News

New projects accepted

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

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

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

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).

Microsoft Innovation Award 2009 Preisträger

Stefan Wagner receives the PhD

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.