SWAGATAM DAS
Title: Engineering Optimization with Non-convex and Heavily Constrained Objectives - Some Recent Approaches and Future Challenges
Abstract: Optimization problems emerging from the diverse disciplins of advanced engineering systems involve nonlinear constraints on the decision variables apart from non-convex (and often non-differentiable) single or multiple conflicting objectives. Presence of such constraints may severely limit the feasible search region for such problems and give rise to additional challenges for the population-based metaheuristic optimizers. Starting with some real-world examples of such problems and a few latest benchmark suites, this talk will outline some latest Constraint Handling Techniques (CHTs). It will then focus on two population-based evolutionary optimizers of latest interest, namely the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) and Spherical Search and discuss their usage in constrained optimization, when integrated with the latest CHTs. The talk will finally unearth a few interesting future avenues of research in the same context.
Swagatam Das received the B. E. Tel. E., M. E. Tel. E (Control Engineering specialization) and Ph. D. degrees, all from Jadavpur University, India, in 2003, 2005, and 2009 respectively. Swagatam Das is currently serving as an Associate Professor and Head of the Electronics and Communication Sciences Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India. His research interests include evolutionary computing and machine learning. Dr. Das has published more than 350 research articles in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences. He is the founding co-editor-in-chief of Swarm and Evolutionary Computation, an international journal from Elsevier with current JCR Impact Factor of 10+. He has also served as or is serving as the associate editors of the IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Pattern Recognition (Elsevier), Neurocomputing (Elsevier), Information Sciences (Elsevier), IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, and so on. He is an editorial board member of Information Fusion (Elsevier), Progress in Artificial Intelligence (Springer), Applied Soft Computing (Elsevier), Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (Elsevier), and Artificial Intelligence Review (Springer). Dr. Das has 26,000+ Google Scholar citations and an H-index of 77 till date. He has been associated with the international program committees and organizing committees of several reputed international conferences including NeurIPS, AAAI, AISTATS, ACM Multimedia, BMVC, IEEE CEC, GECCO, etc. He has acted as guest editors for special issues in journals like IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation and IEEE Transactions on SMC, Part C. He is the recipient of the 2012 Young Engineer Award from the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE). He is the recipient of the 2015 Thomson Reuters Research Excellence India Citation Award as the highest cited researcher from India in Engineering and Computer Science category between 2010 to 2014. In 2021, he received the best Associate Editor Award for the IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics from the IEEE SMC Society.