Maria Bresich, Günther Raidl, and Steffen Limmer received the best paper award at the 2024 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2024) for their contribution Letting a Large Neighborhood Search for an Electric Dial-A-Ride Problem Fly: On-The-Fly Charging Station Insertion. The conference took place in Melbourne, Australia, July 14-18, 2024.

Congratulations to Nikolaus Frohner, who successfully defended his PhD thesis “Advancing State Space Search for Static and Dynamic Optimization by Parallelization and Learning” today.

Thanks to the evaluation committee: Christian Blum, Luca di Gaspero, Sophie Parragh, and Nysret Musliu.

Rupert Ettrich, Marc Huber, and Günther Raidl received the Best Paper Award for their paper A Policy-Based Learning Beam Search for Combinatorial Optimization at the 23rd Europen Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization held in Brno, Czech Republic, from April 12-14.

Jonas Mayerhofer, Markus Kirchweger, Marc Huber, and Günther Raidl received the best paper award for their work A Beam Search for the Shortest Common Supersequence Problem Guided by an Approximate Expected Length Calculation at the 22nd European Conference on Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization being held in Madrid, Spain, in April 2022.

In collaboration with Christian Blum from the University of the Basque Country, Günther Raidl wrote the Book Hybrid Metaheuristics – Powerful Tools for Optimization. The book is published by Springer in the series “Artificial Intelligence: Foundations, Theory, and Algorithms” and available in printed form as well as e-book.

The Vienna Graduate School in Computational Optimization offers Prae-Doc contracts for PhD candidates in different areas of optimization such as Combinatorial Optimization, Global Optimization, Heuristic Optimization, Nonlinear Optimization, Stochastic Optimization, Dynamic Optimization, Algorithmic Game Theory, Optimization for intelligent Data Analysis.

The doctoral program is a joint initiative between the University of Vienna, TU Wien, and the Institute of Science and Technology. Candidates must follow the rules for PhD studies at one of the aforementioned institutions and participate in the joint teaching and research program.

The program starts on October 1, 2016. Applications

One of the most advanced medical centers for Ion Beam Therapy and Research in Europe is currently being built in Wiener Neustadt: MedAustron. The radiation therapies applied will use protons and carbon ions for cancer treatment. The first patient treatments are planned in 2016. In the full operational phase up to 1,200 people per year are expected to benefit from the international first class medicine offered by MedAustron.

Scheduling patient treatments with their large number of individual tasks and specific requirements in order to best utilize the available resources and treat