Keynote:
Evolution's Niche in Applied Optimization and Informatics

Kalyanmoy Deb

Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India & Helsinki School of Economics, Finland

Evolutionary optimization algorithms are now clearly demonstrated to have an edge over their traditional counterparts, particularly in handling practical and difficult problem-solving tasks. The reasons for their success lie in their flexibility in using different forms of an optimization problem, ease in changing their operators to suit a problem, direct use of objectives and constraints, and possessing simplistic operating principles. In this talk, we shall borrow a practical power dispatch optimization problem to demonstrate how each of these aspects can be exploited to come up with theoretically close optimal solutions subjected to two conflicting objectives, scalable and uncertain variables, non-linear equality constraints and dynamically changing problem parameters. The latter part of the talk will address a far-reaching issue -- explaining how multi-criterion evolutionary optimization can be utilized to decipher hidden knowledge of a problem, which are otherwise difficult to find by other means. The recently proposed 'innovization' technique will also be demonstrated through the same power dispatch optimization case study.

Biography

Kalyanmoy Deb is the Deva Raj Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in India. Currently he is visiting Helsinki of Economics in Finland as a Finland Distinguished Professor. He is the recipient of the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Engineering Sciences for the year 2005. He has also received the 'Thomson Citation Laureate Award' from Thompson Scientific for having highest number of citations in Computer Science during the past ten years in India. He is a fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), Indian National Academy of Sciences, and International Society of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (ISGEC). He has received Fredrick Wilhelm Bessel Research award from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2003. His main research interests are in the area of computational optimization, modeling and design, and evolutionary algorithms. He has written two text books on optimization and more than 200 international journal and conference research papers. He has been working in evolutionary optimization for the past 21 years. More information about his research can be found from http://www.iitk.ac.in/kangal/deb.htm.