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...

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 fitnes...

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".