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Plenary Sessions

Rafael Martí


RafaRafael Martí is Professor of Statistics and Operations Research at the University of Valencia, Spain. He received a doctoral degree in Mathematics from the University of Valencia in 1994. He has done extensive research in metaheuristics for hard optimization problems.

Dr Martí has about 200 publications, half of them in indexed journals (JCR), including EJOR, Informs JoC, IIE Transactions, JOGO, C&OR, and Discrete and Applied Maths. He is the co-author of Scatter Search (Kluwer 2003) and The Linear Ordering Problem (Springer 2011) monographs, and has secured an American patent.

Prof. Martí is currently Area Editor in the Journal of Heuristics, Associate Editor in the Math. Prog. Computation, and the Int. Journal of Metaheuristics. He is Senior Research Associate of OptTek Systems (USA), and has given about 50 invited and plenary talks. Dr. Martí has been invited Professor at the University of Colorado (USA), University of Molde (Norway), University of Graz (Austria), and University of Bretagne-Sud (France).

 Manuel Laguna

Manuel Laguna is the MediaOne Professor of Management Science and Director of Global Initiatives at the Leeds School of Business of the University of Colorado Boulder. He started his academic career at the University of Colorado in 1990, after receiving master’s (1987) and doctoral (1990) degrees in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

He has done extensive research in the interface between computer science, artificial intelligence and operations research, resulting in over one hundred publications, including four books. He has received research funding from private industry and government agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and the Environmental Protection Agency. He is co-founder of OptTek Systems, a Boulder-based software and consulting company that provides optimization solutions. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Heuristics and has been Division Chair, Senior Associate Dean and Interim Dean at the Leeds School of Business.

Paola Festa

PaolaPaola Festa obtained her Ph.D. degree in Operations Research in 2000 and is currently Associate Professor in Operations Research at the University of Napoli FEDERICO II, Italy.
Since 1999, she has been frequently and regularly Research Scholar at several national and international research institutions, including CNRs, MIT Lab. for Information and Decision Systems (USA), AT&T Labs Research (USA), and Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering of the University of Florida (USA).

Paola Festa is Associate Editor of several international journals, including Journal of Global Optimization, Optimization Letters, ACM Journal on Experimental Algorithmics, and Journal of Biomedical Data Mining. She has been chair or member of the scientific committee of more than 50 international conferences and workshops and the organizer of more than 10 international scientific events. She is member of the Steering Committee of the International Workshops on Hybrid Metaheuristics.
She is author/co-author of more than 100 publications appeared in international journals, books, and peer-reviewed conference proceedings.

José Andrés Moreno Pérez

pepJosé Andrés Moreno Pérez is full professor of the University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain, in the field of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. He got the Ph.D. degree in Mathematics at the University Complutense of Madrid in the areas of Statistics and Operational Research. He is the Director of the Master’s degree in Computer Engineering of the University of La Laguna and the Coordinator of the Research Group on Intelligent Computing of this University.

Professor Moreno has published about 100 scientific papers or chapter of books most of them in the area of metaheuristic optimization. He is editor of the journals “Memetic Computing” and the “Int. J. of Information and Decision Sciences” and has been referee of the most relevant journal in the field of Optimization. He is co-author of the several relevant papers on Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) and with applications in Logistics Optimization. He is co-author of dozens of papers in location and routing problems in the high quality journals in the last 40 years. In the other side, He is co-author of the first paper on Parallel VNS in 2002, the first review paper on VNS in Spanish in 2003, the recent reviews in VNS in 4OR in 2008 and in Annals of OR in 2010, the Chapter on VNS in the Handbook of Metaheuristics in 2010. He has given several invited talks on VNS. He has been the organizer of the first mini EURO Conference on VNS in 2005 and co-chair of the second mini EURO Conference on VNS in 2012.