A Review Of Hyper - Heuristics

Yeditepe University

Department of Computer Engineering

SEMINAR 

A REVIEW OF HYPER-HEURISTICS

 Ender Özcan

Nottingham University

December 17, 2015

Engineering Building A-412

14:30 - 15:40

Abstract

There is a growing interest in developing more general problem solving techniques that can be applied to different problem domains rather than manually having to customise solutions for each specific domain and instance even in some cases. Hyper-heuristics have emerged as such reusable methods automating the design and/or control of (meta-)heuristics. This talk will provide a review of hyper-heuristics to date starting from the early sixties when the initial ideas have emerged. 

Short Bio of the Speaker: Dr Ender Özcan is a lecturer in Operational Research and Computer Science with the Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning (ASAP) research group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham, UK. He received his PhD from the Department of Computer and Information Science at Syracuse University, NY, USA in 1998. He worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Engineering at Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey from 1998-2007. Dr Özcan was appointed as a senior research fellow in 2008 to the EPSRC funded LANCS initiative, which was one of the largest Science and Innovation Rewards given by EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, UK). He became a lecturer in 2009. He served as an executive committee member for the LANCS initiative. He was on the advisory board of the first Cross-domain Heuristic Search Challenge (CHeSC 2011) and co-organised the second challenge (CHeSC 2014). He chaired the PATAT 2014 conference. Dr Özcan has over 100 refereed publications at reputable venues. His research interests and activities lie at the interface of Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Operational Research, with a focus on intelligent decision support systems combining data science techniques and (hyper/meta)heuristics applied to real world problems. He has been awarded grants as principal investigator and co-investigator/named researchers from The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, T.R. Prime Ministry State Planning Organisation and CONACyT. Dr Özcan is the Deputy Director of the EPSRC's National Taught Course Centre in Operational Research (NATCOR) in UK. He is Steering Committee member and Executive Officer of the International Conference Series on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling (PATAT). He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Scheduling and International Journal of Applied Metaheuristic Computing.