Subject to: Thomas Stützle

Subject to

Thomas Stützle is a research director of the Belgian F.R.S.-FNRS (National Science Foundation) working at the IRIDIA laboratory of Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. He received the Diplom (German equivalent of MSc. degree) in business engineering from the Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany in 1994, and his PhD and habilitation in computer science both from the Computer Science Department of Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, in 1998 and 2004, respectively. He has co-authored three books among which are “Stochastic Local Search: Foundations and Applications” (Morgan Kaufmann) and “Ant Colony Optimization” (MIT Press), both being the main references in their respective areas. His other publications include more than 250 articles in journals, international conferences or edited books many of which are highly cited. In fact, his research contributions received so far more than 60,000 citations in Google Scholar and his h-index is 84. His main research interests are in stochastic local search algorithm, swarm intelligence, multi-objective optimization, and automatic design of algorithms. He is probably best known (i) for his contributions to early advancements in ant colony optimization including algorithms such as Max-Min Ant System, (ii) the establishment of algorithmic frameworks for iterated local search and iterated greedy, and (iii) as a driving force in the advancement of automatic algorithm configuration techniques and their usage in the automatic design of high-performing algorithms. He received seven best paper awards from conferences and his 2002 GECCO paper on “A Racing Algorithm for Configuring Metaheuristics” received the 2012 SIGEVO impact award. He is an Associate Editor of Applied Mathematics and Computation, Computational Intelligence, Evolutionary Computation, International Transactions in Operational Research, and Swarm Intelligence and on the editorial board of seven other journals. He is also frequently involved in international conferences and workshops with program or organizational responsibilities. In 2018, Thomas suffered a stroke that affected, among other things, his ability to remember words, but he has improved a lot and he is now working full time again.