You can contact me:
| by post: |
Tom Hinton Department of Computer Science University of Bristol Room 3.46 Merchant Venturers Building Woodland Road BRISTOL, BS8 1UB United Kingdom |
| by email: | hinton@cs.bris.ac.uk |
| by telephone: | ext. 15231 |
| with jabber/gtalk: | t@larkery.com |
I'm working on a PhD about "Novel Methods for Logistic Optimisation", sponsored by eurobios. Right now I'm looking at creating approximation schemes for some simple vehicle routing problems in euclidian spaces, and doing some experimental work on the best local operations to use in local search techniques for bigger problems with many sharp constraints.
I'm also interested in extensions of the no-free-lunch and conservation of generalisation results, especially the scope for making general statements about the limits of optimiser performance for objective functions drawn from distributions more realistic than the block-uniform distribution.
Previously I've looked at estimation of distribution algorithms, search landscapes and approaches to making simulated annealing work with multiple incommensurable objective functions.
Some Maths 1EM Tutorial Files might be useful. I'm supposed to manage the Machine Learning Group Website, so let me know if there are issues with that. Here's a presentation about No Free Lunch from April 19th MLBC meeting. Here's another presentation about EDAs from December's bridging the gaps affair. Another MLBC presentation about cross-entropy and routing from 11th March. Some code for measuring elapsed CPU time in Matlab and Java might be of use to people trying to time processes on shared computers.