Lecturers Page Dr. Ami Hauptman

Dr. Ami Hauptman

Since 2016 I am a Lecturer and faculty member at the Computer Science Department at Sapir Academic College, and part-time consultant in the field of Machine Learning, to several startup companies.

I completed my BSc. at Tel Aviv University, and MSc. and PhD. (Cum Laude) at Ben Gurion University in 2009, researching Artificial Intelligence for games with Evolutionary Algorithms. My research work has won several awards, including two gold medal awards at the international Humies competition (with co-authors Achiya Elyasaf and Moshe Sipper).

Between the years 2009 and 2015 I held several positions in the industry, including Algorithms Developer at RAFAEL, Machine Learning Researcher under CTO at NICE, and Senior Machine Learning Researcher at Mobli.

Areas of interest and Teaching

Areas of interest

  • Machine Learning & Data Mining
  • Artificial Intelligence for Games
  • Genetic Algorithms
  • Cyber Threat Detection

Teaching

Hebrew lective year: תשפה

Research

Data Mining, Machine Learning, and Evolutionary Algorithms  - for heuristic search in games, and for optimization problems from various fields, incuding: social network analysis, economical models, medical diagnosis problems and speech recognition.

Awards

2015: IEEE CIS Outstanding TCIAIG Paper award
“Evolutionary Design of FreeCell Solvers”esearch. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

2013: Gold HUMIES award (Human-Competitive Results) for the paper "Evolutionary Design of FreeCell Solvers"

2011: Gold HUMIES award (Human-Competitive Results) for the paper "GA-FreeCell: Evolving Solvers for the Game of FreeCell"

2009: Bronze HUMIES award (Human-Competitive Results) for the paper "GP-Rush: Using Genetic Programming to Evolve Solvers for the Rush Hour Puzzle"

2007: Silver HUMIES award (Human-Competitive Results) for the paper " Evolution of an efficient search algorithm for the Mate-in-N problem in Chess "

2007: Best Paper award in the Evo-PhD Workshop at EurpGP 2007

2007: Zabey Prize for excellence in M.Sc research

2005: Friedman Award for excellence in research. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Publications

2016

A. Hauptman, Are Evolutionary-Computation Based Methods Comparable to other State-of-The-Art Methods for Community Detection? To appear in Late-Breaking Abstracts of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2016). Denver, Colorado July 17-24, 2016.

 

 

2012

A. Elyasaf, A. Hauptman, and M. Sipper. Evolutionary Design of FreeCell Solvers. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, 4(4):270 –281, December 2012. Best Paper Award.

2011

A. Elyasaf, A. Hauptman, and M. Sipper. GA-FreeCell: Evolving Solvers for the Game of FreeCell. In Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2011). Dublin, Ireland, July 12-16, 2011. ACM.

2011

A. Elyasaf, Y. Zaritsky, A. Hauptman, and M. Sipper. Evolving Solvers for FreeCell and the Sliding-Tile Puzzle. In Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Search, (SoCS 2011). Castell de Cardona, Barcelona, Spain, July 2011.

2010

A. Hauptman, A. Elyasaf, and M. Sipper. Evolving hyper heuristic-based solvers for Rush Hour and FreeCell. In Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS 2010), July 2010.

2009

A. Hauptman, A. Elyasaf, M. Sipper, A. Karmon. GP-Rush: Using Genetic Programming to Evolve Solvers for the Rush Hour Puzzle. In Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2009), July 2009. ACM.

 

2009

M. Orlov,  M. Sipper,  A. Hauptman. Genetic And Evolutionary Algorithms and Programming: General Introduction and Application to Game Playing. In Encyclopedia for Complexity and Computer Science 2009. 4133-4145.

 

2007

M. Sipper, A. Hauptman, Y. Azaria, and Y. Shichel. Designing an evolutionary strategizing machine for game playing and beyond. In IEEE  Transactions on Systems,  Man, and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews, vol. 37, no.  4, pp.  583-593, July  2007

 

 

2007

A. Hauptman, M. Sipper, Emergence of Complex Strategies in the Evolution of Chess Endgame Players. In Advances in Complex Systems 10(supp01): 35-39 (2007)

 

2007

A. Hauptman and M. Sipper.  Evolution of an efficient search algorithm for the Mate-in-N problem in Chess. In Proceedings  of 10th  European Conference  on Genetic  Programming (EuroGP2007),  EvoPhD: Best Paper award

 

 

2005

A. Hauptman, M. Sipper,  Analyzing  the  Intelligence  of a Genetically  Programmed Chess Player. Late  Breaking  Papers, Genetic  and  Evolutionary Computation Conference  (GECCO-2005), Washington.

 

2005

A. Hauptman and  M. Sipper.  GP-EndChess: Using genetic programming to evolve chess endgame players.  In Maarten Keijzer, Andrea Tettamanzi, Pierre Collet, Jano I. van Hemert,  and Marco Tomassini,   editors,  Proceedings  of the  8th  European Conference  on Genetic  Programming, volume 3447 of Lecture  Notes in Computer Science, pages 120-131, Lausanne,  Switzerland,

April 2005. Springer.

 

Presentations

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