AIDA AI Excellence Lecture 51: Dr. Thomas Stützle "A Personal View of the Past and the Future of.."

The design and development of algorithms is very time-consuming and difficult for a number of reasons, including the complexity of the problems being tackled, the large number of degrees of freedom when designing an algorithm and setting its numerical parameters, and the difficulties of algorithm analysis due to heuristic biases and stochasticity. Fortunately, for some time, advances in automatic algorithm configuration and design methods have made this a more "straightforward" process. In this talk, I will discuss some of the advances we have achieved over the past 25 years and highlight techniques of automatic configuration of algorithms, the automatic configuration of multi-objective algorithms, the automatic configuration for anytime algorithms, and the automatic design of SLS algorithms via the EMILI framework. Towards the end of the talk I will discuss some aspects of the large language models and how they have changed and will continue to change our perspective on automatic configuration and design of the algorithms.