Design of Virtual Ssensors for Diseases"), and at the International Workshop on Nature Inspired Distributed Computing (organized within the 23rd IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium in Rome, Italy) he is going to present the paper "Fine Grained Population Diversity Analysis for Parallel Genetic Programming".

New team member

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:50:22 +0000

We are proud to welcome another official member to the Heureka/HeuristicLab team. Erik Pitzer has already been an active developer on the 2nd iteration of the HeuristicLab architecture, but took the chance to go to Harvard Medical School in the mean time. He is now back and working on structure identification problems within Heureka as well as working actively on the next version of the HeuristicLab architecture, which is scheduled for release in the beginning of next year.

Book chapter published

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:54:35 +0000

The article "Evolutionary Systems Identification: New Algorithmic Concepts and Applications" by Michael Affenzeller, Stephan Winkler, and Stefan Wagner has been bublished in the book Advances in Evolutionary Algorithms. This book, edited by Xiong Zhihui and published by IN-TECH Education and Publishing, can be downloaded here.

Open day at the FH OÖ

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:54:01 +0000

Members of the Heureka Team talked to students about their research and education work during the annual open day in Hagenberg. Interested people were introduced into the world of heuristic optimization. We talked a lot about the importance and the inspiration that comes from nature for deriving new optimization techniques as well as giving an overview of the range of applications from route planning, to schedule optimization and system identification.

Workshop on Heuristic Problem Solving (EuroCAST'09)

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 12:55:24 +0000

The EuroCAST 2009 conference and the workshop on Heuristic Problem Solving provided a good base for exchange between the group of Günther Raidl and the Heureka team around Michael Affenzeller. Here are some pictures of the workshop and an informal meeting.

Announcing EuroCAST'09 conference visit

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:57:53 +0000

Members of the Heureka team will be attending the EuroCAST'09 Workshop on Heuristic Problem Solving and present some of their research studies there. EuroCAST'09 is the 12th international conference on Computer Aided Systems Theory and will take place from February 15-20 in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Spain. Interested people are invited to join us there!

EuroCAST'09 conference visit

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:57:03 +0000

Members of the Heureka team are attending the EuroCAST 2009 conference to present recent research results as well as get in touch with people from the field of heuristics optimization. We would also like to remind everyone of the LINDI 2009 conference in Linz later this year.

Medical- and Bioinformatics professorship for Stephan Winkler

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 12:59:09 +0000

Stephan Winkler is, as of today, officially professor at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences. After a well received PhD thesis and several years of hard work, he is now going to face many new challenges in both education and research at the department of Medical and Bioinformatics in Hagenberg, several of which are also part of the tasks at Heureka!

The whole team congratulates whole-heartedly and wishes him all the best and a lot of success for his plans!

Partners meeting announcement

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 13:00:06 +0000

The Heureka! team is proud to announce the first partners meeting where first results are to be discussed and presented. The meeting will take place at campus Hagenberg of the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences.

There are currently three topics on the agenda:

Presentation of the centre's topics in more detail
Introduction of the part data based structure identification
Introduction of the part optimization in production environments

Happy new year

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 13:02:19 +0000

The HeuristicLab development team wishes everyone a successful and happy new year 2009! We're glad about the worldwide interest in our software and hope that you're on board with us the coming year. The next chance to meet with members of the team is at the EuroCAST 2009 conference in Gran Canaria, Spain from February 15-20. We are there co-organizing a workshop on heuristic problem solving together with the group of Günther Raidl from the University of Vienna.

Research award received

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 13:02:56 +0000

Stephan Winkler today received the Junior Researcher Award 2008 from the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences (FH OÖ). He was given the prize in recognition of his excellent research work, presented in his PhD thesis and more than 30 peer reviewed publications over the course of the last 4 years! The whole team congratulates whole-heartedly to this success!

HEUREKA! opening ceremony

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 10:00:00 +0000

The opening ceremony of the Josef Ressel-Centre HEUREKA! will take place at campus Hagenberg of the Upper Austrian University of Applied Sciences (FH-OÖ). The event will start on October 23rd 2008 at 15:30. The topics and speakers of the opening ceremoney are:

Welcome:

Univ.-Prof. DI Dr. Witold Jacak, Dean FH-Campus Hagenberg
Dr. Gerald Reisinger, CEO FH-OÖ Research in Upper Austria

R&D at Austria's Universities of Applied Sciences:

KommR Viktor Sigl, Minister of Economy, Labour, Youth, Education and European Affairs, Upper Austria
Univ.-Prof. DI Dr. Norbert Vana, Member of the Fachhochschulrat Funding Programme Josef Ressel-Centres
Dipl.-Ing. Theresia Vogel-Lahner, Structural Programmes, Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) Josef Ressel-Centre Heureka!
Prof. (FH) Priv.-Doz. DI Dr. Michael Affenzeller, Head Heureka!

On the Importance of Metaheuristics for Science and Industry

Prof. Dr. Enrique Alba, University of Málaga, Spain

For administrative reasons, please register for the event until October 20th, 2008 with MMag. Martina Anzinger either by phone: +43 (0)7236 3888-1550 or e-mail: martina.anzinger@fh-hagenberg.at

Heureka! opening ceremony

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 13:05:07 +0000

The Josef Ressel-Centre HEUREKA! has been officially opened in a ceremony at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, Campus Hagenberg. There were a number of interesting talks and people from the industry, science and politics later gathered at the buffet. Please find below several pictures of the opening ceremony.

New team member

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:39:45 +0000

The HeuristicLab development team is proud to announce that Michael Kommenda joined today. He will reinforce the research group and study in the field of structure identification, working on some of the projects defined in the Josef Ressel-Centre HEUREKA!

Josef Ressel-Centre HEUREKA!

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 14:38:58 +0000

We are proud to announce that the Josef Ressel-Centre HEUREKA! a research laboratory at the FH-OÖ officially started today. The website can be found at heureka.heuristiclab.com and explains the mission and background of this lab, research plans and our partners. Josef Ressel-Centres are an equivalent to the well-known Christian Doppler laboratories, but specifically adjusted to aid the development of the Austrian Universities of Applied Scienes. They are funded partly by an industry consortium, partly by the FH-OÖ and partly by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG).

Visiting PhD student

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:41:14 +0000

The HeuristicLab development team welcomes a visiting PhD student from the university of Riga, Latvia! Tatjana Lagzdina will stay here for the next three months investigating the application of robust optimization techniques to simulation-based optimization tasks.

HEUREKA! opening ceremony

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:44:08 +0000

The opening ceremony of the Josef Ressel-Centre HEUREKA! will take place at campus Hagenberg of the Upper Austrian University of Applied Sciences (FH-OÖ). The event will start on October 23rd 2008 at 15:30. Following are the topics and speakers of the opening ceremoney.

Welcome

Univ.-Prof. DI Dr. Witold Jacak, Dean FH-Campus Hagenberg
Dr. Gerald Reisinger, CEO FH-OÖ Research in Upper Austria
KommR Viktor Sigl, Minister of Economy, Labour, Youth, Education and European Affairs, Upper Austria R&D at Austria's Universities of Applied Sciences
Univ.-Prof. DI Dr. Norbert Vana, Member of the Fachhochschulrat Funding Programme Josef Ressel-Centres
Dipl.-Ing. Theresia Vogel-Lahner, Structural Programmes, Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)

Josef Ressel-Centre Heureka!

Prof. (FH) Priv.-Doz. DI Dr. Michael Affenzeller, Head Heureka! On the Importance of Metaheuristics for Science and Industry
Prof. Dr. Enrique Alba, University of Málaga, Spain Buffet

For administrative reasons, please register for the event until October 20th, 2008 with MMag. Martina Anzinger either by phone: +43 (0)7236 3888-1550 or e-mail: martina.anzinger@fh-hagenberg.at

Stefan Wagner in Sydney

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:45:59 +0000

Stefan Wagner is staying in Sydney, Australia as guest professor. He will give some talks at the University of Technology, Sydney, as well as meet with Zenon Chaczko, a renowned software engineer and professor at the university.

Journal publication for Andreas Beham

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 14:46:39 +0000

The article AbYSS: Adapting Scatter Search to Multiobjective Optimization has been published in IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Volume 12 Issue 4 2008. It is a joint contribution of Antonio Nebro, Francisco Luna, Enrique Alba, Bernabé Dorronsoro, Juan Durillo from the University of Málaga and our Andreas Beham. The reference can be found, e.g. on the publication page.

Conference news

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:48:03 +0000

Our colleague Gabriel Kronberger is currently in Hamburg, Germany, to present the paper "On the Effects of Enhanced Selection Models on Quality and Comparability of Classifiers Produced by Genetic Programming" at the 32nd Annual Conference of the German Classification Society (GfKl 2008).

Stefan Winkler attends GECCO 2008

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:47:17 +0000

Stephan Winkler attended the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2008) in Atlanta, Georgia, this week to present his contribution Fine-Grained Population Diversity Estimation for Genetic Programming Based Structure Identification (which is available as poster [pdf, 3.2 MB]).

Josef Ressel Centre Heureka!

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:50:33 +0000

The HeuristicLab development team proudly announces that our joint proposal for a Josef Ressel Centre for Heuristic Optimization (Heureka!) has been accepted for funding by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG). Heureka! is among the three first research laboratories for universities of applied sciences in Austria and will start in fall 2008.

WSC'08 paper accepted

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:51:45 +0000

The paper A Comparative Study of Genetic Algorithm Components in Simulation-Based Optimisation, a joint contribution of Birkan Can and Cathal Heavey from the University of Limerick, IE and our Andreas Beham has been accepted to be presented at the upcoming Winter Simulation Conference (WSC'08) this December.

HEAL meeting

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:52:26 +0000

Presentations of the last HEAL meeting on June 11th have been added to the presentations section. The topics this time cover the fields of evolutionary art and software parallelization.