Speakers
We have tapped into an amazing research community to bring you a stellar lineup of speakers
Prof. Maria Garcia de la Banda
Monash Unviersity, Australia
Maria Garcia de la Banda is a Professor at the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. From 2013 to 2016 she was the Deputy Dean of the Faculty and prior to this she was the Head of the Caulfield School of Information Technology at the Faculty. Maria's current research interests are in the modelling and solving of constraint programs, with particular emphasis on the (semi-)automatic analysis and transformation of constraint programming models.
Dr. Ozgur Akgun
University of St Andrews, UK
Özgür Akgün is a Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, School of Computer Science. His research is mainly on the use of high-level modelling methods for solving combinatorial optimisation problems. High-level modelling allows capturing the specification of a problem without having to make ad hoc modelling decisions, and further allows the automation of these decisions. Automatic symmetry breaking, posting implied / dominance constraints, deriving search strategies for local/complete search and streamlining are made possible thanks to high-level modelling. Dr Akgün is the main developer of Conjure, the automated constraint modelling tool and a contributor to the modelling assistant Savile Row.
Prof. Pascal van Hentenryck
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Pascal Van Hentenryck is the A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to this appointment, Van Hentenryck was a Professor of Computer Science at Brown University for 20 years and the leader of the Optimization Research Group at National ICT Australia (about 70 people). He is the designer and implementor of the widely influential constraint programming languages CHIP and OPL which have been in commercial use for about 30 and 20 years.
Dr. Philip Kilby
CSIRO Data61, Australia
Philip Kilby is a Principal Researcher in Optimisation at CSIRO Data61. His main research interests there are: developing solutions to problems in fleet logistics, application of Constraint Programming to real-world problems in logistics and scheduling, application of methods from Artificial Intelligence to a variety of real-world problems. Philip obtained a BSc. and PhD. at The University of Queensland, with major studies in Computer Science and Operations Research. He has worked as an operational research consultant in a private consulting firm, as well as a research fellow at the Australian National University and at Strathclyde University in Scotland. He has also worked for ICT research organisations in Australia, including National ICT Australia (NICTA) and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
Dr. Pierre Schaus
Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Pierre Schaus obtained a Ph.D. from UCLouvain in 2009. Then he spent 5 months as a postdoc at Brown University before working 4 years in the optimization industry, first at Dynadec then at N_SIDE. He came back to academia at UCLouvain where he is Professor since 2012. His research interests are (CP) solver technology, CP-AI-OR applications, constrained-based data mining.
Dr. Sophie Demassey
École des Mines de Paris, France
After completing her PhD in computer science in 2003, Sophie Demassey joined different teams at Avignon, Montréal and Nantes, as post-doc researcher or associate professor. She worked on different projects in combinatorial optimization, covering different topics in integer linear programming, constraint programming and their hybridization applied to different scheduling problems. Her current research at École des Mines de Paris focuses on handling uncertainty and non-linearity in short- and long-term planning of energy systems.
Dr. Tias Guns
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Tias Guns is Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Belgium, in the Business, Technology and Operations lab of the faculty of Economic and Social Sciences & Solvay Business School. His research lies on the border between data mining and constraint programming, and his main interest is in integrating domain expertise and user constraints into data analytics tasks. As part of his PhD, he has developed the CP4IM framework which showed for the first time the potential of using constraint programming for pattern mining. His PhD was awarded with both the constraint programming dissertation award and the ECCAI artificial intelligence dissertation award. He is an active member of the community and has organized a number of workshops and a special issue on the topic of combining constraint programming with machine learning and data mining.
Dr. Zeynep Kiziltan
University of Bologna, Italy
Zeynep Kiziltan is a researcher in artificial intelligence, with her research interests focusing on constraint programming and its integration with heuristic search, machine learning and data science. Kiziltan obtained her Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Uppsala, Sweden, in 2004 with a thesis on symmetry breaking ordering constraints, which won the best Ph.D. dissertation award of European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence. In 2004, she started to work as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Bologna, Italy, where in 2006 she became an assistant professor. In 2007, she was appointed associate professor by the University of Uppsala. Since 2014 she holds the Italian qualification for associate professorship in computer science and engineering.