Title: Everything You Wanted to Know about Constraint Programming But Were Afraid to Ask

Speaker: Professor J. Christopher Beck, University of Toronto

Date/Time: Monday, March 17, 2008, 1:00-3:00pm

Location: CSRI Building, Room 90 (Sandia NM

Brief Abstract: Constraint Programming (CP) is a commercially successful approach to solving hard combinatorial optimization problems such as scheduling. This talk will look in-depth at the core pieces of constraint programming (modeling, heuristic search, propagation/inference, and backtracking), note key differences between CP and traditional mathematical programming, and present a number of advanced examples that either compare or combine CP with other mathematical programming techniques.

The goal of this seminar is to answer the question: What is Constraint Programming and why should I care?

Speaker Bio: Chris Beck received his PhD in 1999 from the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto where he studied heuristics for constraint-based scheduling. He subsequently spent three years working on the Scheduler R&D team at ILOG in Paris, the world's largest industrial R&D lab in constraint programming. Chris then returned to academia, spending two years at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre in Cork, Ireland, the world's largest academic lab in constraint programming. In 2004, he returned to the University of Toronto where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering. Chris is widely published in constraint programming and scheduling with over 50 papers in peer reviewed journals and conferences. He serves on the editorial board and/or as an associate editor of the Journal of Scheduling; Constraints; Constraint Programming Letters; and The Knowledge Engineering Review. In 2007, Chris was elected as a member of the steering committee for the Constraint Programming Society of North America.

CSRI POC: Jean-Paul Watson, (505) 845-8887