Tobias Friedrich together with Carola Doerr, Carlos M. Fonseca, and Xin Yao organized a Dagstuhl seminar about the Theory of Randomized Optimization Heuristics. The meeting aimed at developing new techniques to tackle the mathematical challenges arising in the analysis of such heuristics and their application to real-world optimization problems.

_{Photo credit: Schloss Dagstuhl}

Martin Krejca successfully defended his dissertation on Theoretical Analyses of Univariate Estimation-of-Distribution Algorithms, supervised by Tobias Friedrich and advised by Timo Kötzing, awarding him a PhD in Computer Science.

_{Photo credit: HPI/C. Yunck}

The HPI hosted the 15th ACM/SIGEVO Workshop on Foundations of Genetic Algorithms (FOGA) from August 26 to 29, co-located with the meeting on Configuration and Selection of Algorithms (COSEAL).

_{Photo credit: HPI/K. Herschelmann}

Tobias Friedrich gave a talk on The Intrinsic Geometry of Large Networks at the HPI New York. A Tele-Task recoding of his talk can be found here. In his lecture he presented the features that many real-world networks have in common and how these features enable new algorithms.

_{Photo credits: HPI/N. Schueller}

The participants of this-semester's Heuristic Optimization seminar wonthe international Bi-objective Traveling Thief Competition at GECCO 2019, scoring almost double the points of the next-closest competitor.

_{Photo credit: P. Pošík}

Christopher Weyand and the HPI Competitive Programming student club co-hosted the 2019 German Collegiate Programming Contest. Two of the HPI's teams reached the Top 10.

Students associated with the Algorithm Engineering group received academic honors at this-years graduation ceremony of the University of Potsdam. Philipp Fischbeck, Stefan Neubert, and Christopher Weyand (Master) as well as Freya Behrens, Hans Gawendowicz, and Julius Lischeid (Bachelor) were commended for graduating with perfect marks on top of the Class of 2019.

_{Photo credit: J. Stamm}

_{Photo credit: U Potsdam/E. Kaczynski}

Tobias Friedrich handed out the certificates at the closing ceremony of this-years HPI-Schülerkolleg. The Kolleg is a yearly program of the HPI to teach school kids, aged 12-18, from Berlin and Brandenburg basics in computer science.

_{Photo credit: HPI/K. Herschelmann}

New year, new... bachelor project picture! Their Bachelor Podium presentation is avaiable at Tele-Task.

_{Photo credit: HPI/K. Herschelmann}

New year, new group picture. In 2019, we continued our tradition of taking a picture with the researchers and students of the chair.

_{Photo credit: HPI/K. Herschelmann}

Episode 4 of the HPI podcast Neuland - Der HPI-Wissenspodcast(in German) features an interview with Tobias Friedrich and Timo Kötzing about algorithms and their influence on our everyday life.

_{Photo credit: HPI/K. Herschelmann}

Oliver Brock (TU Berlin) is a leading researcher at the interface of robotics and biology. The Algorithm Engineering group invited him to give a talk about Artificial Intelligence: Does It Require A Body? at the HPI Colloquium on February 21, 2019. A recording is available on Tele-TASK.

The HPI hosted the 6th Day on Computational Game Theory (DCGT) on February 14/15, 2019. The meeting, organized by Tobias Friedrich and Pascal Lenzner, brought together researchers from computer science, operations research and economics, who are working on game theory and social choice.

_{Photo credit: HPI/K. Herschelmann}

Christopher Weyand and the HPI Competitive Programming student club hosted a contest site for the FAU Wintercontest 2019 enabling six HPI teams to participate. Two of them, Hexaflexagons and mosHPIt, reached the top 10.