An Introduction to Evolutionary Optimization
Recent Theoretical and Practical Advances
IJCAI'13 Tutorial TF1: Monday afternoon, Augest 5th, 2013
Yang Yu, Ke Tang, Xin Yao, Zhi-Hua Zhou

Overview

Evolutionary optimization includes a family of stochastic heuristic algorithms for tackling optimization problems. As a general-purpose optimization tool, evolutionary optimization requires very few properties about optimization problems. Briefly, the problems that can evaluate the quality of any solution, are in the range where evolutionary optimization is applicable. It therefore has been used with success in the cases where traditional optimization approaches fail. In recent decades, it has being further developed to be better theoretically founded and to better fit practical problems.

The aim of the tutorial is to introduce evolutionary optimization to the AI students and researchers, whom are interested in trying nontraditional tools for solving the optimization problems. This tutorial covers introductory material of evolutionary optimization as well as advanced topics organized in two branches, theoretical and practical. For the attendees, no pre-knowledge about evolutionary optimization/algorithms is required. We only assume the audience is familiar with basic probability and statistical theory.

Slides & Outline

(To be available)

Presenters


Yang Yu
Yang Yu is a research assistant professor of Department of Computer Science & Technology of Nanjing University, China. He received his Ph.D. degree from Department of Computer Science of Nanjing University in 2011, with the dissertation "Evolutionary Computation: Theoretical Analysis and Learning Algorithms" . His research interests include evolutionary computation and its applications in machine learning and reinforcement learning. He has published 20 research papers in artificial intelligence journals and conferences such as Artificial Intelligence and IJCAI. He received the best paper award of PAKDD'08, the best theory paper award of GECCO'11, the best poster award of KDD'12, and China Computer Federation Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation award in 2011.


Ke Tang
Ke Tang is a professor in University of Science and Technology of China and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham. He received his Ph.D. degree from the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 2007. His major research interests include evolutionary computation and machine learning, and has authored/co-authored more than 50 refereed publications in these fields. He is an associate editor of IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine and serves as a program co-chair of 2010 and 2013 IEEE Congress of Evolutionary Computation, held in Barcelona and Cancun, respectively.
 

Xin Yao
Xin Yao is a professor of computer science from the University of Birmingham, UK. He was also a Distinguished Visiting Professor of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), P. R. China, and a visiting professor of three other universities. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, Editor-in-Chief (2003-08) of IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, an associate editor or an editorial board member of 11 other journals. He was the winner of 2001 IEEE Donald G. Fink prize paper award and several other best paper awards. His research interests include evolutionary computation, neural network ensembles, and their applications. He has more than 300 refereed publications in those areas. He is currently the Director of the Centre of Excellence for Research in Computational Intelligence and Applications (CERCIA) , which is focused on applied research and knowledge transfer to industry.
 

Zhi-Hua Zhou
Zhi-Hua Zhou is a professor of Department of Computer Science & Technology of Nanjing University, China. He has wide research interests, mainly including machine learning, data mining, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. In these areas he has published over 90 papers in leading international journals or conferences, and holds 12 patents. He is a Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of IAPR, Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Chinese Science Bulletin, Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, and on the editorial boards of various other journals. He founded ACML and serves as its Steering Committee Chair, as well as Steering Committee member of PAKDD and PRICAI. He served as Program Committee Chair/Co-Chair of PAKDD'07, PRICAI'08, ACML'09, and SDM’13, Vice Chair or Area Chair of various conferences, and chaired many domestic conferences in China. He has been awarded with various honors such as the Fok Ying Tung Young Professorship First-Grade Award (2010), the National Science & Technology Award for Young Scholars of China (2006), the Microsoft Young Professorship Award (2006), and a number of journal/conference paper awards. He is an Adjunct Professor of universities such as the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology.
Maintained by Yang Yu, 2013
http://cs.nju.edu.cn/yuy

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