Many challenging applications in Science and Industry can be formulated as optimization problems. Due to their complexity and hardness often they cannot be solved in an exact manner within a reasonable time; thus approximate algorithms become the main alternatives to solve them thanks to their ability to efficiently explore large search spaces.

Metaheuristics are successful techniques able to solve such complex and hard optimization problems that arise in human activities, such as economics, industry, or engineering, and constitute a highly diverse family of optimization algorithms, each of which shows individual properties, and different strengths.

The international Metaheuristics Summer School is aimed at qualified and strongly motivated MSc and PhD students; post-docs; young researchers, and both academic and industrial professionals to provide an overview on the several metaheuristics techniques, and an in-depth analysis of the state-of-the-art. The main theme of the 2020 edition is “Learning and Optimization from Big Data”, therefore MESS 2020 wants to focus on (i) Learning for Metaheuristics; (ii) Optimization in Machine Learning; and (iii) how Optimization and Learning affect the Metaheuristics making them relevant in handling Big Data.

The courses will be held by world renowned experts in the field, and will be inspected practical aspects on complex combinatorial optimization problems, as well as examples of their successful real-world applications. The participants will have plenty of opportunities for debate and work with leaders in the field, benefiting from direct interaction and discussions in a stimulating environment. They will also have the possibility to present their recently results and/or their working in progress through oral or poster presentations, and interact with their scientific peers, in a friendly and constructive environment.

All participants to the school will be involved in the “Metaheuristics Competition”, where each of them, individually or divided in working groups, they will must develop a metaheuristic solution on the given problem. The top three of the competition ranking will receive the MESS 2020 prize. Further, the students, whose algorithms will rank in the five top of the competition ranking, will be invited to submit a report/manuscript of their work to be published in the special MESS 2020 Volume of the AIRO Springer Series.

MESS 2020 will involve a total of 36-40 hours of lectures, therefore in according to the academic system, all PhD and master students attending to the summer school will may get 8 ECTS points. Further, during the summer school the students will tackle homework, or project development.