UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM "Landscape Analysis in Science and Engineering" Dr. Andreas Albrecht (University of Hertfordshire, UK) 17 May 2006 (Wednesday) Lecture Theatre E350 Hatfield, College Lane Campus 3 - 4 pm Coffee/tea and biscuits will be available. Everyone is Welcome to Attend Abstract: Over the past few years, landscape analysis has emerged as an attempt to devise suitable mathematical structures for describing the static properties of (combinatorial) landscapes as well as their influence on diverse assessment criteria associated with landscapes. Actually, the concept of a fitness landscape originated in the 1930s (!) in Theoretical Biology as a kind of potential function underlying the dynamics of evolution. Despite this long history, fitness landscapes were mainly used in a passive way for descriptorial purposes, e.g. for the notion of local and global optima, the definition of neighbourhood relations and mutation/crossover operations for local search and genetic algorithms. Since the late 1990s one can observe intensified efforts to incorporate landscape properties into the design of efficient optimization algorithms. We present a review of recent developments in landscape analysis, with focus on Computational Biology, Combinatorial Optimization, and Communication Technology. Furthermore, we will report on our recent research that utilizes landscape analysis techniques, such as results on protein folding simulation, parameterized complexity (Feature Set problem), gene expression data analysis, and multicast routing. -------------------------------------------------- Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium http://homepages.feis.herts.ac.uk/~nehaniv/colloq