CHAIR OF

COMPUTATIONAL

INTELLIGENCE

The Chair of Computational Intelligence is the official partner at the Gender X Informatik Project, which is being funded by the ministry of science (BMBF). The goal of this project is to study the influence of the research in computer science on the society and particularly on the gender relevant issues. The first workshop (in Magdeburg) will be organized on 14th December: 

Sanaz gave a keynote speech about Multi-Criteria Optimization and Decision Making in Dynamic Environments at the 11th International Conference on Simulated Evolution and Learning which took place at SUSTech (Southern University of Science and Technology of China) in Shenzhen China.  

The executable file for the LiquidSwarm Simulation is now available here: 

... to the webpage

The students of our CIG Course got several prizes at the international competition in Computational Intelligence in Games which was announced last week at CIG 2017 Conference in New York. 

In this competition which was part of the requirements for the course Computational Intelligence in Games SS17, the students have worked on AI methods for the PacMan Game. The competition had two categories: MS. Pac-Man Track and  Ghost Team Track. In both categories, our students could win some prizes.

In Ghost Team Track:

• Place 1 (Max F.), Prize 500 USD
• Place 2 (Felix P., Till I.), Prize 300 USD
• Place 5 (Nils S., Tim T.)
• Place 6 (Stefan S. und Thomas S.)

In Ms. Pac-Man Track:  

• Place 4 (Tony S.)
• Place 5 (Bastian H.)
• Place 6 (Alex D.)

 picture from the internal OvGU competition in July 2017

Our RoboCup-Team got the 2nd place at the WorldCup in Japan :-) Thanks to the hard teamwork in the last days, weeks and months.

On Wednesday 19 July Prof. Kalyanmoy Deb will give a talk at our research group: 

Location: G29-301
Time: 3.30 pm 

Title: Breaking the Billion Variable Barrier in Optimization

Abstract: Optimization methods and practices are around for more than 50 years, but they are still criticized for their "curse of dimensionality". In this talk, we shall look at a specific large-dimensional integer-valued resource allocation problem from practice and review the performance of well-known softwares, such as IBM's CPLEX, on the problem. Thereafter, we shall present a population-based heuristic search algorithm that has the ability to recombine short-sized building blocks, despite having overlapping variable linkage, to form larger-sized building blocks. The process is eventually able to solve a billion-variable version of the problem to near-optimality in a polynomial computational time, making the application one of the largest size optimization problems ever solved.

Bio-sketch of the Speaker:
Kalyanmoy Deb is Koenig Endowed Chair Professor at Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Michigan State University, USA. Prof. Deb's research interests are in evolutionary optimization and their application in multi-criterion optimization, modeling, and machine learning. He has worked at various universities across the world including IITs in India, University of Dortmund and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, Aalto University in Finland, University of Skovde in Sweden, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He was awarded Infosys Prize, TWAS Prize in Engineering Sciences, CajAstur Mamdani Prize, Distinguished Alumni Award from IIT Kharagpur, Edgeworth-Pareto award, Bhatnagar Prize in Engineering Sciences, and Bessel Research award from Germany. He has been just awarded IEEE CIS's "EC Pioneer Award". He is fellow of IEEE, ASME, and three Indian science and engineering academies. He has published over 475 research papers with Google Scholar citation of over 100,000 with h-index 102. He is in the editorial board on 20 major international journals. More information about his research contribution can be found from http://www.egr.msu.edu/~kdeb.

Dr. Hemant Singh and Kalyan Bhattacharjee from the University of New South Wales in Canberra visited us for two weeks. We had fruitful discussions and hope to continue working on our ideas in the next two years during the DAAD sponsored research collaboration between Germany and Australia.

Back from CEC 2017 in San Sebastian: Presented 3 papers, organized several meetings, met old friends and made new ones. 

Visit SwarmLab on May 20 from 6 to 11 pm at the Long Night of Science 2017. 

We presented three programs: 

• Flying Swarm
• Catch me, if you can: Virtual reality and drones
• Rolling Swarm

Some impressions from the event:

We organized the Human-Swarm Experiment for the second time on 20th May 2017. 

More pictures and information about the experiment including videos can be found here. 

We spent two days in Harz at one of the most beautiful spots in Germany, discussed about our research topics and had fun :-)

Our team is going to participate at the RoboCup-GermanOpen competitions: May 5 - 7 

We got the third place at GermanOpen :-) 

Nithish defended his Master Thesis which was done in cooperation with the University of Bolzano on 

Multi-Objective Success Factor Analysis of IT-based Startups

SwarmLab hosted three students for the Girls and Boys Day. We discussed about Artificial Intelligence, Swarm Robotics and Swarm Intelligence. The students took a look at the facilities in SwarmLab and learned how we build our robots with 3D Printer and printed their own designed objects. They also had the opportunity to fly the flying swarm and work on the Rolling Swarm platform. 

Sanaz gave a talk at the Ladies Night in Max Planck Institute, Magdeburg.

You find more information about this interesting event here. 

Visit SwarmLab at CeBIT 2017 - March 20 - 24: Halle 06 / Stand B24

The grades are online. During checking the exams, we discovered some nice pieces of art  :-) 

Group meeting at Christmas Market 2016