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Dr. Ender ÖZCAN

Research@NoU-CS          
The LANCS Initiative
ASAP Research Group
School of Computer Science
University of Nottingham
Jubilee Campus
Wollaton Road
Nottingham NG8 1BB
UK

Room C41
T:+44(0) 115 95 15544
F:+44(0) 115 9514254

exo At cs-nott-ac-uk (replace all - with dot)

Home Research Publications Activities Teaching
Management Roles 2010-2011:
  • ITI Co-ordinator
  • MSc Management of IT (G565) Course Director
2008-present: Member of the Executive Committee of the EPSRC LANCS (Lancaster, Nottingham, Cardiff and Southampton) Initiative on Foundational Operational Research. This is a 13M-GBP Science and Innovation consortium between Lancaster, Nottingham, Cardiff and Southampton (1st September 2008-present)

2009-2010: MSc Scientific Computation Course Advisor

2004-2008: Deputy Head of the Department of Computer Engineering, Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey

2004-2008: Head of the ARTIficial Intelligence Research Group, Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey

Professional Duties
    Organiser of the session on Hyper-heuristics at PATAT 2012, Son, Norway, 28-31 August, 2012
  • Organiser (with Christian Artigues, Eric Bourreau, Murat Afsar, Marc Sevaux, Emmanuel Gueré) of the ROADEF/EURO Challenge 2012: Machine Reassignment.
  • Member of the advisory board of CHESC 2011 - Cross-domain Heuristic Search Challenge
  • Joint programme scheduler and stream co-ordinator at YOR17 with A.J. Parkes.
  • Member of the Organising Commitee of the ROADEF/EURO Challenge (2010)
  • Expert reviewer for The Industrial Research Fund (IOF) K.U.Leuven (Flemish fund)
  • External Reviewer for TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey)
Journal Editorships
  • Associate editor of the International Journal of Applied Metaheuristic Computing
  • Guest co-editor of the Journal of the Operational Research Society special issue on "Systems to build systems" (2011) [CFP]
  • Guest co-editor of the Journal of Scheduling special issue on "Maintenance Scheduling: Theory and Applications" (2011) [CFP]
  • Guest co-editor of the Journal of Heuristics special issue on "Hyper-heuristics" (2009) [CFP]
Chairing Duties
  • Organiser (with Christian Artigues, Eric Bourreau, Murat Afsar, Marc Sevaux, Emmanuel Gueré) of the EURO/ROADeF Challenge sessions at EURO, Vilnius, 8-11 July, 2012
  • Organiser (with Andrew Parkes) of the Workshop on Automated Selection and Tuning of Algorithms - Discrete Search Spaces at PPSN 2012, Taormina, Italy, 1-5 September 2012
  • Organiser (with Andrew Parkes) of the Meta-heuristics stream at OR54, Edinburgh, 4-6 September, 2012
  • Chair (with Edmund Burke) of the Special Session on Systems to Build Systems at MISTA 2011, Phoenix, Arizona, 9-12 August 2011
  • Organiser (with Andrew Parkes and Jonathan Rowe) of the Workshop on Scaling Behaviours of Landscapes, Parameters and Algorithms at GECCO 2011 (Dublin, July 2011)
  • Organiser (with Andrew Parkes) of the Meta-heuristics stream at OR53, Nottingham, 6-8 September, 2011
  • Chair (with Rong Qu and Michel Gendreau) of 2011 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Scheduling, Spring 2011
  • YOR17 joint program me scheduler and stream co-ordinator with A.J. Parkes.
  • Organiser (with Djamila Ouelhadj) of the Cooperative meta-heuristics special session at META'10
  • Organiser (with Edmund Burke and Jonathan Thompson) of the "Systems to build systems" workshop at CEC 2010 (2010)
  • Organiser (with Andrew Parkes and Jonathan Rowe) of the "Understanding Heuristics: How do we get the best of both theory and empirical methods?" workshop at PPSN 2010 (2010)
  • Organiser (with Djamila Ouelhadj and Michel Toulouse) of the "Parallel and cooperative search methods" workshop at PPSN 2010 (2010)
  • Organiser (with Andrew Parkes) of the "Metaheuristic" stream at OR52 (2010)
  • Organised the LANCS Initiative research cluster workshop on Systems to Build Systems, 23rd of November (2009)
  • Co-organiser of the OR51 - Meta-heuristics Stream (2009)
  • Co-chair of the Workshop on Automated Heuristic Design: Crossing the Chasm for Search Methods as a part of GECCO (2009) [ More]
  • Co-organiser of the LANCS Initiative workshop on Systems to Build Systems and Heuristic Understanding, Nottingham (2009)
  • Co-chair of the Workshop on Hyper-heuristics Automating the Heuristic Design Process in PPSN X (2008) [More]
  • Co-organiser of the first tutorial on Hyper-heuristics in Istanbul Technical University (2007)
Programme/Scientific Committee Memberships
  1. Programme Committee of the 9th International Conference on Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling (PATAT), Son, Norway, 28-31 August (2012)
  2. Programme Committee of the ANTS 2012, Eight International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, Brussels, Belgium, 12-14 September (2012)
  3. Programme Committee of the 27th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS), London, UK, 3-5 October (2012)
  4. Programme Committee of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), Philedephia, USA, 07-11 July (2012)
  5. Programme Committee of the 15th European Conference on Genetic Programming (under evostar), Malaga, Spain, 11-13 April (2012)
  6. Programme Committee of the European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation (under evostar), Malaga, Spain, 11-13 April (2012)
  7. Programme Committee of the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC'2012), June 10-15, 2012, Brisbane, Australia (2012)
  8. Programme Committee of the International Conference on Evolutionary Computation Theory and Applications (ECTA), Barcelona, Spain, 5-7 October (2012)
  9. Scientific Committee of the International Symposium on INnovations in Intelligent SysTems and Applications, Trabzon, Turkey, 2-4 July (2012)
  10. Programme Committee of the 5th Multidisciplinary International Scheduling: Theory and Applications (MISTA), August 9-12 (2011)
  11. Programme Committee of the 2011 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC 2011), New Orleans, USA, June 5-8 (2011)
  12. Programme Committee of the 7th International Conference on Natural Computation (ICNC11), Shanghai, China, July 26-28 (2011)
  13. Programme Committee of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence track, Dublin, Ireland, 12-16 July (2011)
  14. Programme Committee of the 26th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS), London, UK, 26-28 September (2011)
  15. Programme Committee of the International Conference on Evolutionary Computation Theory and Applications (ECTA), Paris, France, 24-26 October (2011)
  16. Programme Committee of the 6th International Conference On P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud And Internet Computing, Technical University Of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain, October 26-28 (2011)
  17. Programme Committee of the IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI), Paris, France, 11-15 April (2011)
  18. Programme Committee of the 14th European Conference on Genetic Programming (eurogp), Torino, Italy, 27-29 April (2011)
  19. Programme Committee of the 6th European Event on Nature-inspired Techniques in Scheduling, Planning and Timetabling (evostim), Torino, Italy, 27-29 April (2011)
  20. Programme Committee of the International Conference on Evolutionary Computation (ICEC), Valencia, Spain, 24-26 October (2010)
  21. Programme Committee of the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Barcelona, Spain, 18-23 July (2010)
  22. Programme Committee of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), Portland, Oregon, 7-11 July (2010)
  23. Programme Committee of the EuroGP 2010 - 13th European Conference on Genetic Programming, Istanbul, Turkey, 7-9 April (2010)
  24. Programme Committee of the 8th International Conference on Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling (PATAT), Belfast, Northern Ireland, 10-13 August (2010)
  25. Programme Committee of the 25th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS), London, UK, 22-24 September (2010)
  26. Programme Committee of the ANTS 2010 - Seventh International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, Brussels, Belgium, 8-10 September (2010)
  27. Programme Committee of the 6th International Conference on Natural Computation, Yantai, China, 10-12 August (2010)
  28. Scientific Committee of the International Symposium on INnovations in Intelligent SysTems and Applications, Kayseri - Cappadocia, TURKEY, 21-24 June (2010)
  29. Programme Committee of the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Scheduling, Nashville, Tennessee, USA, March 30 - April 2 (2009)
  30. Programme Committee of the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, Trondheim, Norway, 18-21 May (2009)
  31. Programme Committee of the International Conference of Soft Computing and Pattern Recognition (SoCPaR 2009), Malacca, Malaysia, 4-7 December (2009)
  32. Programme Committee of the 4th Multidisciplinary International Scheduling: Theory and Applications, Dublin Ireland, 10-12 August (2009)
Selected Previous Programme Committee Memberships:
  • PATAT Program Committee (2006, 2008)
  • IEEE Symp. on Computational Intelligence in Scheduling Program Committee (2007)
  • IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) Program Committee (2003-2009)
  • IASTED Technical Committee on Artificial Intelligence & Expert Systems (2003-2006)
  • International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences (ISCIS) (2006)
  • Innovations in Intelligent Systems and Applications Program Committee (2005)
  • Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) Program Committee (2004)
Invited Talks
  • Hyper-heuristics, 17/02/2011, University of Khartoum, Sudan.
  • Hyper-heuristics, 07/11/2011, K.U. Leuven, Belgium.
  • Searching for Online Bin Packing Policies using a Genetic Algorithm, 04/05/2011, Workshop on Optimisation and Scheduling in Healthcare, University of Portsmouth, UK.
  • Creating Heuristics via Many Parameters using a Genetic Algorithm (CHAMP-GA), 08/04/2011, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey.
  • Hyper-heuristics: A comprehensive overview, 07/04/2011, Ozyegin University, Istanbul, Turkey.
  • An overview of hyper-heuristics, 17/01/2011, Information Technology Institute, Egypt.
  • An overview of hyper-heuristics, 07/12/2010, University of Salford, UK.
  • Hyper-heuristics for Constraint Satisfaction, 05/11/2010, K.U. Leuven, Belgium
  • Hyper-heuristics and Their Application to an Examination Timetabling Problem, 12/09/2010, (invitation only) Workshop on New Challenges in Scheduling Theory, Frejus, France. [abstract]
  • Hyper-heuristics - A Brief Overview, 25/05/2010, Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey.
  • Hyperheuristics in Search and Optimisation, 12/05/2010, Workshop on Automated Scheduling and Optimisation, University of Portsmouth, UK.
  • Hyperheuristics: recent advances and challenges, 02/03/2010, K.U. Leuven, Belgium
  • University of Bedfordshire, Department of Computer Science and Technology, 24/02/2010
    Title: An Overview of Hyper-heuristics
    Abstract
    The current state of the art in the development of search methodologies is focused around the human design of bespoke systems, which often requires a significant development effort. There is a growing interest in producing more general problem solving techniques, which can potentially be applied to different instances or even problems with less development effort. Hyper-heuristic methodologies have emerged with the main motivation of automating the design and control of (meta-)heuristic methods for this purpose. Although "hyper-heuristic" as a term has been introduced recently, the origins of the idea dates back to early 1960s. A hyper-heuristic is a high level methodology which performs a search by selecting or generating low level (meta-)heuristics which operate on the problem domain. This talk introduces hyper-heuristics and discusses recent developments in this area.
  • University of Nottingham, ASAP seminar, 02/02/2010
    Title: Bidirectional Best-fit Heuristic for Orthogonal Rectangular Strip Packing
    Abstract
    Solving a rectangular strip packing problem requires a search for the best placement of a set of rectangles with given widths and heights in a suitable orientation on a strip of rectangular stock sheet with a fixed width and an infinite height. The ultimate objective is to minimise the height of the strip on which all rectangles will be oriented orthogonally without any overlaps. In this talk, a bidirectional best-fit heuristic will be introduced which considers the gaps in both horizontal and vertical directions during the placement process as a new key feature. The experiments over benchmark instances show that the bidirectional best-fit heuristic achieves better results than the existing heuristics (including the state-of-the-art) and delivers a better or matching performance as compared to the most of the previously proposed meta-heuristics.
  • A classification of hyper-heuristics, 5th of May, 2009, K.U. Leuven, Belgium
  • A classification of hyper-heuristics, 13th of April, 2009, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
  • Hyper-heuristics (guest lecture), 2008, K.U. Leuven, Belgium
  • Hyper-heuristics, 2008, Sabanci University,Turkey
  • Hyper-heuristics: Recent Developments, 2008, Yeditepe University, Turkey
  • Issues in Hyper-heuristics, 6th of June, 2007, University of Nottingham, UK
Refereeing

IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics - Part B, Journal of Heuristics, Evolutionary Computation, Journal of Scheduling, The Journal of the Operational Research Society, Annals of Operations Research, Computational Optimization and Applications, Theoretical Computer Science, European Journal of Operational Research, Computers & Operations Research, INFORMS Journal on Computing, Information Processing Letters, Advances in Complex Systems, Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, International Journal of Modelling, Identification and Control, Natural Computing, The Computer Journal, International Journal of Operational Research, Numerical Mathematics: A Journal of Chinese Universities, IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, International Journal of Applied Metaheuristic Computing and more.