Holger H. Hoos (born 1969) is a German-Canadian computer scientist and an Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Artificial Intelligence at RWTH Aachen University.[1,6,7,14] He also holds a professorial appointment in machine learning at Leiden University (noted as part-time) and is an adjunct professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, where he previously held a full-time professorship from 2000 until 2016.[1,5] Hoos studied computer science at the Department of Computer Science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt, where he earned his doctorate in 1998 under Wolfgang Bibel.
His research interests are centered on artificial intelligence, automated machine learning (AutoML), and the intersection of machine learning, automated reasoning, and optimization, with applications in empirical algorithmics, bioinformatics, and operations research.[2,6,7,15] In particular, he works on automated algorithm design and stochastic local search algorithms. He co-authored the book Stochastic Local Search: Foundations and Applications with Thomas Stützle, and his research is published extensively in leading international journals and conference proceedings.[17,18,16] Hoos also works in computer music, where he created the SALIERI music programming language and computer music system (with Thomas Helbich, Jürgen Kilian, and Kai Renz) as well as GUIDO music notation (with Keith Hamel).[3]
He has been elected a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) since 2015, and since 2020 has been a Fellow of both the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).[13,1,3] In 2023, he received the ACM SIGKDD Test of Time Award for his work on Auto-WEKA, alongside Chris Thornton, Frank Hutter, and Kevin Leyton-Brown.[2]
Career
Holger Hoos studied computer science at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, where he earned his doctorate in 1998 with the dissertation "Stochastisch-Lokale Suchverfahren – Methoden, Modelle, Anwendungen" and received the Dissertation Award of the Gesellschaft für Informatik that same year.[8,9] From 2000 to 2016, he was a Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. In 2016, he took up a professorship in Machine Learning at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Since January 2022, he has been an Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Artificial Intelligence at RWTH Aachen.[10,11]
Hoos is a co-founder of the Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in Europe (CLAIRE), which is dedicated to promoting AI research in Europe and was awarded the German AI Award in 2021.[12] For his contributions to computer science, Hoos was recognized as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI).
External links
External links include Holger H. Hoos's personal homepage, his research group at Leiden University, and his homepage at UBC.