Title: Why reconsider constraints when we know them so well? And other related topics…

Speaker: Dr. Martine Ceberio, Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, University of Texas at El Paso

Date/Time: Thursday, October 28, 2010, 10:00 am Mountain Time       

Location: CSRI Building/Room 90 (Sandia NM)

Brief Abstract: Constraints are ubiquitous. Nevertheless, not everyone uses constraint solvers to solve their daily-life problems. In this talk, we will focus on numerical constraints. We will take a look at cases in which constraint programming / solving does help and should be used. In particular, constraint solving techniques have been applied successfully to a number of fields, such as scheduling of air traffic, software engineering, networks security, chemistry, and biology.
 
Before to move on to other topics, we will make clear what distinguishes constraint solving from mathematical programming. We will then tie constraints into other kinds of more general problems, such as optimization, multi-criteria decision making, and tensor problems. However, there are shortcomings associated to solving numerical constraints and associated problems: we will review these, suggest directions for work, and present some current efforts. I will then illustrate these shortcomings on two specific problems that I work on, namely multi-criteria decision making and program verification, and describe my efforts in addressing them.

Biography:       Martine Ceberio's research interests are primarily in numerical constraint solving, and also include interval arithmetic, global optimization, soft constraints, multi-criteria decision making, and their applications such as network security, bio-medical engineering. She received her BS in mathematics from the University of Poitiers, France, in 1995, and her PhD in computer science from the University of Nantes, France, in 2003. She joined the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) in the fall of 2003 as a visiting assistant professor and has been an assistant professor in computer science since fall of 2004. She regularly organizes and chairs workshops and conferences, among which the annual international workshop CoProD (coprod.constraintsolving.com) and the international conferences SCAN'08 (scan2008.com), NAFIPS'11 (nafips.cs.utep.edu). At UTEP, she supervises the CR2G research group (cr2g.constraintsolving.com), in charge in particular of maintaining the community website constraintsolving.com.

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