News

Franz Rothlauf was reelected as one of six new members of the executive committee of ACM SIGEVO. Franz will be in office for six years.

Continue reading "Franz Rothlauf reelected as member of the ACM SIGEVO Executive Committee"

In September 2014 three theses have been successfully completed at the chair of Information Systems and Business Administration.

Continue reading "Three outstanding doctoral theses at the chair of Information Systems and Business Admininstration – Congratulations"

Study confirms online sales are enhanced by social recommendations and determines the actual value of "likes"

When online retailers display customer recommendations next to their product descriptions, it can significantly increase the sales of these. This is the conclusion reached following a study undertaken by academics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Technische Universität (TU) Darmstadt.

Continue reading "Facebook recommendations could be worth millions of euros"

Franz Rothlauf was re-elected as member of the editorial board of Evolutionary Computation Journal (http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/evco). ECJ is a leading journal in the field of evolutionary computation. In 2008, the journal had an impact factor of 3,0 ranking it 13th (out of 94) in the area "Computer science, artificial intelligence" and fifth (out of 85) in the area "Computer Science, theory and method" (source: Thomson).

Franz Rothlauf publishes a new book on the "Design of Modern Heuristics".

The book is published at Springer and provides an integrated view on modern heuristics. The following paragraphs provide a short summary of the book:

"Most textbooks on modern heuristics provide the reader with detailed descriptions of the functionality of single examples like genetic algorithms, genetic programming, Tabu search, simulated annealing, and others, but fail on teaching the underlying concepts behind all these
different approaches.

This book focuses on the users' needs and gives answers to three fundamental questions: First, it tells us for which types of problems modern heuristics are expected to perform well and which ones should be left to traditional optimization methods. Second, it teaches us how we can systematically design the ``right'' modern heuristic for a particular problem by providing a coherent view on design elements and working principles. Third, it shows us how we can make us of problem-specific knowledge for the design of efficient and effective modern heuristics that solve not only small toy problems but also perform well on large real-world problems.

The book is written in an easy-to-read style and aimed at students and practitioners who want to understand modern heuristics and are interested in a guide to their systematic design and use."

More information about the book can be found at
http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/book/978-3-540-72961-7
Parts of the book can be electronically accessed at
http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-3-540-72962-4#section=925019&page=1
Reviews of the book can be found at
http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/book/978-3-540-72961-7?detailsPage=reviews

Having computer science here in Mainz for 25 years was celebrated at 26 and 27 November 2009. Greetings cam from the CIO of the state Rheinland-Pfalz, Jürgen Häffner, and the president of the university, Prof. Dr. Georg Krausch.

During an interdisciplinar discussion with various representatives from different application areas of computer science, the future of computer science in Mainz was discussed. The participants emphasized in the discussion that having a strong computer science deparment here in Mainz is important for the successful development of many other disciplines.

Franz Rothlauf and Andreas Fink from the Helmut Schmidt-University Hamburg organized the 3rd European Workshop on Evolutionary Computation in Transportation and Logistics. The workshop took place from 15 to 17 April 2009 in Tübingen (Germany) and was part of Evo*, the world premium event on the application of evolutionary computation. Acceptance rate of the workshop was 54% and accepted papers are published in the Springer LNCS series.

More details on EvoTransLog

On July 10th 2008 we had our annual Sommerfest. Many members of the department and a lot of friends were enjoying the nice weather during our outside barbeque. Before the barbeque many guests were competing for the first Mainzer Wifo-Kicker-Cup. The cup went to Jan Rübenach and Matthias Hofmann who clearly dominated the tournament, Silvia and Jörn Grahl were second and Johannes Appelmann and Philip Burkert won the bronze medal. The "Turtle Team" including a large fan club) Silke Rath and Tobias Grosche came in fourth but won the prize for best tricots.

Many thanks to all guests!

Results of the cup can be found here.
Photos are here.

Prof. Dr. Franz Rothlauf gave his inaugural lecture at the university of Mainz on June 19, 2008. The talk on "Heuristic Optimization Methods: A tool for the "sinnhafte Vollautomatisierung" in companies" positioned heuristic optimization methods in the field of information systems. In addition, the talk gave an overview over the research topics of the team members and Prof. Rothlauf.

The president of the Johannes Gutenberg university, Prof. Dr. Krausch, the Dean of the department, Prof. Dr. Breuer, and many external colleagues (like Prof. Dr. Kargl, Prof. Dr. Merntens, and Prof. Dr.
Heinzl) as well as family and friends enjoyed the presentation and congratulated Franz on his talk.

After the presentation, the department and Franz invited all guests for snacks, wine, beer, and nice weather. All guests enjoyed it (as well as the soccer game in the evening) and partied until night.

The slides of the talk are here.

In the course of the tutorial which belongs to the Winfo 2 lecture "Technologien Betrieblicher Informationssysteme" ("Technologies of operational information systems"), the group which emerged victorious in the winter semester 2007/2008 received book tokens.

The students created together an IT design for a furniture store as well as a website respectively. Both team work projects were evaluated by all the participants of the tutorial. A web based administration and communication system for the alumni was supposed to be developed in the process of generating a website. The winners? version a prize was awarded to can be found here: http://studium.flixner.de/winfo2/.

We would like to seize the opportunity to thank all participants for their achievements.