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.

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 al...

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...