Swagatam Das
India Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India

 Title

Large-scale and Multi-peak Optimization with Differential Evolution – Some Recent Approaches and Future Challenges.

Abstract:

Differential Evolution (DE) is arguably one of the most powerful stochastic optimization algorithms of current interest. Since its inception in 1995, DE has drawn the attention of many researchers all over the world resulting in a lot of variants of the basic algorithm with improved performance, especially on continuous parametric spaces. This talk will begin with a brief but comprehensive overview of the basic concepts related to DE, its algorithmic components and control parameters. It will subsequently discuss some of the significant algorithmic variants of DE for bound-constrained single-objective optimization for high-dimensional search spaces. The talk will then focus on some interesting DE variants with additional mechanisms like a distance-based selection, a clustering procedure and bi-objective formulations for solving multi-peak optimization problems where the objective is to locate all the global and local optima of a fitness landscape during one run of the algorithm. The talk will finally highlight a few open research problems in the related areas.

Swagatam Das is currently serving as an associate professor at the Electronics and Communication Sciences Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India. His research interests include machine learning and non-convex optimization. Dr. Das has published one research monograph, one edited volume, and more than 300 research articles in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences. He is the founding co-editor-in-chief of Swarm and Evolutionary Computation, an international journal from Elsevier. He has also served as or is serving as the associate editors of Pattern Recognition (Elsevier), IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, IEEE Access, Neurocomputing (Elsevier), Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (Elsevier), and Information Sciences (Elsevier). He is an editorial board member of Applied Soft Computing (Elsevier) and Progress in Artificial Intelligence (Springer). Dr. Das has 16000+ Google Scholar citations and an H-index of 61 till date. He has acted as guest editors for special issues in journals like IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation and IEEE Transactions on SMC, Part C. He is the recipient of the 2012 Young Engineer Award from the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE). He is also the recipient of the 2015 Thomson Reuters Research Excellence India Citation Award as the highest cited researcher from India in Engineering and Computer Science category between 2010 to 2014.