News

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.

On September 25th 2007, private lecturer Franz Rothlauf was appointed university professor

The appointment was carried out by Prof. Dr. Preuss, vice president of the University of Mainz.

For more information, we invite you to look through our next issue of the Johannes Gutenberg magazine

ACM has just concluded the email balloting of SIGEVO members for election of nine new members of the SIGEVO (Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation) Executive Committee. Franz Rothlauf has been a newly elected member and will take office on July 1, 2007. The other newly elected members of the executive commitee are Darrell Whitley, John Holland, Riccardo Poli, John Koza, Marc Schoenauer, Kalyanmoy Deb, Dirk Thierens, and Dave Davis.

The scope of SIGEVO is genetic and evolutionary computation, including all aspects of its organization, structure, design, and engineering.

More information on the ACM SIGEVO can be found at http://www.sigevo.org/

Since January 1st 2007, Wolfgang Steitz works as a research assistant at the chair of business administration and computer science.

Wolfgang Steitz studied Business IT with an emphasis on information systems, logistics and network engineering/multimedia at the University of Mannheim. His diploma thesis dealt with the development of efficient evolutionary algorithms in the planning of communication and IT networks as well as with the representation for genetic algorithms.

His doctorate thesis will presumably concentrate on the domain of genetic (evolutionary) algorithms/metaheuristics.