Frank Hutter previously: Postdoctoral Researcher, UBC hutter@cs.ubc.ca now: Assistant Professor, Freiburg University fh@informatik.uni-freiburg.de

 

I just moved back to Germany to start a new independent junior research group on learning, optimization, and automated algorithm design at the computer science department at Freiburg university through the DFG's Emmy Noether Programme. Here's my new website in Freiburg.

Before that, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Computer Science Department of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, working with Prof. Holger Hoos and Prof. Kevin Leyton-Brown. Below is the state of my website before I left.

Research Interests

• Computer-Aided Algorithm Design
• Algorithm Configuration (searching the combinatorial design space spanned by an algorithm’s parameters)
• Algorithm Selection (selecting the best algorithm on a per-instance basis)
• Statistical Modelling of Algorithm Performance (helping algorithm designers understand the importance and interplay between algorithmic components and instance characteristics)
• Artificial Intelligence
• Combinatorial optimization
• Machine learning
• Bayesian Optimization
• Empirical algorithmics

Core research topic:

My research aims to improve our ability to solve hard computational problems of importance to society and industry, by automating core parts of the scientific design and analysis of algorithms for solving such problems.
I recently gave a Google tech talk on this topic; you can watch it on youtube.

Education

• I completed my PhD at UBC in October 2009
• Primary supervisor Prof. Holger Hoos, co-supervisors: Prof. Kevin Leyton-Brown and Prof. Kevin Murphy. 
• My dissertation "Automated Configuration of Algorithms for Solving Hard Computational Problems"  received the 2010 CAIAC doctoral dissertation award for the best thesis in Artificial Intelligence completed at a Canadian University in 2009.
• I earned a MSc (German "Diplom") at Darmstadt University of Technology
• Primary supervisor: Prof. Thomas Stützle, co-supervisor: Prof. Holger Hoos

Affiliations

I am a member of Computer Science Department of the University of British Columbia, specifically of the Laboratory for Computational Intelligence (LCI) and the Bioinformatics and Empirical & Theoretical Algorithmics Laboratory (BETA). I organize the Empirical Algorithmics Reading Group (EARG).

This year, I'm on the senior programme committee of IJCAI, and on the programme committees of AAAI CompSust, LION, GECCO, CocoMile, and AI. Here are the several workshops I co-organized over the past years:

• NIPS 2012 workshop on Bayesian optimization and decision making. 
• NIPS 2011 workshop on Bayesian optimization, experimental design, and bandits. 
• Doctoral Symposium on Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms (SLS-DS-09)
• AAAI-06 workshop on Learning for Search.

For more information, please see my publication page and my academic CV (the CV is updated irregularly).