scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
Author

Rong Qu

Bio: Rong Qu is an academic researcher from University of Nottingham. The author has contributed to research in topics: Contextual image classification & Heuristics. The author has an hindex of 43, co-authored 282 publications receiving 7277 citations. Previous affiliations of Rong Qu include Queen's University Belfast & Information Technology University.


Papers
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A critical discussion of the scientific literature on hyper-heuristics including their origin and intellectual roots, a detailed account of the main types of approaches, and an overview of some related areas are presented.
Abstract: Hyper-heuristics comprise a set of approaches that are motivated (at least in part) by the goal of automating the design of heuristic methods to solve hard computational search problems. An underlying strategic research challenge is to develop more generally applicable search methodologies. The term hyper-heuristic is relatively new; it was first used in 2000 to describe heuristics to choose heuristics in the context of combinatorial optimisation. However, the idea of automating the design of heuristics is not new; it can be traced back to the 1960s. The definition of hyper-heuristics has been recently extended to refer to a search method or learning mechanism for selecting or generating heuristics to solve computational search problems. Two main hyper-heuristic categories can be considered: heuristic selection and heuristic generation. The distinguishing feature of hyper-heuristics is that they operate on a search space of heuristics (or heuristic components) rather than directly on the search space of solutions to the underlying problem that is being addressed. This paper presents a critical discussion of the scientific literature on hyper-heuristics including their origin and intellectual roots, a detailed account of the main types of approaches, and an overview of some related areas. Current research trends and directions for future research are also discussed.

1,023 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This survey provides a comprehensive overview of a variety of object detection methods in a systematic manner, covering the one-stage and two-stage detectors, and lists the traditional and new applications.
Abstract: Object detection is one of the most important and challenging branches of computer vision, which has been widely applied in people's life, such as monitoring security, autonomous driving and so on, with the purpose of locating instances of semantic objects of a certain class. With the rapid development of deep learning algorithms for detection tasks, the performance of object detectors has been greatly improved. In order to understand the main development status of object detection pipeline thoroughly and deeply, in this survey, we analyze the methods of existing typical detection models and describe the benchmark datasets at first. Afterwards and primarily, we provide a comprehensive overview of a variety of object detection methods in a systematic manner, covering the one-stage and two-stage detectors. Moreover, we list the traditional and new applications. Some representative branches of object detection are analyzed as well. Finally, we discuss the architecture of exploiting these object detection methods to build an effective and efficient system and point out a set of development trends to better follow the state-of-the-art algorithms and further research.

749 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, a generic hyper-heuristic approach based on a set of widely used graph coloring heuristics is proposed for timetabling problems, where a Tabu Search approach is employed to search for permutations of graph heuristic which are used for constructing timetables.

516 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A critical discussion of the research on exam timetabling which has taken place in the last decade or so is presented and a range of relevant important research issues and challenges that have been generated by this body of work are outlined.
Abstract: Examination timetabling is one of the most important administrative activities that takes place in all academic institutions. In this paper, we present a critical discussion of the research on exam timetabling which has taken place in the last decade or so. This last ten years has seen a significantly increased level of research attention for this important area. There has been a range of insightful contributions to the scientific literature both in terms of theoretical issues and practical aspects. The main aim of this survey is to highlight the new trends and key research achievements that have been carried out in the last decade. We also aim to outline a range of relevant important research issues and challenges that have been generated by this body of work. We first define the problem and discuss previous survey papers. Within our presentation of the state-of-the-art methodologies, we highlight recent research trends including hybridisations of search methodologies and the development of techniques which are motivated by raising the level of generality at which search methodologies can operate. Summarising tables are presented to provide an overall view of these techniques. We also present and discuss some important issues which have come to light concerning the public benchmark exam timetabling data. Different versions of problem datasets with the same name have been circulating in the scientific community for the last ten years and this has generated a significant amount of confusion. We clarify the situation and present a re-naming of the widely studied datasets to avoid future confusion. We also highlight which research papers have dealt with which dataset. Finally, we draw upon our discussion of the literature to present a (non-exhaustive) range of potential future research directions and open issues in exam timetabling research.

370 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is shown that case based reasoning can act effectively as an intelligent approach to learn which heuristics work well for particular timetabling situations.
Abstract: This paper presents a case-based heuristic selection approach for automated university course and exam timetabling. The method described in this paper is motivated by the goal of developing timetabling systems that are fundamentally more general than the current state of the art. Heuristics that worked well in previous similar situations are memorized in a case base and are retrieved for solving the problem in hand. Knowledge discovery techniques are employed in two distinct scenarios. Firstly, we model the problem and the problem solving situations along with specific heuristics for those problems. Secondly, we refine the case base and discard cases which prove to be non-useful in solving new problems. Experimental results are presented and analyzed. It is shown that case based reasoning can act effectively as an intelligent approach to learn which heuristics work well for particular timetabling situations. We conclude by outlining and discussing potential research issues in this critical area of knowledge discovery for different difficult timetabling problems.

224 citations


Cited by
More filters
Journal Article
TL;DR: This book by a teacher of statistics (as well as a consultant for "experimenters") is a comprehensive study of the philosophical background for the statistical design of experiment.
Abstract: THE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF EXPERIMENTS. By Oscar Kempthorne. New York, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1952. 631 pp. $8.50. This book by a teacher of statistics (as well as a consultant for \"experimenters\") is a comprehensive study of the philosophical background for the statistical design of experiment. It is necessary to have some facility with algebraic notation and manipulation to be able to use the volume intelligently. The problems are presented from the theoretical point of view, without such practical examples as would be helpful for those not acquainted with mathematics. The mathematical justification for the techniques is given. As a somewhat advanced treatment of the design and analysis of experiments, this volume will be interesting and helpful for many who approach statistics theoretically as well as practically. With emphasis on the \"why,\" and with description given broadly, the author relates the subject matter to the general theory of statistics and to the general problem of experimental inference. MARGARET J. ROBERTSON

13,333 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis.
Abstract: Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

13,246 citations