COMEX Workshop on Practical Automatic Algorithm Configuration

IRIDIA, the artificial intelligence laboratory of the Université libre
de Bruxelles, organizes, in the context of the COMEX project
(http://comex.ulb.ac.be/), a free-of-charge one-day workshop on the
practical application of automatic configuration methods to configure
heuristic and exact optimization algorithms, and other configurable
systems.  The aim of the workshop is to introduce the concepts of
automatic configuration to algorithm users and designers.

Automatic configuration of algorithms, also known as offline parameter
tuning, is the problem of finding a high-performing configuration of
the parameters of an optimization algorithm given training instances
of the problem to be tackled. In recent years, advances in automatic
algorithm configuration have resulted in practical methods, such as
ParamILS (http://www.cs.ubc.ca/labs/beta/Projects/ParamILS/) and irace
(http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/irace/), able to configure hundreds of
parameters. Moreover, these methods enable the automatic design of
optimization algorithms, either by building a flexible high-level
algorithm from other algorithms and tuning its parameters, or by
defining a grammar description of the design space and instantiating
algorithms from this grammar.

Date:       Tuesday November 25, 2014
Language:   English
Location:   IRIDIA, Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels
Schedule:

10.00 - 11.45 Introduction to Automatic Algorithm Configuration

11.45 - 12.00 Coffee break

12.00 - 13.00 Short presentations (5-10 minutes) of the configuration
              problems tackled by the participants

13.00 - 14.00 Sandwich lunch (free)

14.00 - 14.30 Introduction to the irace software package

14.30 - 17.00 Hands-on session on applying irace to the participants'
              scenarios

This workshop should be of interest to researchers, students and
practitioners in the areas of:

* Exact and heuristic optimization
* Combinatorial and black-box optimization, both single and multi-objective
* Metaheuristics, including evolutionary algorithms, ant colony
  optimization, and local search
* Hyper-parameter tuning and model selection in machine learning

The workshop will be free-of-charge and open to anyone who wants to
participate. The number of places is very limited, thus early
registration is compulsory.

To register, please send an email to Manuel López-Ibáñez
with your contact details, what is
your motivation for attending the workshop, and whether you are
interested in presenting your configuration problem in the 12:00-13:00
slot.

More information is available at: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~manuel/comex_workshop

Best regards,

    Manuel López-Ibáñez and Franco Mascia.