New PhD course about Global Optimization metaheuristics

A new PhD course about GO metaheuristics — organized by Dr. Luca Manzoni, Dr. Luca Mariot, and me — was given green light by our Department. Confirmed special guest for a seminar: Prof. Leonardo Vanneschi from the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.

The course, that will be probably 20 hours long, will focus on the main areas of bio-inspired methods: evolutionary methods, including genetic programming, and swarm intelligence.

I will cover the latter topic, describing the most widespread nature-inspired algorithms: Particle Swam Optimization, Artificial Bee Colony, and Ant Colony Optimization. My plan is to describe the recent advancements in the field and the state-of-the-art variants of the three algorithms, showing to PhD candidates that these metaheuristics can be suitable for their optimization needs, both in the case of combinatorial and real-valued complex problems.

The syllabus, along with the exact dates of the course, will be published soon.