IEEE TEVC Outstanding Paper Award

A team from the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Research Lab has been bestowed the 2019 IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (TEVC) Outstanding Paper Award for their article ‘Multifactorial Evolution: Toward Evolutionary Multitasking’. The award is presented by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, recognizing the most outstanding paper published in the IEEE TEVC journal in the year 2016.

With an impact factor of 8.124, IEEE TEVC is considered the top journal of the field of evolutionary computation, and is among the premier journals of Computer Science (Theory & Methods) and Artificial Intelligence in general. 

The authors are Dr Abhishek Gupta, a Research Scientist at SCSE, Professor Yew-Soon Ong, and his former PhD student Dr Liang Feng. The article unveils the novel paradigm of evolutionary multitask optimization, showing that with a relatively small number of carefully designed enhancements to classical evolutionary algorithms, they can be transformed into effective multitask solvers. In situations where multiple tasks are related to each other, the paradigm enables one to automatically exploit recurring information patterns to substantially speedup the efficiency of the search. In addition to a plethora of applications spanning smart engineering design, machine learning, and operations research, the proposed algorithm promises to be further developed for deployment as a cloud-based on-demand optimization service capable of catering to multiple customers at once.