Monday November 13, 2017 at 3:00 p.m. Dr. Shahryar Rahnamayan will be presenting “Fingerprints of Black-Box Optimization in Science and Engineering”.
Day & Time: Monday November 13, 2017
3:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Speaker: Dr. Shahryar Rahnamayan
Location: Room ENG 210
George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre
245 Church Street, Toronto, ON M5B 1Z4
Contact: Mehrdad Tirandazian
Organizers: IEEE Toronto Systems Chapter
Abstract: In this research seminar, the speaker will discuss his recent optimization research works and accomplishments, categorized in the following two main groups of contributions: theoretical/developmental and practical. The first group will cover his contributions in large-scale optimization, opposition-based computation, many-objective optimization, image-based large-scale visualization and interaction, incremental cooperative coevolution, micro-differential evolution, 3D visualization of many-objective Pareto-front, innovation, preserving constraint handling, decision making in high-dimensional objective space, and multi-modal optimization. In the practical category, the speaker will explain several real-world applications to demonstrate contributions of optimization in medical image processing, renewable energy systems, forensic science, vibration, scheduling, and wireless sensors network. In this talk, the essential role of complex black-box optimization in since and engineering will be highlighted. This seminar would be beneficial for faculty members and students who conduct “research in optimization” or “optimization in research”.
Biography: Dr. Shahryar Rahnamayan received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees both with honors in software engineering. In 2007, he received his Ph.D. degree in the field of evolutionary computation from the University of Waterloo (UW), Canada. Since 2008, he is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Software Engineering, University of Ontario Institute of Technology. He is a faculty member of the BEACON Center (an NSF center for study of evolution in action) since 2014; and also adjunct professor at the Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, since 2009. Dr. Rahnamayan was a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Engineering, Simon Fraser University, in 2008. His research is mainly focused on evolutionary computation and its real-world applications. Dr. Rahnamayan has 139 peer-reviewed publications mostly in evolutionary optimization areas, which received 3700 citations (h-index: 24); one of his high-impact journal papers in optimization ranked 23rd out of 194,000 in term of number of citations, 2008-2017. Dr. Rahnamayan co-founded Segasist Technologies Inc., which develops segmentation solutions for medical image analysis and radiation planning; the company raised over $2M and secured the FDA approval. Dr. Rahnamayan has been awarded several prestigious research grants, including, NSERC Discovery Grant and Applied Research and Commercialization Initiative Fund. He recently conducted research as a visiting associate professor at Michigan State University (MI, USA) for two years (2014-2016). Dr. Rahnamayan is an active reviewer for more than thirty international conference and journal papers. He has been awarded the UOIT Research Excellence Award in 2017.