Two new research projects have been granted, one each to the Algorithm Engineering group at the HPI and our partner group at the School of Computer Science of the U Adelaide.
The first project on Scale-Free Satisfiability is funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG). It investigates the disparity between the computational hardness of the Boolean satisfiability problem and the efficiency of modern-day solvers on industrial SAT instances. The aim is to identify structural features that facilitate faster solution, finding algorithmic strategies to exploit these features can in turn improve the state of the art SAT solving. The project brings together international expertise by granting Mercator Fellowships to Jordi Levy (Spanish Council for Scientific Research) and Vijay Ganesh (U Waterloo).
The second project by the Australian Research Council (ARC) is on Evolutionary Diversity Optimisation. When tackling real-world problems with techniques from evolutionary computation, high diversity among candidate solutions has been observed to lead to better results, but a systematic exploration of diversity mechanisms is still missing. This project sets out to fill this gap by developing an understanding of the fundamental principles of diversity optimisation. Chief Investigator of this project is Frank Neumann (U Adelaide), Tobias Friedrich of the Algorithm Engineering group serves as a Partner Investigator. Francesco Quinzan, a PhD student with the group, will visit Adelaide to support the research coming next February.
