Technical advisors
Chris Beck
Chris has a strong industrial background in scheduling and constraint programming. He has worked as a Senior Scientist on the Scheduler Team at ILOG SA, at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre, in the Intelligent Scheduling Research Group of the Enterprise Integration Laboratory at the University of Toronto, and in the scheduling group at Numetrix Ltd.
Chris obtained his PhD from the University of Toronto, where he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering.
Aditya Ghose
Aditya is a professor at the University of Wollongong and a director of the University's Decisions Systems Laboratory. His research interests lie in the theory and application of constraint programming, with a special emphasis on solving over-constrained problems, and distributed, multi-agent techniques.
Aditya has completed major projects with various organizations (including BHP Billiton, Bluescope Steel, and the New South Wales State Emergency Services), in the areas of scheduling, integrated planning and scheduling, manpower optimization, and truck optimization. He is also interested in broader supply chain management challenges, including whole-of-enterprise approaches to the planning and design of optimization systems.
Aditya holds a Bachelor of Engg. from Jadavpur University, Kolkata India, and an MSc and PhD from the University of Alberta.
Bill Havens
Bill’s research interests lie in the practical application of intelligent systems technology to real-world, industrial-scale combinatorial optimization challenges. A Professor Emeritus in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, Bill is well known internationally for his work in the fields of Constraint Reasoning and Artificial Intelligence, and he has directed various projects aimed at advancing research and applications of intelligent systems methods and technology.
Bill holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia as well as MSEE and BSEE degrees from Virginia Tech.
Holger Hoos
Holger is an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of British Columbia. His main research interests span empirical algorithmics, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics and computer music, and he is one of the world's leading experts on stochastic local search methods and on the automated design of high-performance algorithms.
He is a co-author of the book Stochastic Local Search: Foundations and Applications, and his research has been published in numerous book chapters, journals, and at major conferences in artificial intelligence, operations research, molecular biology and computer music. Holger is a founding member of the Bioinformatics, Empirical & Theoretical Algorithmics Laboratory (BETA-Lab), a Faculty Associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, and currently serves as President of the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC).