Ben Paechter
Ben Paechter

Prof Ben Paechter FBCS CITP

Professor

Biography

Prof. Ben Paechter is Director of Research in the School of Computing. He was Coordinator of the EvoNet, PerAda, and AWARE Coordination Actions within Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) and Deputy Coordinator of the FOCAS Coordination Action. He was a Principal Investigator of the “Speckled Computing” consortium of Scottish universities developing “spray on” computers for wireless sensor networks. He coordinated the FET DREAM project looking at peer-to-peer distribution evolution. He was the scientific officer in charge of the Metaheuristics Network examining the use of metaheuristics for combinatorial optimisation and the FET NEWTIES project which created an artificial society and examined the relationships between individual, social, and evolutionary learning. Prof Paechter is an Associate Editor of “Evolutionary Computation” (MIT Press). He was Joint General Chair of Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN) 2016.

News

Esteem

Editorial Activity

  • Associate Editor of Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press)

 

Media Activity

  • Timetabling software developed within the Centre for Emergent Computing highlighted in new TEDx talk on Evolutionary Computing and Design
  • PerAda team run successful public engagement event at the Science Museum, London
  • FoCAS Book: Adaptive Collective Systems - Herding Black Sheep
  • IIDI's AWARE project host successful talk at Edinburgh International Science Festival

 

Date


92 results

On the comparison of initialisation strategies in differential evolution for large scale optimisation

Journal Article
Segredo, E., Paechter, B., Segura, C., & González-Vila, C. I. (2018)
On the comparison of initialisation strategies in differential evolution for large scale optimisation. Optimization Letters, 12(1), 221-234. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11590-017-1107-z
Differential Evolution (DE) has shown to be a promising global opimisation solver for continuous problems, even for those with a large dimensionality. Different previous works...

An investigation of environmental influence on the benefits of adaptation mechanisms in evolutionary swarm robotics

Conference Proceeding
Steyven, A., Hart, E., & Paechter, B. (2017)
An investigation of environmental influence on the benefits of adaptation mechanisms in evolutionary swarm robotics. In GECCO '17 Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. , (155-162). https://doi.org/10.1145/3071178.3071232
A robotic swarm that is required to operate for long periods in a potentially unknown environment can use both evolution and individual learning methods in order to adapt. How...

Hybridisation of Evolutionary Algorithms through hyper-heuristics for global continuous optimisation

Conference Proceeding
Segredo, E., Lalla-Ruiz, E., Hart, E., Paechter, B., & Voß, S. (2016)
Hybridisation of Evolutionary Algorithms through hyper-heuristics for global continuous optimisation. In P. Festa, M. Sellmann, & J. Vanschoren (Eds.), Learning and Intelligent Optimization: 10th International Conference, LION 10, Ischia, Italy, May 29 -- June 1, 2016 (296-305). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50349-3_25
Choosing the correct algorithm to solve a problem still remains an issue 40 years after the Algorithm Selection Problem was first posed. Here we propose a hyper-heuristic whic...

Hybrid parameter control approach applied to a diversity-based multi-objective Memetic Algorithm for frequency assignment problems

Conference Proceeding
Segredo, E., Paechter, B., Hart, E., & Gonz´alez-Vila, C. I. (2016)
Hybrid parameter control approach applied to a diversity-based multi-objective Memetic Algorithm for frequency assignment problems. In 2016 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC)https://doi.org/10.1109/CEC.2016.7743969
In order to address the difficult issue of parameter setting within a diversity-based Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA), we recently proposed a hybrid control sche...

Trickle-Plus: Elastic Trickle algorithm for Low-power networks and Internet of Things

Conference Proceeding
Ghaleb, B., Al-Dubai, A., Ekonomou, E., Paechter, B., & Qasem, M. (2016)
Trickle-Plus: Elastic Trickle algorithm for Low-power networks and Internet of Things. In Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), 2016 IEEE (1-6). https://doi.org/10.1109/WCNC.2016.7564654
Constrained Low-power and Lossy networks (LLNs) represent the building block for the ever-growing Internet of Things (IoT) that deploy the Routing Protocol for Low Power and L...

Understanding Environmental Influence in an Open-Ended Evolutionary Algorithm

Conference Proceeding
Steyven, A., Hart, E., & Paechter, B. (2016)
Understanding Environmental Influence in an Open-Ended Evolutionary Algorithm. In Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XIV; Lecture Notes in Computer Science. , (921-931). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45823-6_86
It is well known that in open-ended evolution, the nature of the environment plays in key role in directing evolution. However, in Evolutionary Robotics, it is often unclear e...

Analysing the performance of migrating birds optimisation approaches for large scale continuous problems

Conference Proceeding
Lalla-Ruiz, E., Segredo, E., Voss, S., Hart, E., & Paechter, B. (2016)
Analysing the performance of migrating birds optimisation approaches for large scale continuous problems. In Parallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XIV. , (134-144). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45823-6_13
We present novel algorithmic schemes for dealing with large scale continuous problems. They are based on the recently proposed population-based meta-heuristics Migrating Birds...

Improving survivability in environment-driven distributed evolutionary algorithms through explicit relative fitness and fitness proportionate communication.

Conference Proceeding
Hart, E., Steyven, A., & Paechter, B. (2015)
Improving survivability in environment-driven distributed evolutionary algorithms through explicit relative fitness and fitness proportionate communication. In Proceedings of the 2015 on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference - GECCO '15, (169-176). https://doi.org/10.1145/2739480.2754688
Ensuring the integrity of a robot swarm in terms of maintaining a stable population of functioning robots over long periods of time is a mandatory prerequisite for building mo...

The Cost of Communication: Environmental Pressure and Survivability in mEDEA

Conference Proceeding
Steyven, A., Hart, E., & Paechter, B. (2015)
The Cost of Communication: Environmental Pressure and Survivability in mEDEA. In Proceedings of the Companion Publication of the 2015 on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference - GECCO Companion '15, 1239-1240. doi:10.1145/2739482.2768489
We augment the mEDEA algorithm to explicitly account for the costs of communication between robots. Experimental results show that adding a costs for communication exerts envi...

A Lifelong Learning Hyper-heuristic Method for Bin Packing.

Journal Article
Hart, E., Sim, K., & Paechter, B. (2015)
A Lifelong Learning Hyper-heuristic Method for Bin Packing. Evolutionary Computation, 23(1), 37-67. https://doi.org/10.1162/EVCO_a_00121
We describe a novel Hyper-heuristic system which continuously learns over time to solve a combinatorial optimisation problem. The system continuously generates new heuristics ...

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