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.

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 t...

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 d...