Conferencia impartida por el Dr. Christian Blum, del Instituto de Investigación en Inteligencia Artificial del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (IIA-CSIC).

Título: Construct, Merge, Solve & Adapt: A Recent Hybrid Algorithm for Combinatorial Optimization

Resumen: The combination of metaheuristics with exact techniques, such as integer linear programming (ILP) solvers, is one of the current lines of research in combinatorial optimization. The main aim behind such approaches is to exploit the complementary character of different optimization strategies in order to obtain robust algorithms that generate high-quality solutions in reasonable computation times. Given a combinatorial optimization problem, general-purpose ILP solvers such as CPLEX are often highly efficient for solving instances up to a certain size, which is problem-dependent. This is because they profit from many years of research in Operations Research and they make use of efficient implementations of cutting edge ILP technologies. One of the motivations for the combination of metaheuristics with ILP solvers such as CPLEX is the aim of taking profit from the application of ILP solvers even when the considered problem instances are too large for applying these solvers directly. In this talk we will present one of our most recent algorithmic developments from the research line outlined above: construct, merge, solve & adapt (CMSA).

Biografía: Christian Blum currently holds the permanent post of a Senior Research Scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Bellaterra, Spain. Before that, from 2012 to 2016, he was an Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country in San Sebastian, Spain. Dr. Blum obtained a PhD in Applied Sciences from the Free University of Brussels in 2004 and a Diploma (equivalent to a Masters Degree) in Mathematics from the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, in 1998. His main research interests are in swarm intelligence techniques for optimization and control, and in the hybridization of metaheuristics with other techniques for large-scale optimization problems arising, for example, in bioinformatics or in transportation. During the last 20 years Dr. Blum has (co-)authored more than 200 publications in international journals, books, and peer-reviewed conference proceedings. In total, his work has currently received around 16.500 citations, and his current H-index is 42 (Google Scholar). Apart from acting as editor for the journal Computers & Operations Research (responsible for heuristics and metaheuristics), he currently is also associate editor for journals such as the Artificial Intelligence Journal and for Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence. Moreover, he is on the editorial board of several additional journals. Dr. Blum is frequently invited to give keynote talks, tutorials and seminars. He has given invited keynote talks, for exemple, at conferences such as MOTOR 2021, ETI4.0 2021, ISMSI 2021, FedCSIS 2020, HM 2019, BBCC 2018, VNS 2017 and Matheuristics 2016, just to name some of the most recent ones. Moreover, Dr. Blum has been very active in the co-organization of scientific events. He is, for example, a co-founder of the interational workshop series on Hybrid Metaheuristics. Another recent example is the International Conference on Swarm Intelligence (ANTS 2020) which he co-organized in 2020 in Barcelona. Finally, during his carrer, he has won several research and supervision awards. The most prestigous awards he received are the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE TEC) Outstanding Paper Award and the SEIO-BBVA award 2021 for the best methodological contribution in Operations Research (Spanish national award). Concerning student supervisions, he has received an award as director of the thesis that won the first prize at the "Certamen Arquímedes" (Spanish national competition). In addition to these academic results, Dr. Blum was involved in the design and in the development of an innovative ride-sharing software that was officially registered as a patent application by the CSIC in September 2019.

 

La conferencia se llevará a cabo el martes 30 de noviembre a las 16:30. Se podrá seguir online en el siguiente enlace.