LION15: The 15th Learning and Intelligent Optimization Conference Athens, Greece, June 20-25, 2021 --------------------------------------------------------------- Conference website https://lion15.sba-research.org/index.html Submission link https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lion15 Extended Submission deadline March 15, 2021

The large variety of heuristic algorithms for hard optimization problems raises numerous interesting and challenging issues. Practitioners using heuristic algorithms for hard optimization problems are confronted with the burden of selecting the most appropriate method, in many cases through expensive algorithm configuration and parameter tuning. Scientists seek theoretical insights and demand a sound experimental methodology for evaluating algorithms and assessing strengths and weaknesses. This effort requires a clear separation between the algorithm and the experimenter, who, in too many cases, is "in the loop" as a motivated intelligent learning component. LION deals with designing and engineering ways of "learning" about the performance of different techniques, and ways of using past experience about the algorithm behavior to improve performance in the future. Intelligent learning schemes for mining the knowledge obtained online or offline can improve the algorithm design! process and simplify the applications of high-performance optimization methods. Combinations of different algorithms can further improve the robustness and performance of the individual components.

This meeting explores the intersections and uncharted territories between machine learning, artificial intelligence, energy, mathematical programming and algorithms for hard optimization problems. The main purpose of the event is to bring together experts from these areas to discuss new ideas and methods, challenges and opportunities in various application areas, general trends and specific developments. We are excited to be bringing the LION conference in Greece for the third time.

Plenary/Invited Speakers ------------------------

Martin Charles Golumbic (University of Haifa, Israel) "B_k-VPG graphs – the string graphs of paths on a grid"

Evangelos Kranakis (Carleton University, Canada) "Communication and Mobility in Optimization for Infrastructure Resilience"

Paul Spirakis (University of Liverpool, UK and University of Patras, Greece) "Temporal Networks and the impact of availability patterns"

COVID-19 INFORMATION ---------------------

The 15th Learning and Intelligent Optimization (LION) conference is planned to take place as a hybrid (on-site and on-line) conference on June 20-25, 2021 at Athens, Greece.

Submission Guidelines ----------------------

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following paper categories are welcome:

Paper Format

Please prepare your paper in English using the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) template, which is available here.

Papers must be submitted in PDF.

Types of Submissions

When submitting a paper to LION15, authors are required to select one of the following three types of papers:

Long paper: original novel and unpublished work (max. 15 pages in LNCS format); Short paper: an extended abstract of novel work (max. 6 pages in LNCS format); Work for oral presentation only (no page restriction; any format). For example, work already published elsewhere, which is relevant and which may solicit fruitful discussion at the conference.

Submission System

All papers must be submitted using EasyChair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lion15.

List of Topics --------------

LION15 welcomes high quality submissions on the broad topics of machine learning, artificial intelligence, energy, mathematical programming, optimization (models, algorithms and applications) and heuristics. Additionally, more specialized, submission topics for long and short papers may include, but are not limited to:

automatic solver configuration parallel methods for search and optimization hard combinatorial optimization problems intelligent optimization in health, e-health, bioinformatics and neurosciences machine learning and optimization methods in tourism and hospitality nature-inspired algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems hard combinatorial optimization problems in combinatorics, computational geometry and machine learning DC (difference of convex functions) learning: theory, algorithms and applications computational intelligence for smart cities computational intelligence for autonomous driving optimization and management in smart manufacturing algorithms and applied optimization for environmental data science machine learning and robust optimization techniques in finance applications machine learning and optimization methods in software engineering

Organizing committee --------------------

Panos Pardalos (General Chair), Center for Applied Optimization, University of Florida, USA Dimitris E. Simos (Technical Program Committee Chair), SBA Research, Austria & Institute for Software Technology, Graz University of Tecnology, Austria & Information Technology Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), USA Ilias Kotsireas (Local Organizing Committee Chair), CARGO Lab, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada

Publication -----------

LION15 proceedings will be published by SpringerNature in the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

Revised selected papers of LION15 will be published in a special issue of Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence.

Contact -------

All questions about submissions should be emailed to the Technical PC Chair, Dimitris E. Simos at dsimos@sba-research.org