Professor  Enrique Alba

Dr. Enrique Alba works a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Málaga, Spain. He got his Ph.D. degree on parallel neuroevolution in 1999. His current research interests involve the design and application of metaheuristics and bio-inspired systems to real problems in telecommunications, combinatorial optimization, software engineering, and smart cities. He is the fifth most influent researcher in Computer Science of Spain (JCR), the first of his university in Engineering, and a prolific author according to DBLP, with an H-index of 59 and more than 17.000 cites to his works.

A main part of his research deals with parallelism, having long experience in cluster computing, grid/cloud algorithms, P2P techniques, multi/many-core systems, GPU developments, Myrinet/Gigabit Ethernet analysis and Wi-Fi ad-hoc networks in MANET and VANET (vehicular ad hoc networks).

His ongoing research deals with discrete and continuous optimization, used for solving problems in smart mobility, smart cities, logistics, vehicle routing, DNA fragment assembly, gene microarrays, software testing and validation, automatic software quality assessment, and in general hard problems lying in the base of real world problems.

New fields like multiobjective techniques, rich Internet platforms, dynamic optimization (problem definition changes in time), self-adaptive efficient techniques, and heterogeneous algorithms are dealt with, both in theory and applications.

As to the techniques, Prof. Alba and his group are experts in metaheuristics, either bio-inspired or not, and hybridization with other (possibly exact) methods. In concrete, evolutionary algorithms, particle swarm, ant colonies, simulated annealing, variable neighborhood search, branch and bound, and related solvers are investigated.

Prof. Alba has published 12 monographs on metaheuristics and bio-inspired techniques, 125 papers in ISI indexed journals, and more than 300 conference papers. He has coordinated several national and international research projects in the past. Some of these projects are TRACER, OPLINK, M*, roadME, moveON, the Spanish network on smart cities CI-RTI, INRIA PERFOM and MOID, European projects like CARLINK, COADVISE, ImAppNIO, FIQARE, TAILOR, and Excellence Projects in Andalucía like DIRICOM and MAXCT. Prof. Alba holds active collaborations with more than 20 international universities and labs, and his research in Málaga is also woth of industrial transferences to many companies: OPTIMI, ZED, Indra, ACERINOX, VTT, ETRA, VATIA, SECMOTIC; EMERGYA, ArcelorMittal, etc. holding 4 patents and also two software packages in exploitation by Ericsson.

Prof. Alba has supervised dozens final degree theses, 20 master theses, 19 PhD theses presented and 8 running new theses (most of them with the international mention). This evidences a large vocation to human training in research and knowledge dissemination, with more than 50 international seminars and plenary talks given (ACM Distinguished Speaker).

Finally, Prof. Alba is deeply involved with ACM through the SIGEVO chapter, organizing (as general chair and now as an officer) conferences like GECCO and FOGA. He works in the program committee of conferences like ACM GECCO, IEEE CEC, PPSN, EvoCOP, IPDPS and many more, as well has he organizes international events like SmartCT, NIDISC,  IEEE/ACM MSWiM. He also works as reviewer for IEEE Transactions (on EC, PDS, Education, SMC), JPDC, PARCO, Journal of Heuristics, JMMA, EJOR, Computer Communications, and many others.

• Intelligent Systems for Smart Cities
  The concept of Smart Cities can be understood as a holistic approach to improve the level of development and management of the city in a broad range of services by using information and...
• World Strategies for Artificial Intelligence
  In this lecture we will make an introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI), its impact in our lives, and the need for a regulation in modern societies. We will then move to anlyze the different...
• How Can Metaheuristics Help Software Engineers
  This presentation focuses on the potential benefits that metaheuristics (Genetic Algorithms, Ant Colonies, Particle Swarm, etc.) can bring to the field of Software Engineering (SE). For this to...
• Smart Mobility by Using Evolutionary Algorithms
  Nowadays, cities are growing fast. Citizens are moving from the countryside to big cities looking for better jobs and services. As a consequence of this population growth, road traffic in...
• Communications in Vehicular Networks: Opportunities for Optimization and Learning
  Vehicular Networks (VANET) are an exciting new research field that poses a big challenge to existing technologies. Defining how connections should be established, used, and profited from means...
• On the Importance of Metaheuristics in Science and Industry
  This lecture addresses the comparative strong issues in using metaheuristics for solving complex problems. A summary of competences for searching in difficult landscapes will be presented in the...
• Parallel Multiobjective Optimization
  This lecture introduces the basic concepts of two fields of research: Parallelism and Multiobjective optimization. Dealing with complex problems means optimizing a given metric, like the...
• Parallel Experiences in Solving Complex Problems
  This lecture introduces the basic concepts of two fields of research: parallelism and metaheuristics. We will revise the main concepts, tools, metrics, open issues, and application domains related...