Introductory lecture
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On Forgotten Island Treasures and Future Jungle Paths
Articles written in the pre-electronic era seem to have no chance to be read in modern times, except for by historians. So it may be worthwhile that an elderly person talks to the young about findings contained on yellowed pages. That is what the title means with forgotten treasures, the island being West Berlin in this case, i.e., the origin of evolution strategies in the 1960s and 1970s. Jungle paths depict areas that I hope to see more people hiking along in the future instead of trodden paths, in order to detect new insights in the working principles of organic evolution leading to ever more effective and efficient optimum seeking methods. Hans-Paul Schwefel
Hans-Paul Schwefel studied Aero- and Space-Technology at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB). Before and after receiving his engineer diploma in 1965 he worked at the Hermann-Foettinger-Institute of Hydrodynamics, from 1967 to 1970 at an industrial research institute, and from 1971 to 1975 again at the TUB, from where he got his Dr.-Ing. degree in 1975. Coherent during that period at Berlin was the development of a new experimental and later on also numerical optimization method called 'Evolutionsstrategie'. From 1976 to 1985 he acted as senior research fellow at the Research Centre (KFA) Jülich, where he was head of a computer aided planning tools group. Since 1985 until he was
pensioned in 2006 he was holder of a Chair for Systems Analysis at the University of Dortmund, Department of Computer Science.
In 1990 he was co-founder of the international conference series on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN), which has been held biennially ever since. He acted as dean of the faculty, as spokesman of the collaborative research center on computational intelligence (SFB 531), as co-founder and president of the Informatics Centre Dortmund (ICD), and also as pro-rector for research at the university. He has been member of the editorial boards of three journals and advisory board member of two book series in the field of Evolutionary respective Natural Computation. His publication list comprises more than 160 entries.
In 2002 he got an Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award from the IEEE Neural Networks Society, later renamed IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. He was elevated to Fellow of the IEEE in 2007. In the same year The University of Birmingham admitted him to the degree of Doctor
of Science, honoris causa.
E-mail: hps@udo.edu Homepage: http://Ls11-www.cs.uni-dortmund.de/people/schwefel/WelcomeE.html |