The University of Dortmund is a technical university that covers science disciplines such as mathematics, statistics, chemistry, biology, computer science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and bio-chemical engineering. The University of Dortmund has about 25.000 students, 350 Professors, 800 scientists and 1300 employees.ks.

The LS1 group, participating in OPTIX, is part of the Department of Computer Science and was founded in 1972 by Prof. Dr. Bernd Reusch. The major research topics have changed from the late 80’s towards computational intelligence and data mining. Computational intelligence comprises areas like Fuzzy Logic, Artificial Neural Networks and Evolutionary Algorithms.

These techniques are used to model and optimize the behaviour of technical and scientific processes (e.g. quality assessment in welding industry, analysis of medical images and prediction of car breakdowns for a large German motorcar company). Data mining is the science of finding concealed relations and structures in databases. The LS1 has used statistical computational models to find hidden structures in traffic data or data from insurances. For eight years, the LS1 has taken part in European projects under the Framework Programme. Used techniques come from the field of computational intelligence, artificial intelligence and statistics.