JoLEA
The twenty-fourth lecture takes place on the 26th of November 2025 at 4:30 PM (CET), virtually.
The zoom link to attend the lecture is: https://cwi-nl-zoom.zoom.us/j/89972406334?pwd=P3GGgQsLzhYiJgBLEnY9v9caoa6nsz.1 The lecture will be held by Prof. Dr. Marcus Gallagher, The University of Queensland, Australia.
Fitness landscapes and problem features: selected techniques and research directions
Fitness landscape analysis refers to a broad area of work concerned with understanding, modelling and utilizing the properties of the solution spaces of optimisation problems. This research includes both discrete and continuous problem instances and ranges from understanding the theoretical properties of landscapes, through to improving benchmarking of optimisation algorithms, as well as practical techniques that produce features for downstream use in automated algorithm selection and configuration methods. In this talk I will give a brief overview of the main ideas in this area before discussing some selected examples of techniques that have been developed specifically for understanding and modelling fitness landscapes, with an emphasis on continuous landscapes. Some of the main challenges in this area will be highlighted, leading to possible directions for future research.
About the speaker
Marcus Gallagher received this Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia in 2000. He is currently Associate Professor with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Queensland. His research interests are in Artificial Intelligence, including evolutionary computation, black-box optimisation, algorithm benchmarking, machine learning and real-world applications. His contributions include the development of continuous Estimation of Distribution Algorithms, techniques problems for benchmarking optimisation algorithms and problem landscape analysis. Dr. Gallagher has co-authored over 120 papers and is an Associate Editor of the Swarm and Evolutionary Computation Journal and Chair of the Queensland Chapter of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.
