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

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

Among others, HeuristicLab 3.3.8 contains the following new features:

• Scatter Search
• Relevant Alleles Preserving GA (RAPGA)
• Symbolic Time-Series Prognosis
• Neighborhood Component Analysis
• Ensemble Modeling
• LM-BFGS
• Gaussian Process Regression and Least-Squares Classification
• Job Shop Scheduling
• Linux support based on Mono

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