Curriculum Vitae
See also Black-Box Optimization Lab @ University of Tsukuba for activities of our Lab.
Contact
Affiliation
Faculty of Engineering, Information and Systems, University of Tsukuba
Address
Building F, room 934 (on the 9th floor)
1-1-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba 305-8573, JAPAN
akimoto [at] cs [dot] tsukuba [dot] ac [dot] jp
Tel.
+81-29-853-5533
Research Interests
My main research field is black-box optimization, especially in continuous domain. I am interested in stochastic search algorithms such as covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategies (CMA-ES), a probabilistic model based derivative free optimizer. I work on theoretical analysis of stochastic search algorithms and also on design principle for efficient algorithms in practice, and on real-world applications.
Biography
Youhei Akimoto received the B.S. degree in computer science in 2007, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computational intelligence and systems science from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, in 2008 and 2011, respectively. From 2010 to 2011, he was a Research Fellow at JSPS, Japan, and from 2011 to 2013, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at INRIA, France. From 2013 to 2018, he was an Assistant Professor at Shinshu University, Japan. Since 2018, he has been an Associate Professor with the University of Tsukuba, Japan and a Visiting Researcher with the Center for Advanced Intelligence Projects, RIKEN. His research interests include the design principles, theoretical analyses, and applications of stochastic search heuristics and reinforcement learning. He won the Best Paper Award at GECCO 2018 and FOGA 2019. He is an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization and a member of the editorial board of Evolutionary Computation. He has given many tutorials on evolution strategies, particularly CMA-ES, in GECCO.
Awards
2019 Aug. Best Paper Award, FOGA 2019
2019 Jul. Best Paper Nomination, GECCO 2019 ENUM Track
2018 Dec. (to a collaborated paper), Best Presentation Award, Japanese Symposium on Evolutionary Computation 2010
2018 Nov. Best Presentation Award, SICE SSI 2018
2018 Jul. Best Paper Award, GECCO 2018 ENUM Track
2017 Dec. Best Reviewer Award, NIPS 2017
2017 Nov. (to a collaborated paper), Research Incentive Award, SICE SSI 2017
2016 Dec. (to a collaborated paper) Young Researcher Award, IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Japan Chapter
2016 Sep. Best Presentation Nomination, PPSN 2016
2014 Dec. (to a collaborated paper) Young Researcher Award, IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Japan Chapter
2014 Dec. (to a collaborated paper) Best Poster Award, Japanese Symposium on Evolutionary Computation 2010
2014 Nov. Best Paper Award, SICE SSI 2014
2010 Dec. Young Researcher Award, IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Japan Chapter
2010 Dec. Best Presentation Award, Japanese Symposium on Evolutionary Computation 2010
2010 Sep. Best Presentation Award, FAN Symposium 2010
2010 Jun. JSAI Incentive Award, Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (SIG-ECF)
2009 Dec. Best Presentation Award, Japanese Symposium on Evolutionary Computation 2009
2008 Jul. Best Presentation Nomination, GECCO 2008 ESEP Track
Professional Activities
Journals
Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press) Editorial Borad (2019--now)
ACM Transactions on Evolutionary Learning and Optimization (ACM) Associate Editors (2019--now)
Reviewer for other journals (IEEE TEVC, JMLR, TMLR, etc.)
Conferences
Chair for ENUM Track of GECCO (2024)
Student Workshop Organizer at GECCO (2018, 2019)
Chair for CO Track of GECCO (2015, 2016)
PC for GECCO, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, PPSN, FOGA, IJCAI, AAAI, AISTATS, CEC, etc.