Peter Bosman, researcher at CWI has won a Best Paper Award during the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2010 in Portland, Oregon (USA). This is one of the most outstanding conferences on Evolutionary Computation. Bosman received the prize for his publication ‘The Anticipated Mean Shift and Cluster Registration in Mixture-based EDAs for Multi-Objective Optimization'. He won the prize in the category of Estimation of Distribution Algorithms. Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) are advanced genetic algorithms that are mainly used for the solution of general optimization problems. Bosman's winning article studies the characteristics of probability distributions and their influence on the optimization by EDAs. EDAs are broadly used, especially when it's difficult or impossible to use other techniques.
Bosman focused on multi-objective optimization, where the goal is to optimize multiple, often conflicting objectives simultaneously, such as, for example, the costs and quality of a product. Bosman's research is part of the CWI research group Computational Intelligence and Multi-Agent Games (SEN4). EDAs were recently used during the study of adaptive bed planning in hospitals. They will likely be deployed in other projects, for example in research for revenue management and energy systems.More information:
http://www.sigevo.org/gecco-2010/
