Optimisation workshop

Kent McClymont and David Walker led this workshop to identify research areas across the University in which problems could be solved with the application of computational optimisation methods.

Following an introduction to Optimisation, we heard talks by Professor Mitchell Berger on 'Optimising Musical Intruments' and Dr Adam Sparto on 'Optimisation in  Systems Biology'. For the discussion session afterwards, all participants were invited to bring along ideas for problems to be solved using Optimisation methods.

All areas of research, from the creative arts through to theoretical physics, are faced with difficult problems that can be solved using optimisation. Optimisation is a computer science technique for taking a complex and time consuming problem and applying artificial intelligence methods to automatically solve it. Optimisation can be and has been applied to many varied problems such as:

 * design of effective marketing campaigns;

* product design;

* solving complex bioinformatics problems;

* data mining large medical databases;

* creating music and art;

* understanding and comparing text;

* designing experiments and constructing timetables.

 Google “Evolutionary Algorithms” for a taste of the number of publications on one type of optimisation method.

For more information, please contact Kent McClymont or David Walker (k.mcclymont@exeter.ac.uk; d.j.walker@exeter.ac.uk).