Open Optimization Competition -- call for entries

[Carola Doerr]

Dear Benchmarking Network members,

The Nevergrad and IOHprofiler teams are happy to announce that we have paired up for the
Open Optimization Competition 2020.

Two types of entries are invited:

1. performance track: design and submit new algorithmic approaches to any one of the competition tracks (including one-shot optimization, low budget optimization, multi-objective optimization, discrete optimization, structured optimization, constrained optimization)
2. benchmarking practices track: contribute to our benchmarking routines by suggesting new features for nevergrad or IOHprofiler (e.g, additional performance measures and statistics, new benchmark problems, modular algorithm frameworks, visualization of data, parallelization of the experiments, reproducibility, ....)
   

Submissions are entirely based on pull requests to our GitHub repositories:

• nevergrad: https://github.com/facebookresearch/nevergrad
• IOHprofiler: https://github.com/IOHprofiler/ [please use the competition branch for submissions]
  

More information available at
https://github.com/facebookresearch/nevergrad/blob/master/docs/opencompetition2020.md
Please do not hesitate to reach out to the organizers in case of questions!

Prizes: Up to 12 000 euros of awards, to be used for traveling to PPSN or GECCO 2020 or 2021, distributed over several winners. In addition, a limited number of registration fee waivers are available for PPSN 2020.

Award Jury:

• Enrique Alba (University of Málaga, Spain)
• Maxim Buzdalov (ITMO University, Russia)
• Josu Cerebio (University of the Basque country, Spain)
• Benjamin Doerr (Ecole Polytechnique, France)
• Tobias Glasmachers (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany)
• Manuel Lopez-Ibanez (University of Manchester, UK)
• Katherine Mary Malan (University of South Africa)
• Luís Paquete (University of Coimbra, Portugal)
• Jan van Rijn (Leiden University, The Netherlands)
• Marc Schoenauer (Inria Saclay, France)
• Thomas Weise (Hefei University, China)

We look forward to receiving your contributions!
The organizers of the Open Optimization Competition
- Thomas Bäck (Leiden University, The Netherlands)
- Carola Doerr (CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France)
- Antoine Moreau (Université Clermont Auvergne)
- Jeremy Rapin (Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research, Paris, France)
- Baptiste Roziere (Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research, Paris, France)
- Ofer M. Shir (Tel-Hai College and Migal Institute, Israel)
- Olivier Teytaud (Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research, Paris, France)