Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments

ALENEX

Invited Speakers

The invited research lecture will be given by Professor Robert E. Bixby, who is Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University and affiliated with Rice's Center for Research on Parallel Computation. Professor Bixby is also the co-founder of CPLEX Optimization, which produces very high-quality optimization software (linear and mixed-integer programming) for industrial customers. With colleagues D. Applegate and W. Cook and collaborator V. Chvatal, Professor Bixby recently broke the record for the largest instance of TSP solved exactly, with an instance of 13,509 US cities.

Professor Bixby will speak on CPLEX: What's In, What's Out. CPLEX is a commercial software package for solving linear and mixed-integer programming problems. It is "high-performance" software whose position in the marketplace depends upon its ability to solve customer optimization problems. The talk will discuss how the performance of new features, new implementations, and the overall code are measured. In short: how to decide what's in and what's out.

The tutorial will be given by Professor Catherine C. McGeoch, from Amherst College. Professor McGeoch has pioneered the area of experimental analysis of algorithms for 15 years, working with Jon Bentley, David Johnson, and others. She ran the first DIMACS Algorithms Challenge, co-organized the first ALENEX workshop (ALENEX99), and has contributed many articles on methodological issues in algorithm research, particularly with respect to data analysis. Professor McGeoch will speak on the issue of Data Analysis for Algorithm Experiments.