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   School of Computer Science Intelligent Decision Support: Optimisation and Learning
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I am a Professor of Computer Science and Operational Research with the Computational Optimisation and Learning (COL) Lab (formerly known as ASAP research group), investigating the interaction between data science (DS) and optimization (O), and carrying out multi-disciplinary research with impact in mind into intelligent systems that can automatically aid the design and implementation of more efficient, effective, reusable, easier-to-implement/deploy/use general computational search methods that are applicable to a range of real-world problems.
My research interests and activities lie at the interface of
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Operational Research:
Grants by Source
If your research interests are aligned with mine and you are an overseas PhD student or a postdoctoral researcher or a lecturer, considering a (research) visit to us at Nottingham (e.g., for a collaborative project or sabbatical leave from your institution), please drop me an email to discuss your particular situation.
- Intelligent decision support systems, data science, search and optimization (combinatorial optimisation, constraint optimisation, multi-modal optimisation and multi-objective optimisation) using heuristics, local search, hyper-heuristics, meta-heuristics (in particular memetic algorithms, particle swarm optimisation), hybrid approaches and their theoretical foundations.
- Modelling of and applications to the real world and theoretical problems (course timetabling, exam timetabling, presentation (jury) timetabling, room arrangement, employee scheduling, stock cutting, strip packing, SAT, 0-1 multiple knapsack problem, TSP) that are at the intersection of computer science and operational research, including grouping (data clustering, graph colouring and bin packing) problems.
Funding
I have been involved in a variety of multi-disciplinary projects as a PI and co-I supported by various funding bodies and industrial partners worth more than £14.3M as listed below.Grants by Source
-
Project Title:
AI Synthesis of Structures for Additive Manufacturing
Project Team: Ian Maskery, Ender Özcan
Start-End Date: 2023-2025
Supported by EPSRC grant EP/X016854/1 [£202,419] -
Project Title:
EPSRC CDT in Sustainable Chemistry: Atoms-2-Products an Integrated Approach to Sustainable Chemistry
Project Team: Peter Licence, Hon Lam, Francesca Paradisi, Edward Lester, Ricky Wildman, Tim Foster, Simon Woodward, Ender Ozcan, Simon Mosey
Start-End Date: 01/10/2019- 31/03/2028
Project Partners: Added Scientific Ltd, Arcinova, AstraZeneca UK Limited, BEACON Bioeconomy Research Centre, Britest Limited Bruker, CatScI Ltd, Coal Authority, Coventive Composites, Croda (Group), Enlumo Ltd, European Thermodynamics Ltd, eventMAP Ltd, Friedrich-Alexander Uni of Erlangen FAU, GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK), IUPAC, James I University (Jaume I), Key Organics Ltd, Lubrizol Ltd, McGill University, Pontifical Cath Uni of Rio Grande do Sul, Promethean Particles Ltd, Sygnature Discovery Limited, Synthomer Ltd Thomas Swan, UNIDO, Unilever (UK), Yale University Added Scientific Ltd, GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK), Key Organics Ltd, Perceptive Engineering Ltd, Strem Chemicals UK Ltd and more
Supported by EPSRC grant EP/S022236/1 [£6.2M] -
Project Title:
Hyper-heuristics for Routing
Project Team: Ender Özcan, Ahmed Kheiri (Lancaster University), Optrak
Start-End Date: 2019-2021
Supported by KTP Scheme under Project No. KTP11692 [£207,627] (£139,110 from Innovate UK + £68,517 from Optrak) -
Project Title:
Accelerated Discovery and Development of New Medicines.
Prosperity Partnership for a Healthier Nation:
GlaxoSmithKline, University of Strathclyde with University of Nottingham
UoN Project Team: Peter Licence, Christopher Moody, Clive Roberts, Ender Ozcan, Hon Lam, Jonathan Hirst, Liam Ball, Michael George, Michael Stocks, Ricky Wildman, Ross Denton, Simon Woodward, Victor Sans Sangorrin
Start-End Date: 01/01/2019-30/09/2024
Project Partners: Added Scientific Ltd, GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK), Key Organics Ltd, Perceptive Engineering Ltd, Strem Chemicals UK Ltd and more
Supported by EPSRC grant EP/S035990/1 [£5.5M] -
Project Title: OPTIMACS -
European industrial doctorate for efficient multidisciplinary design Optimization of
Multifunctional Aerospace Composite Structures
Project Team: Dimitrios Chronopoulos, Ender Ozcan, Arthur Jones, Tom Turner, Louise Brown
Start-End Date: 01/05/2018- 30/04/2022
Supported by European Commission (Brussels) (grant no. 764650) [EUR 1.3M] -
Project Title: N2N -
European industrial doctorate for advanced, lightweight and silent, multifunctional composite structures
Project Team: Dimitrios Chronopoulos, Ender Ozcan, Savvas Triantafyllou, Gregor Tanner, Donald Brown, Andrew Parkes
Start-End Date: 01/03/2018- 28/02/2022
Supported by European Commission (Brussels) (grant no. 765472) [EUR 809K] -
Project Title:
Multiobjective Timetabling with Fairness
Project Team: Ender Özcan, EventMap
Start-End Date: 2017-2019
Supported by KTP Scheme under Project No. KTP10618 [£149,103] (£100,103 from TSB and Invest NI + £49,000 from EventMap) -
Project Name:
Automated Intelligent Decision Support Using Hyper-Heuristics
Project Team: Ender Özcan (UK), Nelishia Pillay (SA)
Start-End Date: 2015-2017
Supported by The Royal Society - Newton International Exchanges Scheme [£11,719] -
Project Name:
3D Printing Production Planning (3DPPP): reactive manufacturing execution driving re-distributed manufacturing
Project Team: Martin Baumers, Ender Ozcan, Jason Atkin
Start-End Date: 01/04/2016- 31/12/2016
Supported by the Bit-by-Bit Network (EPSRC/ESRC) [£42K] -
Channel 4 Project:
ASAP team is working with Channel 4 (a national TV company) in order to investigate the application of optimisation techniques to the scheduling of commercials during advertising breaks. The objective is to provide schedules that increase advertising effectiveness and lead to greater advertiser satisfaction. Member of the ASAP team. -
Title: Collaborative Research Projects
Project Team: Ender Özcan (PI) for 4 internal grants
Dates: 2012-2014
Supported by The LANCS Initiative Postdoctoral Training Scheme and The LANCS Initiative International Outreach Fund [£14,704] -
Project Name: Co-evolutionary hyper-heuristics
Project Team: Graham Kendall (Principal Investigator), Ender Özcan (Co-investigator), Jerry Swan
Start Date: 2010
End Date: 2011
Supported by Subproject of EPSRC's "Next Generation Decision Support: Automating the Heuristic Design Process" (EP/D061571/1) [110,000GBP] -
Project Name: Working Towards the Generality of
Hyper-heuristics for Optimization Problems
Project Team: Hugo Terashima-Marin, Manuel Valenzuela-Rendon, Santiago E. Conant-Pablos, Eunice Lopez-Camacho, Jose Carlos Ortiz-Bayliss (Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Monterrey Campus), Peter Ross (Napier University), Edmund K. Burke, Gabriela Ochoa, Ender Özcan (University of Nottingham, ASAP)
Start Date: 2009
End Date: 2012
Supported by CONACyT [598,938 $] -
Project Name: Self-adaptive Multimeme Approaches for Solving Hard Problems
Project Team: Ender Özcan (Principal Investigator), Emin Erkan Korkmaz (Researcher)
Start Date: October 2008
End Date: October 2010
Supported by TUBITAK [143,254 TL]
Withdrawn -
Project Name : A Study of Transcriptional Profiling of Gene Experession in Metastatic Tumors Using Integrated Bioinformatics Approach and Drug Target Identification
Project Team: Isil Kurnaz (Principal Investigator), Ender Özcan (Researcher), Cem Ünsalan (Researcher), Nihat Baysal (Researcher), Levent Kurnaz (Researcher), Türkan Haliloglu (Researcher), Fikrettin Sahin (Researcher)
Start Date: September 2005
End Date: September 2009
Supported by DPT [232,000 TL]
Involvement: 2005-2007 -
Project Name: Operators for Solving Timetabling Problems
Project Team: Ender Özcan (Principal Investigator), Emin Erkan Korkmaz (Researcher), Burak Bilgin (Researcher), Özgür Ülker (Researcher)
Start Date: October 2005
End Date: October 2006
Supported by TUBITAK [42,160 TL]
- Visiting Scholars 1,917GBP (2013), 4,055GBP (2011), 2,720GBP (2010)
- Equipment Fund 1,854GBP (2011)
Research Supervision
Research Fellows/Associates/VisitorsIf your research interests are aligned with mine and you are an overseas PhD student or a postdoctoral researcher or a lecturer, considering a (research) visit to us at Nottingham (e.g., for a collaborative project or sabbatical leave from your institution), please drop me an email to discuss your particular situation.
- Prof Ali Fuat Alkaya, Marmara University, funded by TUBITAK (2022-2023)
- Dr Emrullah Sonuc, Karabuk University, funded by TUBITAK (2021-2022)
- Cumali Turkmenoglu, funded by TUBITAK (2019-2020)
- Dr Muhammet Deveci, funded by TUBITAK (2018-2019)
- Dr Bahadir Zeren, funded by TUBITAK (2018-2019)
- Dr Derya Deliktas, funded by TUBITAK, Turkey (6 months, 2018-2019)
- Simon Kingston, KTP Associate (EventMAP: 2017-2019)
- Dr Valdivino Alexandre de Santiago Junior, postdoctoral researcher, funded by FAPESP, Brasil (2018-2019)
- Vinicius Renan de Carvalho, PhD student, funded by CAPES, Brasil (2018-2019)
- Selman Karagöz, PhD student, Yildiz Technical University, Turkey (2017-2019)
- Seda Özdemir, postoctoral researcher, Turkey (3 months, 2018)
- Marcelo Garcia Escalante, PhD student, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico (4 months) (2017)
- Dr Daniel Karapetyan
- Dr Jose Carlos Ortiz Bayliss
- Dr Jerry Swan
- Dr Yuri Bykov
- Muhammet Deveci, visiting PhD student, Yildiz Technical University, Turkey (2014-2015)
- Dulce Jacqueline Magana Lozano, visiting PhD student, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico (2013-2014)
- Cevriye Altintas, visiting PhD student, Suleyman Demirel University, Turkey (2013-2014)
- Aysun Guran, PhD funded by TUBITAK, Dogus University, Turkey (2013)
- Jonas Baeklund, PhD fellow funded by Aarhus University, Denmark (2012)
- Gokhan Secme, PhD, University of Nevsehir, Turkey (2011-2012)
- Dr Hasan Mujtaba, visiting postdoc, Pakistan (2012)
- Jose Carlos Ortiz Bayliss, visiting PhD student, funded by CONACyT, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico (2010)
- Dr Serdar Biroglu, visiting fellow, Mugla University, Turkey (2010)
My entry at the online database of the
Mathematics Genealogy Project.
The oldest supervisor of the supervisors that can be traced back starting from my PhD supervisor turned out to be
Sharaf al-Din al-Tusi (1135-1213) who was an Iranian mathematician and astronomer.
- Weijie Tan, OPTIMACS, University of Nottingham (co-supervision with Andrew J Parkes, Louise Brown, Roland Landertshamer, Florian Glock, Fernass Daoud)
- Ismail Gokay Dogan, University of Nottingham (co-supervision with Geert De Maere)
- Jingjin Li, UNNC(co-supervision with Heng Yu and Ruibin Bai)
- Eduardo Aguilar Bejarano, FoS AI DTC, University of Nottingham (co-supervision with Simon Woodward, Grazziela Figueredo)
- Rebecca Tickle, University of Nottingham (co-supervision with Gail Hopkins and Grazziela Figueredo)
- Wenbo Zhang, University of Nottingham (co-supervision with Colin Johnson)
- Oska Pugh, Chemistry CDT, University of Nottingham (co-supervision with Ross Denton and Grazziela Figueredo)
- Vivek Thaminni Ramamoorthy, Heuristics and metaheuristics in the design of sound-absorbing porous materials, NO2NOISE EU ITN project, University of Nottingham (2023) (co-supervision with Andrew J Parkes, Luc Jaouen, Francois-Xavier Becot)
- Georgios Ntourmas, Detailed Sizing Optimisation of Industrial-Scale Composite Aeronautical Structures, OPTIMACS EU ITN project, University of Nottingham (2022) (co-supervision with Dimitrios Dimitrios Chronopoulos, Florian Glock, Fernass Daoud)
- James Hey, Investigating the use of Machine Learning for Resource Intensive Agent-Based Simulation and Optimisation of Domestic Energy Retrofit Adoption, University of Nottingham (2022) (co-supervision with Peer-Olaf Siebers, Paul Nathanail, Darren Robinson)
- Heda Song, Novel Meta-Learning Approaches for Few-shot Image Classification, University of Nottingham (2022) (co-supervision with Isaac Triguero)
- Warren Jackson, Move Acceptance in Local Search Metaheuristics for Cross-domain Heuristic Search, University of Nottingham (2021)
- Düriye Betül Gümüş, Parameter Tuning for Cross-domain Search, University of Nottingham (co-supervision with Jason Atkin) (2020)
- Luiz Jonata Pires de Araujo, Enhancing Decision Support for Solutions of Packing Problem in Additive Manufacturing: Features, Datasets and Experimental Studies, University of Nottingham (2019)
- Wenwen Li, Multiobjective selection hyper-heuristics using reinforcement learning, University of Nottingham (2018).
- Seda Türk, An Integrated model of Supplier Selection and Inventory Planning using Fuzzy Logic and Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithms, University of Nottingham (co-supervision with Bob John) (2017)
- Ahmad Muklason, Hyper-heuristics and Fairness in Examination Timetabling Problems, University of Nottingham (2017) (co-supervision with Andrew J. Parkes)
- Shahriar Asta, Machine Learning for Improving Heuristic Optimisation, University of Nottingham (2015)
- Anas Elhag, Selection Hyper-heuristics for Grouping Problems, University of Nottingham (2015)
- Ahmed Kheiri, Multi-stage Hyper-heuristics for Optimisation Problems, University of Nottingham (2014)
- Berna Kiraz, Hyper-heuristics in Dynamic Environments, Istanbul Technical University (co-supervision with Sima Uyar) (2014)
- John Drake, Crossover Control in Selection Hyper-Heuristics: Case Studies Using MKP and Hyflex, School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham (2014)
- Mashael Maashi, An Investigation of Multi-objective Hyper-heuristics for Multi-objective Optimisation, School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham (2014)
- Monica Banerjea-Brodeur, Hyper-heuristics for Healthcare Scheduling, School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham (2013)
- Syariza Abdul Rahman, Search Methodologies for Examination Timetabling, School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham (2012)
- Murat Birben, Hyper-heuristics for Grouping Problems, M.Sc. Thesis, Department of Computer Engineering, Yeditepe University (2008-2011)
- Turker Ercal, Soft Morphological Filter Optimization Using a Genetic Algorithm for Noise Elimination, M.Sc. Thesis, Department of Computer Engineering, Yeditepe University (2006-2010)
- Mustafa Misir, Group Decision Making During Move Acceptance in Hyperheuristics, M.Sc. Thesis, Department of Computer Engineering, Yeditepe University. (2007-2008)
- Ersan Ersoy, Local Search Management Approaches in Memetic Algorithms for Solving Exam Timeta bling Problems, M.Sc. Thesis, Department of Computer Engineering, Istanbul Technical University. (co-supervision with Sima Uyar, 2004-2007)
- Burak Bilgin, Performance Analysis of Hyperheuristics and Their Use With Hill Climbers, M.Sc. Thesis, Department of Computer Engineering, Yeditepe University. (2003-2006)
- Murat Yilmaz, Particle Swarm Systems for Multimodal Optimization, M.Sc. Thesis, Department of Computer Engineering, Yeditepe University. (2004-2006)
- Özgür Ülker, Linear Linkage Encoding in Genetic Algorithms, M.Sc. Thesis, Department of Computer Engineering, Yeditepe University . (2003-2006)
- Deniz Aldogan, Memetic Algorithms for Timetabling Problems in Private Schools, M.Sc. Thesis, Department of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University. (co-supervision with Ferda Nur Alpaslan, 2004-2005)
- Murat Erenturk, Performance Analysis of Meta-heuristic Approaches for Travelling Salesperson Problem, M.Sc. Thesis, Department of Computer Engineering, Yeditepe University. (2000-2004)
- Alpay Alkan, Solving Course Scheduling Problem using Genetic Algorithms, M.Sc. Thesis, Department of Computer Engineering, Yeditepe University. (1999-2002)