Title: Fitness landscapes and problem features: selected techniques and research directions

Speaker: Associate Professor Marcus Gallagher
University of Queensland

Abstract:
Fitness landscape analysis refers to a broad area of work concerned with understanding, modelling and utilizing the properties of the solution spaces of optimisation problems. This research includes both discrete and continuous problem instances and ranges from understanding the theoretical properties of landscapes, through to improving benchmarking of optimisation algorithms, as well as practical techniques that produce features for downstream use in automated algorithm selection and configuration methods. In this talk I will give a brief overview of the main ideas in this area before discussing some selected examples of techniques that have been developed specifically for understanding and modelling fitness landscapes, with an emphasis on continuous landscapes. Some of the main challenges in this area will be highlighted, leading to possible directions for future research.

Bio:
Marcus Gallagher received this Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia in 2000. He is currently Associate Professor with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Queensland and an Associate Investigator in OPTiMA. His research interests are in Artificial Intelligence, including evolutionary computation, black-box optimisation, algorithm benchmarking, machine learning and real-world applications. His contributions include the development of continuous Estimation of Distribution Algorithms, techniques problems for benchmarking optimisation algorithms and problem landscape analysis. Dr. Gallagher has co-authored over 120 papers and is an Associate Editor of the Swarm and Evolutionary Computation Journal and Chair of the Queensland Chapter of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.

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This event is Zoom only:
JOIN VIA ZOOM WITH MEETING ID: 873 1557 5255; PASSWORD: 778635

SEMINAR: WED 22 APRIL 2026 16:00-17:00 (AEST, Melbourne)